@article{rohlfing-2011-exploring,
    title = "Exploring ``Associative Talk'': When {G}erman Mothers Instruct Their Two Year Olds about Spatial Tasks",
    author = "Rohlfing, Katharina J.",
    editor = "Schlangen, David  and
      Rieser, Hannes  and
      Crocker, Matthew W.",
    journal = "Dialogue {\&} Discourse",
    volume = "2",
    year = "2011",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-dnd/2011.dnd-2.1/",
    doi = "10.5087/dad.2011.201",
    pages = "1--18",
    abstract = "In this study, maternal input was analyzed during a task, in which German mothers instructed their two-year-old children to put two objects together in a particular way. In the setting, the spatial relation (ON and UNDER) and the canonicality of these relations (canonical such as `a pot on a table' and noncanonical like `a train on a tunnel') were varied. Two kinds of discourse strategies are proposed that characterize mothers' input in this task: bring-in and follow-in. For the analysis, an automatic procedure was developed, in which the amount of words spent on a strategy was related to the overall word amount. The data suggest that the canonicality of the task can change the discourse: Bring-in strategies dominated the discourse in tasks with canonical spatial relations while in more difficult tasks with non-canonical relations, German-speaking mothers used follow-ins significantly more often than in the canonical tasks. Together, the results of this study shed light on the process of an on-line adaptation of the mother to her child and give us insight into how a situated understanding in a task-oriented discourse emerges."
}