How Adults Get Children to Pay Attention

How Adults Get Children to Pay Attention

Speakers depend on their listeners being cooperative and listening when they are spoken to. But when the listeners are children, adult speaks normally have to work a bit harder to ensure that this happens. They use attention getters to tell children which utterances are addressed to them rather than to someone else, and hence which utterance they ought to be listening to. And they use attention holders whenever they have more than one thing to say, for example, when telling a story.

Attention getters and attention holders fall into two broad classes. The first consists of names and exclamations. For example, adults often use the child's name at the beginning of an utterance, as in Ned, there's a car . Even 4 years olds know that this is an effective way to get a two year old's attention. Or, instead of the child's name, adults use exclamations like Look! or Hey! as a preface to an utterance that they want the child to pay attention to. The second class of attention getters consists of modulations that adults use to distinguish utterances addressed to young children from utterances addressed to other listeners. One of the most noticeable is the high-pitched voice adults use for talking to small children.
When the linguist Olga Garnica compared recordings of English-speaking adults talking to two year olds, five year olds, and adults in the same setting (1977), she found that when talking to children, adults use a wider with five year olds, and narrowest with other adults.

Another modulation adults use is whispering. If children are setting on their laps or standing right next to them, adults will speak directly into their ears so it is clear they are intended to listen. Garnica observed that all the mothers in her study on occasion whispered to two year olds, a few whispered to five year olds, but none whispered to adults.

Not all attention getters and attention holders are linguistic. Speakers often rely on gestures as well and may touch a child's shoulder or cheek, for example, as they begin talking. They also use gestures to hold a child's attention and frequently look at and point as objects they name or describe.

See also:
How Adults Talk to Young Children

Source : Language File: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics