Clarification Request Sequences and Related Discourse Strategies in Information Exchange between Hearing-Impaired and Hearing Children

Abstract

This study describes the use of the clarification request sequence and other related communicative strategies by children in interaction together in a school setting. 79 children aged 7-11 years, including l9 hard-of-hearing children, were recorded in two situations: carrying out a set of referential communication tasks and building a model together. The focus of the study is on language used by the children in the exchange of information. The selection of participants, methodology adopted for collecting the data and procedures devised for anlysing informational language data are described. The main section is introduced by a discussion of criteria for the definition and categorisation of clarification request sequences, in the light of work by other researchers. The sequence is defined in terms of its function, in enabling a speaker to acquire information which will clarify a prior utterance by a conversational partner so that an appropriate response can be given; it also takes into account its role as a side-sequence or contingent sequence in the discourse. The importance of studying utterances in context is stressed, together with the difficulty of neat categorisation when multiple functioning is allowed for. Fuzziness and overlap of category boundaries are seen as characteristic of real discourse. The children's use of clarification strategies is analysed in relation to five categories of request: the nonspecific request, the request for specific constituent repetition, and the requests for specification, elaboration and confirmation. Multiple and complex clarification request sequences are discussed, as are related strategies such as multiple query requests and repetition. In the final section of the study, the use of clarification strategies by the hearing-impaired children is discussed, examining their use of each type of request both in requesting and providing clarification. The corpus of 2471 requests for clarification, derived from a structured information exchange situation and. a relatively free interaction, is substantially larger than those on which previous studies of clarification requests have been based. A wide range of structures are represented, in numbers which permit analysis. while many function to seek repair of a problem, the children use clarification strategies freely to elicit additional or more specific information needed for the completion of the communication tasks. They also use the clarification request sequence to challenge, tease and negotiate. The important role played by clarification strategies in information exchange is clearly evident in the children's discourse. For the hard-of-hearing children, these strategies are particularly significant. The discourse of the 19 children studied shows them able to request and provide clarification appropriately and. effectively, in spite of sometimes garbled and limited syntax and lexicon. They use the same strategies as their hearing peers and show sensitivity to different types of request and levels of functioning.