Abstract
Despite the evidence that infants are sensitive to facial cues and prosody for the detection of emotion, we have contradictory evidence regarding the use of these cues by older preschool and school children when inferring both emotional and politeness stance. This study assessed preschool aged children’s sensitivity to intonational and facial cues signalling a speaker’s polite stance in requestive speech acts with controlled lexical and contextual materials. Thirty-six 3-year-old American English-speaking children performed a forced-choice decision task which investigated whether children at this age use pitch and/or facial cues to infer a speaker’s affective stance in either audio-only, visual-only or audio-visual presentation modalities, when lexical cues are controlled for. Results showed that (a) children at three years can infer a speaker’s polite stance equally well in all three conditions (audio-only, visual-only and audio-visual) and thereby (b) unlike previous research, in the present task both intonation and facial cues are equally strong cues in children’s understanding of a speaker’s polite stance in requestive speech acts. The authors discuss especially the implications of this early use of intonation to detect politeness, relating it to other previous research on children’s ability to infer meaning from pitch.
About the authors
Iris Hübscher has recently received her PhD in Linguistics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Catalunya and since then she has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the URPP Language and Space at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Her main research interest lies in multimodal communication, with a main focus on the interplay of prosody, gesture and lexicon in children’s pragmatic language development.
Laura Wagner has an MA in Psychology and a PhD in Linguistics, both from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently professor in the Ohio State University Psychology department. Her research specialty is children’s language development. She is the director of the Language Sciences Research Lab, a working research lab embedded inside a science museum that is committed to engaging with the public about how language works.
Pilar Prieto is an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Barcelona, Catalunya. Her main research interests focus on the communicative role of prosody and gesture in language, as well as their significance in language development and language training for both impaired and non-impaired populations. Currently she is an Associate Editor of Language and Speech and is coediting a book on Prosodic Development (2018, John Benjamins).
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to Faith Stagge, whose assistance in collecting the data at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio, was invaluable. Many thanks also to the students and researchers at Ohio State University who participated in our discourse elicitation task and the stimulus recordings. We are grateful to the linguistics team at Ohio State University who helped with some native speaker inputs along the way. Thank you to Shari Speer and her team at the Psycholinguistics Lab (Kiwako Ito and Kathryn Kimberley in particular), where some preliminary results were presented, and also to Mary Beckman and Ajou Chen for making valuable comments. Thanks also go to Joan Borràs-Comes for helping with the statistics.
Funding
This research has been funded by a research grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PGC2018-097007-B-I00 ‘Multimodal Language Learning (MLL): Prosodic and Gestural Integration in Pragmatic and Phonological Development’) and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR _ 971) to the Prosodic Studies Group. The first author also acknowledges a travel grant received by the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
References
Aguert, Marc, Virginie Laval, Agnès Lacroix, Sandrine Gil & Ludovic Le Bigot. 2013. Inferring emotions from speech prosody: Not so easy at age five. PLoS ONE 8(12), 1-9. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.008365710.1371/journal.pone.0083657Search in Google Scholar
Andersen, Peter A. & Laura K. Guerrero. 1998. Handbook of communication and emotion: Research, theory, applications, and contexts. San Diego: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar
Armstrong, Meghan. E., Núria Esteve-Gibert & Pilar Prieto. 2014. The acquisition of multimodal cues to disbelief. Paper presented at Speech Prosody 2014, May 20-23, Dublin, Ireland10.21437/SpeechProsody.2014-218Search in Google Scholar
Armstrong, Meghan. E. & Iris Hübscher. 2018. Children’s development of internal state prosody. In Pilar Prieto & Núria Esteve-Gibert (Eds.), Prosodic Development in First Language Acquisition 272-293. John Benjamins.10.1075/tilar.23.14armSearch in Google Scholar
Bänziger, Tanja, Marcello Mortillaro & Klaus Scherer. 2010. Introducing the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayal (GEMEP) corpus. In Klaus Scherer, Tanja Bänziger, & Etienne Roesch (Eds.), Blueprint for affective computing: A sourcebook 271-294. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bates, Elizabeth. 1976. Language and context: the acquisition of pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary E., Julia Hirschberg & Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. 2005. The original ToBi system and the evolution of the ToBi framework. In Sun Ah Jun (Ed.), Prosodic Typology: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing 9-54. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199249633.003.0002Search in Google Scholar
Brown, Lucien & Prieto Prieto. 2017. (Im)politeness: prosody and gesture. In Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh, & Dániel Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness London: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/978-1-137-37508-7_14Search in Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope & Steven Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511813085Search in Google Scholar
Butcher, Cynthia & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2000. Gesture and the transition from one- to two-word speech: When hand and mouth come together. In Dacid McNeill (Ed.), Language and Gesture 235-257. New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511620850.015Search in Google Scholar
Camras, Linda A., Toni M. Pristo & Mari J. Brown. 1985. Directive choice by children and adults: Affect, situation and linguistic politeness. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 31. 19-31.Search in Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it!”: prosody and impoliteness. In Linguistic Politeness Research Group (Ed.), Discursive approaches to politeness Vol. 8, 57-83. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110238679.57Search in Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, Derek Bousfield & Anne Wichmann. 2003. Impoliteness revisited: With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 35(10-11). 1545-1579. doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00118-210.1016/S0378-2166(02)00118-2Search in Google Scholar
Denham, Susanne A., Marcia Mckinley, Elizabeth. A. Couchoud & Robert Holt. 1990. Emotional and behavioral predictors of peer status in young preschoolers. Child Development 61. 1145-1152.10.2307/1130882Search in Google Scholar
Esteve-Gibert, Núria & Pilar Prieto. 2018. Early development of prosody-meaning interface. In Núria Esteve-Gibert & Pilar Prieto (Eds.) The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition. 228-246. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tilar.23.12estSearch in Google Scholar
Farroni, Teresa, Mark H. Johnson, Enrica Menon, Luisa Zulian, Dino Faraguna & Gergely Csibra. 2005. Newborns’ preference for face-relevant stimuli: Effects of contrast polarity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102(47). 17245-17250. doi:10.1073/pnas.050220510210.1073/pnas.0502205102Search in Google Scholar
Fernald, Anne. 1993. Approval and disapproval: infant responsiveness to vocal affect in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Child Development 64(3). 657-674. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1993.tb02934.x10.2307/1131209Search in Google Scholar
Friend, Margaret. 2001. The transition from affective to linguistic meaning. First Language 21(63), 219-243. doi:10.1177/01427237010210630210.1177/014272370102106302Search in Google Scholar
Friend, Margaret & Judith B. Bryant. 2000. A developmental lexical bias in the interpretation of discrepant messages. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 46(2). 342-369. Retrieved from https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-0034338064&partnerID=40&md5=afb1e6b4aebfc23d537559d380f546a6Search in Google Scholar
Gagnon, Mathieu, Pierre Gosselin, Isabelle Hudon-Ven Der Buhs, Karine Larocque & Karine Milliard. 2010. Children’s recognition and discrimination of fear and disgust facial expressions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 34(1). 27-42. doi:10.1007/s10919-009-0076-z10.1007/s10919-009-0076-zSearch in Google Scholar
Gagnon, Mathieu, Pierre Gosselin & Reem Maassarani. 2014. Children’s ability to recognize emotions from partial and complete facial expressions. Journal of Genetic Psychology 175(5). 416-430. doi:10.1080/00221325.2014.94132210.1080/00221325.2014.941322Search in Google Scholar
Gao, Xiaoqing & Daphne Maurer. 2010. A happy story: Developmental changes in children’s sensitivity to facial expressions of varying intensities. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 107(2). 67-86. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.05.00310.1016/j.jecp.2010.05.003Search in Google Scholar
Grossmann, Tobias, Regine Oberecker, Stefan Paul Koch & Angela D. Friederici. 2010. The Developmental Origins of Voice Processing in the Human Brain. Neuron 65(6). 852-858. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.03.00110.1016/j.neuron.2010.03.001Search in Google Scholar
Harrigan, Jinni A. 1984. The effects of task order on children’s identification of facial expressions. Motivation and Emotion 8(2). 157-169. doi:10.1007/BF0099307110.1007/BF00993071Search in Google Scholar
Herba, Catherine. M., Sabine Landau, Tamara Russell, Christine Ecker & Mary L. Phillips. 2006. The development of emotion-processing in children: Effects of age, emotion, and intensity. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 47(11). 1098-1106. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2006.01652.x10.1111/j.1469-7610.2006.01652.xSearch in Google Scholar
Hoehle, Barabara. 2009. Bootstrapping mechanisms in first language acquisition. Linguistics 47(2), 359-382. doi:10.1515/LING.2009.01310.1515/LING.2009.013Search in Google Scholar
Hoicka, Elena & S. H. Wang. 2011. Fifteen-month-old infants match vocal cues to intentional actions. Journal of Cognition and Development 12(3). 299-314. doi:10.1080/15248372.2010.54221510.1080/15248372.2010.542215Search in Google Scholar
Hübscher, Iris, Núria Esteve-Gibert, Alfonso Igualada & Prieo Prieto. 2017. Intonation and gesture as bootstrapping devices in speaker uncertainty. First Language 37(1). 24-41. Retrieved from https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85011392086&doi=10.1177 %2f0142723716673953&partnerID=40&md5=9c2d4b2ff417d2015caff0e78961e38210.1177/0142723716673953Search in Google Scholar
Izard, Carrol E. 1971. The face of emotion. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.Search in Google Scholar
Jhang, Yuna & D. Kimbrough Oller 2017. Emergence of functional flexibility in infant vocalizations of the first 3 months. Frontiers in Psychology 8(MAR). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0030010.3389/fpsyg.2017.00300Search in Google Scholar
Jun, Sun-Ah. 2010. Prosodic typology: The phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567300.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Kahana-Kalman, Ronit & Arlene. S. Walker-Andrews. 2001. The role of person familiarity in young infants’ perception of emotional expressions. Child Development 72(2). 352-369. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.0028310.1111/1467-8624.00283Search in Google Scholar
Kayyal, Mary. H. & Sherri. C. Widen. 2015. What made sahar scared?: Imaginary and realistic causes in Palestinian and American children’s concept for fear. Journal of Cognition and Culture 15(1-2). 32-44. doi:10.1163/15685373-1234213910.1163/15685373-12342139Search in Google Scholar
Kelly, Spencer. D. 2001. Broadening the units of analysis in communication: Speech and nonverbal behaviours in pragmatic comprehension. Journal of Child Language 28(2). 325-349. Retrieved from https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-0035376342&doi=10.1017 %2fS0305000901004664&partnerID=40&md5=f902c2e2adcc804f4acc7638af49ca7a10.1017/S0305000901004664Search in Google Scholar
Khu, Melanie, Craig Chambers & Susan. A. Graham. 2017. When you’re happy and I know it: Four year-olds’ emotional perspective-taking during on-line language comprehension. Child Devevelopment 89. 2264-2281.10.1111/cdev.12855Search in Google Scholar
Langlotz, Andreas. & Miriam. A. Locher. 2013. The role of emotions in relational work. Journal of Pragmatics 58. 87-107. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2013.05.01410.1016/j.pragma.2013.05.014Search in Google Scholar
Langlotz, Andreas. & Miriam. A. Locher. 2017. (Im)politeness and emotion. In Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politenes 287-322. London.10.1057/978-1-137-37508-7_12Search in Google Scholar
Lawrence, L. L. & Anne Fernald. (1993). When prosody and semantics conflict: infants’ sensitivity to discrepancies between tone of voice and verbal content Poster session presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development New Orleans, LA.Search in Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam. A. & Regula Koenig. 2014. ‘All I could do was hand her another tissue’ - Handling emotions as challenge in reflective writing texts by medical students. SPELL: Swiss papers in English language and literature 30. 215-236.Search in Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam. A. & Andreas Langlotz. 2008. Relational work: at the intersection of cognition, interaction and emotion. Swiss Association of Applied Linguistics 88. 165-191.Search in Google Scholar
Markham, Roslyn & Kym Adams. 1992. The effect of type of task on children’s identification of facial expressions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 16(1). 21-39. doi:10.1007/BF0098687710.1007/BF00986877Search in Google Scholar
Mastropieri, Diane. & Gerald Turkewitz. 1999. Prenatal experience and neonatal responsiveness to vocal expressions of emotion. Developmental Psychobiology 35(3). 204-214.10.1002/(SICI)1098-2302(199911)35:3<204::AID-DEV5>3.0.CO;2-VSearch in Google Scholar
Mcclure, Erin B. 2000. A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents. Psychological Bulletin 126(3). 424-453. Retrieved from https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-0034185772&partnerID=40&md5=3719b627961e46b85f3b54b34587307310.1037/0033-2909.126.3.424Search in Google Scholar
Mccluskey, Ken. W. & Daniel. C. Albas. 1981. Perception of the emotional content of speech by Canadian and Mexican children, adolescents, and adults. International Journal of Psychology 16. 119−132.10.1080/00207598108247409Search in Google Scholar
Morton, J. Bruce & Sandra E. Trehub. 2001. Children’s understanding of emotion in speech. Child Development 72(3). 834-843. Retrieved from https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-0035348611&partnerID=40&md5=8a1cc662ac0a6f90d4121e6d1034187110.1111/1467-8624.00318Search in Google Scholar
Morton, J. Bruce, Sandra E. Trehub & Philip David Zelazo. 2003. Sources of inflexibility in 6-year-olds’ understanding of emotion in speech. Child Development 74(6). 1857-1868. doi:10.1046/j.1467-8624.2003.00642.x10.1046/j.1467-8624.2003.00642.xSearch in Google Scholar
Mumme, Donna L., Anne Fernald & C. Herrera. 1996. Infants’ responses to facial and vocal emotional signals in a social referencing paradigm. Child Development 67(6). 3219-3237. Retrieved from https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-0030348025&partnerID=40&md5=13bdeb6acfcba7d688e05a1e2ee0b0f010.2307/1131775Search in Google Scholar
Nelson, Nicole. L. & James A. Russell. 2011. Preschoolers’ use of dynamic facial, bodily, and vocal cues to emotion. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 110(1). 52-61. Retrieved from https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-79957624786&doi=10.1016 %2fj.jecp.2011.03.014&partnerID=40&md5=8a34211a0f607bdd0478c3291ac42bc210.1016/j.jecp.2011.03.014Search in Google Scholar
Nelson, Nicole. L. & James. a. Russell. 2012. Children’s understanding of nonverbal expressions of pride. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 111(3). 379-385. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2011.09.00410.1016/j.jecp.2011.09.004Search in Google Scholar
Nelson, Nicole. L. & James. a. Russell. 2015. Children distinguish between positive pride and hubris. Developmental Psychology 51(11). 1609-1614. doi:10.1037/dev000004810.1037/dev0000048Search in Google Scholar
Nowichi, Stephan. & Marshall P. Duke. 1994. Individual differences in the nonverbal communication of affect: The diagnostic analysis of nonverbal accuracy scale. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 18. 9−35.10.1007/BF02169077Search in Google Scholar
Oller, D. Kimbrough, Eugene. H. Buder, Heather. L. Ramsdell, Anne. S. Warlaumont, Lesya Chorna & Roger Bakeman. 2013. Functional flexibility of infant vocalization and the emergence of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110(16). 6318-6323. doi:10.1073/pnas.130033711010.1073/pnas.1300337110Search in Google Scholar
Papaeliou, Christina, George Minadakis & D. Cavouras. 2002. Acoustic patterns of infant vocalizations expressing emotions and communicative functions. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 45(2). 311-317.10.1044/1092-4388(2002/024)Search in Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet. 1980. The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. PhD thesis, MIT: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Search in Google Scholar
Quam, Carolyn & Daniel Swingley. 2012. Development in children’s interpretation of pitch cues to emotions. Child Development 83(1). 236-250. Retrieved from https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84856262408&doi=10.1111%2fj.1467-8624.2011.01700.x&partnerID=40&md5=1b3445f440a261e6cf4a998c01b5f2f010.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01700.xSearch in Google Scholar
Roberson, Debi, Ljubica Damjanovic & Mariko Kikutani. 2010. Show and tell: The role of language in categorizing facial expression of emotion. Emotion Review 2(3). 255-260. doi:10.1177/175407391036197910.1177/1754073910361979Search in Google Scholar
Scheiner, Elisabeth, Kurt Hammerschmidt, Uwe Jürgens & Petra Zwirner. 2003. Unterschiede im vokalen Ausdruck von Emotionen bei hörenden und hochgradig schwerhörigen Säuglingen. In M. Kruse & E. Gross (Eds.) Aktuelle phoniatrisch-pädaudiologische Aspekte 2003/2004. Vol. 11, 282-286. Heidelberg: Median VerlagSearch in Google Scholar
Shochi, Takaaki, Donna Erickson, Kaoru Sekiyama, Albert Rilliard & Véronique Aubergé. 2009. Japanese children’s acquisition of prosodic politeness expressions. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH.10.21437/Interspeech.2009-524Search in Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2011. Conceptualising ‘the relational’ in pragmatics: Insights from metapragmatic emotion and (im)politeness comments. Journal of Pragmatics 43(14). 3565-3578. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.08.00910.1016/j.pragma.2011.08.009Search in Google Scholar
Székely, Eszter, Henning Tiemeier, Lidia. R. Arends, Vincent W. V. Jaddoe, Albert Hofman, Frank. C. Verhulst & Catherine. M. Herba. 2011. Recognition of facial expressions of emotions by 3-year-olds. Emotion 11(2). 425-435. doi:10.1037/a002258710.1037/a0022587Search in Google Scholar
Szumilas, Magdalena. 2010. Explaining Odds Ratios. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 19. 227.Search in Google Scholar
Tracy, Jessica L., Richard. W. Robins & Kristin. H. Lagattuta. 2005. Can children recognize pride? Emotion 5(3). 251-257. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.5.3.25110.1037/1528-3542.5.3.251Search in Google Scholar
Vaillant-Molina, Mariana, Lorraine. E. Bahrick & Ross Flom. 2013. Young infants match facial and vocal emotional expressions of other infants. Infancy 18(SUPPL.1). doi:10.1111/infa.1201710.1111/infa.12017Search in Google Scholar
Vaish, Amrisha & Tricia Striano. 2004. Is visual reference necessary? Contributions of facial versus vocal cues in 12-month-olds’ social referencing behavior. Developmental Science 7(3). 261-269. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2004.00344.x10.1111/j.1467-7687.2004.00344.xSearch in Google Scholar
Wagner, Laura, Shari. R. Speer, Leslie. C. Moore, Elizabeth. A. Mccullough, Kiwako Ito, Cynthia G. Clopper & Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. 2015. Linguistics in a science museum: integrating research, teaching, and outreach at the language sciences research lab. Linguistics and Language Compass 9(10). 420-431. doi:10.1111/lnc3.1216410.1111/lnc3.12164Search in Google Scholar
Walker-Andrews, Arlene. S. & Wendy Grolnick. 1983. Discrimination of vocal expressions by young infants. Infant Behavior and Development 6(4). 491-498. doi:10.1016/S0163-6383(83)90331-410.1016/S0163-6383(83)90331-4Search in Google Scholar
Waxer, Matthew & J. Bruce Morton. 2011. Children’s judgments of emotion from conflicting cues in speech: Why 6-year-olds are so inflexible. Child Development 82(5). 1648-1660. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01624.x10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01624.xSearch in Google Scholar
Widen, Sherri C. 2013. Children’s interpretation of facial expressions: The long path from valence-based to specific discrete categories. Emotion Review 5(1). 72-77. doi:10.1177/175407391245149210.1177/1754073912451492Search in Google Scholar
Widen, Sherri C. & James A. Russell. 2003. A closer look at preschoolers’ freely produced labels for facial expressions. Developmental Psychology 39(1). 114-128. doi:10.1037//0012-1649.39.1.11410.1037/0012-1649.39.1.114Search in Google Scholar
Widen, Sherri C. & James A. Russell. 2008. Children acquire emotion categories gradually. Cognitive Development 23(2). 291-312. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2008.01.00210.1016/j.cogdev.2008.01.002Search in Google Scholar
Wilutzky, Wendy. 2015. Emotions as pragmatic and epistemic actions. Frontiers in Psychology 6(OCT). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0159310.3389/fpsyg.2015.01593Search in Google Scholar
Zhang, Dandan, Yunzh Liu, Xinlin Hou, Guoyu Sun, Yawei Cheng & Yuejia Luo. 2014. Discrimination of fearful and angry emotional voices in sleeping human neonates: A study of the mismatch brain responses. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 8(DEC). 1-10. doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2014.0042210.3389/fnbeh.2014.00422Search in Google Scholar
Appendix
DCT Instructions:
Imagine yourself being a pre-school teacher, in charge of a small group of three- to four-year-old children. The task consists of 10 situations. Imagine yourself being in each of these situations and then respond to them as spontaneously as possible.
Non-polite stance condition | Polite stance condition |
Scene 1a. The child is playing with your smartphone and dropped it. You have already asked him/her to stop playing with your smartphone before. You’re getting impatient. Tell the child to give you the smartphone. | Scene 1b. You have both your hands full of plates on your way to the kitchen and you have just dropped a fork. Ask the child nicely to give you the fork. |
Scene 2a. The child is scribbling in a book from the class. You have told the child many times before to not scribble in the picture books. You’re getting annoyed and tell the child to give you the book. | Scene 2b. The child is reading a picture book with a pen close by. You need to write something down. Ask the child nicely to give you the pen. |
Scene 4a. The child is very excited and plays continuously with a noisy toy but you want him/her to be quiet. You’re quite annoyed. Tell the child to give you the toy. | Scene 4b. You bring some toys to the table. A huge frog is still in front of the child. In order to have room for the new toys you ask the child nicely to give you the frog. |
Scene 5a. The child is playing with a ball in the kitchen and you have told the child several times before not to play with the ball there. You get annoyed and tell the child to give you the ball. | Scene 5b. You’re sitting at a table next to the children. You can’t reach the bread and you ask the child who sits closest to the bread nicely to give you the bread. |
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
