Baby Talkの日米比較 : 日米母親の発話行動の事例研究
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概要
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This paper discusses the results and implications of a cross-cultural study of mothers' speech to children. It is based on two case-studies, one of a Japanese with a 17month-old son, the other of an American mother with a 12-month-old daughter. The study was undertaken to ascertain whether there existed cultural differences such as those suggested by earlier studies that had indicated that Japanese mothers tended to use more BT words and, by talking less than American mothers, to function less effectively as a speech model than their American counterparts. Tape recordings were made over a period of one month of both the mothers talking to their children in ordinary domestic settings. There were a total of seven sessions, each lasting about 45 minutes, with each mother. The scoring of the protocols yielded 3,012 utterances by the Japanese subject and 1,008 by the American, whose behaviour and speech were affected by the presence of another child who continually distracted her attention. Analysis focused on two features of the mother's speech : the use of BT words, and interactional devices. The BT words in the protocols were examined and compared on the following measures: a) number of BT words; b) semantic distribution; c) frequency of distribution; and d) morphological derivational processes. The findings confirmed the tendency, reported in earlier studies, for Japanese mothers to use BT words more extensively than American mothers. The Japanese subject used a total of 185 different BT words with a wide semantic range, while the American used only 22, which clustered within a very narrow semantic range. Tokens of BT nouns represented 85% of the total of noun tokens in the case of the Japanese subject, compared with 12.5% in the case of the American. The morphological devices most favoured by the Japanese subject were the honorific affixes o- and -san(-chan), and the American subject's favourite device was the diminutive suffix -ie. The interactional devices which were studied were the "contentless utterances"whose primary functions were to facilitate conversational procedures and to add affective stimulus to the child's involvement in interactions. These utterances were divided into two groups: those responding to the children's stimuli, and those that either initiated or maintained an interactive chain. Within each group the utterances were subcategorised according to communicative function. Analysis revealed that the overall interactive behaviour of both subjects patterned similarly and that the Japanese subject, the widespread belief in the reticence of Japanese mothers notwithstanding, showed herself to be at least the equal of her American counterpart in all categories. The use of BT words stands out as the marked difference in the verbal environment that the mothers provide for their children. It is posited that the higher incidence of BT words in the Japanese mother's speech is due, in part at least, to the fact that the Japanese language provides productive morphological devices that give Japanese mothers the linguistic means to behave verbally as social peers of their children and to the fact that Japan does not foster a strong inhibition in mothers against the expression of affection through the use of BT words. Longitudinal studies are required to determine whether a verbal environment that contains an abundance of such affective elements has any adverse effect on child growth, as is often claimed.
- 東京女子大学の論文