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The development of conversational skills.

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Veneziano, E. (2014). The development of conversational skills. In P. Brooks and V. Kempe (Eds.),
Encyclopedia of Language Development (pp. 108-110). Sage Publications

Conversational skills (development of)

Conversational skills are essential and necessary to become a competent speaker of a

language. The underlying rules of conversation require that participants share a joint focus of

attention, alternate their turns in a pattern of talking and listening, offer relevant contributions

that are also informative, sincere and clear (Grice’s maxims). In the course of development,

children acquire conversational skills that allow them to participate in conversations and to

communicate effectively with others. These skills include abilities such as: mastering the implicit

rules of taking turns in conversation, directing the interlocutor’s attention, initiating and

maintaining conversational topics, knowing how to make requests and refusals, asking for

clarification and responding with repairs, taking into account the knowledge interlocutors have

of the verbal and nonverbal context in order to be informative, or taking into account previous

discourse in order to choose the appropriate expressions.

Taking Turns

During the first year of life, and before contents can be exchanged, children and caregivers

engage in conversation-like exchanges presenting the pattern of alternation of turns. Although

mothers work more than children in achieving this pattern, babies participate too: at 3-4 months,

if the adult’s response is not temporally contingent to the baby’s turn, the pattern of turn

alternation is disrupted and the baby's vocalizations are judged to be less speech-like. Two- and

three-year-olds become more expert in managing their interventions, can participate in triadic

conversations and can even intervene appropriately in third-party conversations. At this time,
however, they are still slower than older children and adults in intervening after a partner’s

contribution. Turn taking can still be challenging for older children. In interaction with peers,

children need more sophisticated conversational skills (such as, managing interruptions,

resolving overlaps, maintaining the floor, keeping the conversation going) in order to intervene

adequately. Preschoolers begin using devices such as initiating a sentence or using follow-up

markers like and then, signaling that it is still their turn to talk, but these skills continue to

develop at least until adolescence. Moreover, while during the first two-three years, children’s

conversational moves tend to be either initiations or replies to the partner, with age, children

learn to produce "turnabouts", turns that have the double role of replying and requiring a

response. These are very important in keeping the conversation going and are very frequent in

adult speech.

Relatedness and Topic Continuation

In conversation, turns are most often related one to the content of the other. Content-related

exchanges can be initiated by the child or by the partner and can be discontinued after the second

turn, or present "extended" thematic continuity. Children start early on to relate to the content of

the partner’s utterances. During the first year, children may simply reproduce segments of the

partner’s utterance and partners may reproduce children’s vocalizations, giving rise to sequences

of turns that lay down the foundation for vocal sharing. Sequences of this kind are also observed

in peer interaction among older children. Children repeat each other's utterances as “sound play”

to obtain conversational cohesion and some “common ground”.

 During the second year, exchanges where the partners’ turns are related to each other

increase, with mothers and children contributing about equally. Exchanges where the same topic

is maintained become longer. Caregivers may respond by repeating or interpreting the children’s

utterances, by providing corrections, recasts, and/or elaborating on the children’s topics.

Children at first relate most often by repeating part of the caregiver’s utterances, and then they

start answering questions and offering a comment to the partner-initiated topic. In the course of

the exchange, children may revise adaptively their production. At this time, children are more

likely to respond to partners’ turns that are themselves replies to their own interventions than to

partners’ turns that initiate a topic, and to questions rather than to non-questions. In the second

part of the second year, children can make the topic advance by answering to questions and

providing comments. These conversational skills lead children to produce successive single-

word utterances, a sequence of two or more single word utterances relating to the same situation

or communicative intention, elaborated “vertically” over successive conversational turns. The

first realizations are strongly anchored in the unfolding of the conversation (e.g., C.: dog M.:

what’s the dog doing? C.: run M. yes, he’s running), while later children produce them more

autonomously (e.g., C.: dog M.: yes, it’s a dog C.: run M. yes, he’s running). Successive single

word utterances elaborated in conversation prepare the ground to later-to-come multiword

speech and to progress in language development.

Relatedness does not increase steadily. Seven- and eight-year-olds do not produce many

related turns and less than older children or adults; moreover, their contributions relate more

often to actions of their peer partners than to what the latter say. As children develop further,

they increase their skills in the use of cohesive linguistic devices to argue and offer supporting

evidence for different opinions.

Being Informative

Mothers and children talk about present objects and events in a context of shared attention.

Although such here-and-now talk is considered to be an important support for early language

acquisition, it does not correspond to the conversational rule requiring participants to be

informative (without saying too much either). Accordingly, mature speakers use language to talk

about internal subjective states or to evoke and interpret entities and events removed from the

time and place of enunciation. In the second part of the second year, and when they are still

dominantly single-word speakers, children start to use language in a similar displaced manner:

they evoke past events, provide justifications for their requests, refusals or denials to optimize

the chances that the interlocutor will accept them, and talk about internal states and subjective

meanings constructed in their pretend play. Talk about past events occurs first within

conversations scaffolded by familiar partners while later they are more frequently initiated

autonomously by the children and become more elaborated; their justifications of requests or of

refusals are at first expressed by single-word utterances and need the interpretation of familiar

partners to be well understood, while later they are expressed in a more widely understandable

way (for example, a request may be justified early on by ’can’t’, and later by ‘ I cannot do it’). In

pretend play, children’s informative verbalizations are also limited but are sufficient to make

subjectively constructed meanings accessible to onlookers, particularly when the child’s

verbalizations in themselves create pieces of pretend meanings (for example, when the child

says, ‘is cold’ to justify placing a toy quilt over a baby doll).
 Functionally, all these different uses of language show that children have understood this

conversational requirement and that they can take into account, implicitly in their behavior, their

interlocutor’s intentions and states of knowledge.

Being informative is not only a matter of keeping track of partners’ intentions and

knowledge. Referents also need to be presented linguistically as a function of their accessibility

to the interlocutor, in the immediate context or in previous discourse. Studies of everyday

conversations in natural setting, as well as experimental studies, suggest that by the age of three,

children tend to express referents as a function of their accessibility to the partner, preferring

lexical nouns to pronouns when the referent is new or not focused upon either in context or in

previous discourse. Concerning the use of definite vs. indefinite articles in languages such as

English and French that use the distinction to mark given and new information respectively,

adequate use of the contrast, although appearing in the third year, takes longer to attain adult

proficiency, with a tendency to overuse the definite forms in places where an indeterminate form

is needed.

These results suggest that children understand that the meanings of grammatical devices

are not restricted to the realm of grammar but need to interact with conversational and discursive

rules. Moreover, they indicate that certain language distinctions may be more difficult than

others to understand in all their complexities of use.

Conversational Repairs

This is an important conversational skill that requires the ability to relate to utterances and

to their form. Children’s repairs may occur after the partner’s request, or when their original
utterance has not attained the intended goal. For example, children may revise their requests if

their interlocutor neglects or refuses to satisfy them.

An early strategy to repair a communication failure is to ‘try again’, sometimes simply

repeating the original verbalization, but sometimes pronouncing it differently, although not

necessarily better. With increasing skills, children become better able to understand what is the

origin of the communication failure and their repairs become more effective.

Preschoolers can differentiate general clarification questions (what did you say?) from

specific queries that question only part of what the child has said (you want what?), providing

only the questioned constituent for the latter and repeating the entire utterance after the former.

With very young children, most parental requests for clarification focus on remedying

unintelligible child utterances. Occasionally, however, clarification requests are used to have

children elaborate on meaning. This may happen with children’s refusals, where the partner’s

demand for clarification invites an explanation from the child’s part.

Differences are reported in the ways mothers’ and fathers’ deal with breakdowns.

Conversational breakdowns occur more frequently when children interact with their fathers, who

address them with more nonspecific queries than specific ones; mothers use more specific

queries and continue asking clarification questions until the resolution of the communication

failure; moreover, mothers, more than fathers, tend to return to the original topic. Variation in

interactional styles, while more demanding on children’s abilities to adapt, is considered a source

of progress.Children become better conversationalists over the course of development. Their

conversational skills evolve from a very limited to a progressively clearer understanding of

conversational rules. Competent partners behave according to the socio-cultural rules that
manage conversation at all times, and children can learn from the model they display while

participating in conversation with them.

Edy Veneziano

University Paris Descartes - CNRS, MoDyCo (UMR 7114)

See Also: Children's learning of social conventions); Conversational implicature

(development of); Dyadic interaction and early communicative development; Joint attention and

language development; Parental responsiveness and scaffolding of language development;

Pragmatic development; Proto-conversations with Infants: on the way to language; Recasts,

clarifications, and other indirect negative evidence; Social foundations of communicative

development; Theory of mind and language development

Further Readings

Clark, E.V. First Language Acquisition. 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2009

Gallaway, C., & Richards, B. J., eds. Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994.Gardner, H. & Forrester, M.A., eds. Analysing

Interactions in Childhood: Insights from Conversation Analysis. London: Wiley, 2010.

Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N., & Zacharski, R. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring

expressions in discourse. Language, v. 69, 1993.

 McTear, M.F. Children's conversation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.

Pan, B. A., & Snow, C. E. “The development of conversation and discourse skills.” In M.

Barrett, ed. The development of language. Hove, Sussex: Psychology Press, 1999.

Scollon, R. Conversations with a one year old: A case study of the developmental foundation of

syntax. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976.

Veneziano, E., ed. Special issue on Conversation and Language Acquisition, First Language,

v.30/3-4, 2010.

Veneziano, E. Interactional processes in the origins of the explaining capacity. In K. Nelson, A.

Aksu-Koç, & C. Johnson, eds. Children’s language, v. 10. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence

Erlbaum, 2001.

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