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The Multimodal Representational Characteristics of Mandarin Children’s Disagreement —— A Case Study Based on Diachronic Videos

Received: 8 May 2020     Accepted: 4 June 2020     Published: 15 June 2020
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Abstract

Based on a case study, this research collects naturally happened videos of one mandarin-speaking child during the period of her 1.5-3.5 years old, and makes a thorough study of the multimodal representational characteristics of disagreement of this child from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Within a data corpus constituted by 80 hours’ video-recorded life traces of a pre-school child, a corpus of 114 cases of disagreement was selected for a qualitative analysis through the Elan software. It is shown that mandarin-speaking children of this age period usually conduct multimodal communicative behaviors when they are expressing disagreement, the modal forms of which include verbal disagreement, nonverbal disagreement, verbal-nonverbal disagreement. To be more specific, verbal-nonverbal disagreement involves two kinds of modal interactional relationships: equivalent and complementary with the latter containing reinforced and non-reinforced cases. Through this research, parents and early educational staffs are suggested to pay more attention on children’s multimodal expressions on the one hand and to employ more non-verbal resources in interacting with young children on the other hand. What’s more, the point of individual differences of children is a time-consuming but simultaneously a noteworthy one for both parents and preschool teachers. The results of this study bring further light on the knowledge of early education and parental involvement.

Published in International Journal of Language and Linguistics (Volume 8, Issue 3)
DOI 10.11648/j.ijll.20200803.14
Page(s) 115-121
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Mandarin-speaking Children, Disagreement, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Diachronic Videos Study

References
[1] Pomerantz, Anita. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In Atkinson, J. M., Heritage, J. (Eds.), Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 75-101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Baym, Nancy. (1996). Agreements and Disagreements in a Computer-Mediated Discussion. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 29, 315-346.
[3] Haoxin Yang. (2011). An Intercultural and Cross-Gender Study on Disagreement Realization Patterns of Chinese and American College Students. Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Northwest Normal University, Gansu.
[4] Sififianou, Maria. (2012). Disagreements, Face and Politeness. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1554–1564.
[5] Angouri, Jo. (2012). Managing disagreement in problem solving meeting talk. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1565-1579.
[6] Kakavá, Christina. (1993). Negotiation of Disagreement by Greeks in Conversations and Classroom Discourse. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Georgetown University, Washington D. C.
[7] Bressem, J. & Müller, C, (2014). Body Language Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. Berlin: Degruyter Mouton Press.
[8] Bressem, J., Stein, N., & Wegener, C. (2017). Multimodal Language Use in Savosavo. Pragmatics, 2, 173-206.
[9] Mehu, Marc.& van der Maaten, Laurens. (2014). Multimodal Integration of Dynamic Audio-Visual Cues in the Communication of Agreement and Disagreement. Journal of nonverbal behaviour, 38 (4), 569-597.
[10] Khaki, Hossein. & Bozkurt, Elif. &Erzin, Engin. (2016). Agreement and Disagreement Classification of Dyadic Interactions Using Vocal and Gestural Cues. International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing ICASSP, 2762-2766.
[11] Rongbin Wang, Yaoqin Xue. (2020). On the Multimodal Representation of 4~5-year-old Chinese-speaking Children’s Negative Behavior. Studies in Preschool Education, No. 1, 20-29.
[12] Antonio Bova, Francesco Arcidiacono. (2018). The interplay between parental argumentative strategies, children's reactions and topics of disagreement during family conversations. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1-10.
[13] Amanda S. Haber, David M. Sobel & Deena Skolnick Weisberg. (2019). Fostering Children’s Reasoning about Disagreements through an Inquiry-base Curriculum. Journal of Cognition and Development, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2019.1639713.
[14] Alexa Kane, Barbara A. Morrongiello. (2020). The Impact of Children’s Temperament on How Parents Resolve Safety Disagreements During Preadolescence. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 45 (2), 218–228.
[15] Zhuanglin Hu et al. 2005. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Beijing: Peking University Press.
[16] Delu Zhang. (2009). On A Synthetic Theoretical Framework for Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Foreign Language in China, 24-30.
[17] Capirci O, Iverson M J, et al. (1996). Gestures and words during the transition to two word speech. Journal of Child Language, 23, 645-673.
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  • APA Style

    Rongbin Wang, Rui Zhang. (2020). The Multimodal Representational Characteristics of Mandarin Children’s Disagreement —— A Case Study Based on Diachronic Videos. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 8(3), 115-121. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20200803.14

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    ACS Style

    Rongbin Wang; Rui Zhang. The Multimodal Representational Characteristics of Mandarin Children’s Disagreement —— A Case Study Based on Diachronic Videos. Int. J. Lang. Linguist. 2020, 8(3), 115-121. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20200803.14

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    AMA Style

    Rongbin Wang, Rui Zhang. The Multimodal Representational Characteristics of Mandarin Children’s Disagreement —— A Case Study Based on Diachronic Videos. Int J Lang Linguist. 2020;8(3):115-121. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20200803.14

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  • @article{10.11648/j.ijll.20200803.14,
      author = {Rongbin Wang and Rui Zhang},
      title = {The Multimodal Representational Characteristics of Mandarin Children’s Disagreement —— A Case Study Based on Diachronic Videos},
      journal = {International Journal of Language and Linguistics},
      volume = {8},
      number = {3},
      pages = {115-121},
      doi = {10.11648/j.ijll.20200803.14},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20200803.14},
      eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijll.20200803.14},
      abstract = {Based on a case study, this research collects naturally happened videos of one mandarin-speaking child during the period of her 1.5-3.5 years old, and makes a thorough study of the multimodal representational characteristics of disagreement of this child from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Within a data corpus constituted by 80 hours’ video-recorded life traces of a pre-school child, a corpus of 114 cases of disagreement was selected for a qualitative analysis through the Elan software. It is shown that mandarin-speaking children of this age period usually conduct multimodal communicative behaviors when they are expressing disagreement, the modal forms of which include verbal disagreement, nonverbal disagreement, verbal-nonverbal disagreement. To be more specific, verbal-nonverbal disagreement involves two kinds of modal interactional relationships: equivalent and complementary with the latter containing reinforced and non-reinforced cases. Through this research, parents and early educational staffs are suggested to pay more attention on children’s multimodal expressions on the one hand and to employ more non-verbal resources in interacting with young children on the other hand. What’s more, the point of individual differences of children is a time-consuming but simultaneously a noteworthy one for both parents and preschool teachers. The results of this study bring further light on the knowledge of early education and parental involvement.},
     year = {2020}
    }
    

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    AU  - Rui Zhang
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    AB  - Based on a case study, this research collects naturally happened videos of one mandarin-speaking child during the period of her 1.5-3.5 years old, and makes a thorough study of the multimodal representational characteristics of disagreement of this child from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Within a data corpus constituted by 80 hours’ video-recorded life traces of a pre-school child, a corpus of 114 cases of disagreement was selected for a qualitative analysis through the Elan software. It is shown that mandarin-speaking children of this age period usually conduct multimodal communicative behaviors when they are expressing disagreement, the modal forms of which include verbal disagreement, nonverbal disagreement, verbal-nonverbal disagreement. To be more specific, verbal-nonverbal disagreement involves two kinds of modal interactional relationships: equivalent and complementary with the latter containing reinforced and non-reinforced cases. Through this research, parents and early educational staffs are suggested to pay more attention on children’s multimodal expressions on the one hand and to employ more non-verbal resources in interacting with young children on the other hand. What’s more, the point of individual differences of children is a time-consuming but simultaneously a noteworthy one for both parents and preschool teachers. The results of this study bring further light on the knowledge of early education and parental involvement.
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Author Information
  • School of Foreign Languages, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China

  • School of Foreign Languages, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China

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