3- and 4-year-olds’ Comprehension of Polite Requests
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Politeness is one of the essential components of being able to communicate in a social world, but not much is known about how or when politeness is understood by very young children. Thus, this paper examines 3- and 4-year-olds’ judgements on simple requests. More specifically: When do children begin to grasp the basics of politeness? Are some forms of requests easier to judge as more polite than others? Do young children understand both what it means to be “polite” and “rude”? To answer these questions, 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with an iPad game containing several stories which asked the participants to choose the more polite or more rude request out of two options. The audio for each utterance was pre-recorded and all utterances were recorded with a rising intonation at the end (like a question) in order to standardize the input across all participants. The results showed that there was a difference in performance between the 3- and 4-year-old participants, with 3-year-olds performing at around chance or just above when judging which request was more polite or rude and 4-year-olds answering correctly about 80% of the time. Furthermore, there was no significant difference in performance depending on the form of the more polite request nor when the participants were asked to pick the “more rude” utterance as compared to when asked to choose the “more polite” one. Thus, it seems that at least by the age of four, children begin to understand which requests are more polite and which ones are more rude.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | December 6, 2018 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Lynch, Raci H |
|---|---|
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Symbolic Systems |
| Primary advisor | Frank, Michael |
| Advisor | Gweon, Hyowon |
| Advisor | Yoon, Erica |
Subjects
| Subject | politeness |
|---|---|
| Subject | speech comprehension |
| Subject | language development |
| Subject | Symbolic Systems |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Lynch, Raci H. (2018). 3- and 4-year-olds’ Comprehension of Polite Requests. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/fw604td6083
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University
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- Contact
- rhlynch@alumni.stanford.edu
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