FROM DEVELOPMENTALLY DELAYED CHILDREN ? : A SEQUENTIAL ANALYSIS

Many developmentally delayed children do not talk as often as other children of the same linguistic level (Rosenberg, 1982). For three reasons, children who converse often with adults may develop language more quickly than children who converse less frequently. First, adults use several techniques that effectively model new language structures immediately after the child talks. For example, it is widely accepted that continuing the child's spoken topic while modeling slightly more advanced ways to communicate the child's message facilitates the acquisition of new language structures (e.g., expansions and recasts; Nelson, 1989; Snow, Perlmann, & Nathan, 1987). Second, immediate feedback on language use may help the child test hypotheses about underlying linguistic rules and concepts (Hoff-Ginsberg & Shatz, 1982). Third, frequent conversationalists may experience other aspects of facilitating dialogues more often than less frequent conversationalists (e.g., adult labeling of the child's focus of attention; Hoff-Ginsberg & Shatz, 1982; Shatz, 1987; Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). Most research on adult language input to children examines correlations between total frequencies or proportions of adult behaviors with some measure of child language level (see Hoff-Ginsberg & Shatz, 1982, for review). These summary-level correlational analyses do not address which adult utterances immediately elicit child replies. Significant correlations between adult and child behaviors can occur without immediate elicitation occurring (Yoder & Kaiser, 1989). To identify adult utterances that immediately elicit child replies, a sequential level of analysis is required. In the context of the current research a "sequential level of analysis" means that the analyzed data are the numbers or proportions of child replies that immediately follow a target adult utterance. The "given behavior" is the proposed "elicitor" and the "target behavior" is the proposed "elicited behavior. " Research on mother-child interaction that uses a sequential level of analysis indicates that replies of normally developing children follow two types of adult utterances a high percentage of the time that the adult utterance types are used. These are prompting or requesting verbal information (e.g., questions, directives to give information; Olsen-Fulero & Conforti, 1983) and continuing the child's topic of conversation (i.e., topic continuations; Bloom, Rocissano, & Hood, 1976; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1987b). Requests for verbal information may elicit child talk because they generally carry a relatively high social obligation for the child to respond (Olsen-Fulero & Conforti, 1983). Questions are frequently used to allocate speaker turn in conversations with young children (Blount, 1977; Ervin-Tripp & Miller, 1977). Utterances with a rising intonational curve appear to command the child's attention (Garnica, 1977). Moreover, normally developing children in the first two stages of language learning respond to questions more frequently than comments (Bloom et al., 1976; Howe, 1981; Olsen-Fulero & Conforti, 1983; Yoder, 1988). Continuing the child's topic may elicit further child conversation for two reasons. First, presumably children are interested in topics that they talk about. Second, it may be easier for children to understand adult speech that continues the child's topic and attentional lead because the information processing load may be less for topic continuations than for topic initiations (Bloom et al., 1976; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1987a & 1987b; Landry & Chapieski, 1989). Child replies have been found to follow adult topic continuations more than topic initiations in samples of young normally developing children (Chapman, Miller, MacKenzie, & Bedrosian, 1981; Yoder, 1988) and in hearing-impaired children (Kenworthy, 1986). In these