Semiotic mediation in guiding interactions with young children: The role of context and communication handicap on distanciation in adult discourse

This paper pays attention to two factors often neglected in the studies of instructional or guidance interaction: the specifity of the child as interlocutor and the constraints exerted by the properties of the tasks on the semiotic means used to guide the child. Following Sigel’s ‘distanciation hypothesis’ we have studied the ‘distancing’ characteristics of the adult’s discourse adressed to the child in two groups of dyads, one with deaf (N=5), the other with hearing children (N=7) aged around 24 months, in two tasks: Symbolic Play and Picture — Book reading. The main results indicate a strong effect of the tasks, SP allowing more distanciation than PB for both categories. D-dyads show few differences in SP task but less ability to share references in Picture-Book reading. It appears also that with such young children, the distancing potential might be conveyed by the forms and pragmatic functions and not only by the semantic components of adult’s utterances.