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Vocal behavior in the dyadic interactions of preadolescent and early adolescent friends and acquaintances

Adolescence, Fall, 2002 by Stanley Feldstein, Tiffany Field

An increasing number of studies are concerned with the extent to which the vocal behavior of pairs of individuals in conversational interactions with each other shows mutual vocal coordination or entrainment. Most of these studies have involved the interactions of adults and young adults (e.g., Crown, 1991; Feldstein & Welkowitz, 1987; Field et al., 1992) and, more recently, the interactions of infants with mothers and with strangers (e.g., Beebe, Alson, Jaffe, Feldstein, & Crown, 1988; Cohn & Tronick, 1988; Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, & Jasnow, 2001; Jasnow & Feldstein, 1986). The study reported here examined the interactions of preadolescent dyads. The study had three major aims. The first was to determine whether, and how much, entraimnent, or what we call coordinated interpersonal timing, occurs in the dialogues of preadolescent pairs. Coordinated interpersonal timing, or CIT, refers to changes in the temporal patterns of one person in a conversation as a function of changes in those of the other pers on. The second aim was to provide descriptive statistics of the states that comprise the vocal patterning of preadolescent interactions. The last, but not at all the least aim, was to compare, in terms of the state durations and frequencies and the coefficients of CIT, the interactions of friends and acquaintances in mixed- and same-gender dyads. Thus, the study is primarily an analysis of the temporal structure of preadolescent dialogues. This information was expected to extend our knowledge of what may be the basis for subsequent differences in the social interactions of friends and acquaintances. This expectation is based upon a "dyadic systems" position which holds that the two-person group is a basic psychological unit in which personality is originally formed (Sullivan, 1947) and in which the behavior of one of the individuals is determined by the behavior of both individuals (Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, & Jasnow, 2001). It has been shown (Jaffe et al., 2001) that the degree to which the temporal rh ythms of mothers and their infants are coordinated not only initiates, for four-month-old infants, the formation of an adult dialogue structure prelinguistically, but predicts the quality of the mother-infant relationship that will have developed by age 12 months.

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The few investigations that have examined the chronography of children's interactions were concerned with whether the conversational time patterns of the children exhibited CIT, as well as the effects of age, gender, and ethnicity on the conversational time patterns of the children. One study (Welkowitz, Bond, & Feldstein, 1984a) of Hawaiian children found that the vocal time patterns are stable indices of children's conversational behavior, and that the patterns seem to vary as a function of the gender and ethnicity of the conversational pairs. Another study (Welkowitz, Bond, & Feldstein, 1984b) of Japanese-American children and adults in mixed- and same-gender pairs found gender effects for the adults but not for the children. Two earlier studies (Garvey & BenDebba, 1974; Welkowitz, Cariffe, & Feldstein, 1976) seemed to indicate that the development of CIT is positively related to age. However, none of these studies involved preadolescents, and the techniques for assessing CIT were relatively crude. In the present study, CIT was estimated by the use of time-series regression analyses.

METHOD

Participants

The 30 female and 26 male pre- and early adolescents who participated in the study were recruited from two sixth-grade classes at the West Laboratory Elementary School for a study by Field et al. (1992). The average age of the participants was 11.5 years, and the friends knew each other for an average of 4.2 years. The acquaintances knew each other for approximately five months. The selection of friends and acquaintances was made on the basis of a sociogram that presented cartoon faces with messages in balloon-like clouds coming from the cartoon faces such as "I know ______ the best" and "I know ______ the least." The choices of the students were validated by their teachers, who were asked to rank order, for each student, two of the student's closest friends (Field et al., 1992). For the present study, it is important simply to note that the boys and girls were assembled into same- and mixed-sex pairs, and that each pair participated in a 10-minute, face-to-face interaction across a small table, about any top ic or topics they desired, and that the interaction was audiotaped such that each voice was on a separate channel.

Coding Vocal Interactions

The coding of the vocal behavior of a dialogue is accomplished by means of the direct input of the two audio signals, one for each person, into a specialized computer system known as the Automated Vocal Transaction Analyzer (AVTA; Jaffe & Feldstein, 1970). AVTA first performs an analogue-to-digital conversion. Specifically, the two channels of incoming audio signals are sampled synchronously every 250 msec to determine whether the signal in each channel is on or off, without regard to the frequency or intonational characteristics of the sounds. The sole requirement is that the sounds be within the range of human hearing. These observed time series are stored digitally in the computer in the form of a sequence of four number codes that index the four observable dyadic states: when one signal is on and the other is off, the code is "1"; if vice versa, the code is "2"; if both signals are on, the code is "3"; or if both are off, the code number is "0." In the present study, the AVTA software transforms these dec imal numbers into a set of dialogic vocal states (defined next) and averages their durations for a fixed time unit. Although the observable states 1 and 2 distinguish between the speakers, the coactive states 3 and 0 do not. To have them do so requires a superordinate characteristic of dialogue that allows for unequivocal identification of the speaker. The speaking turn is the characteristic that provides such identification. It begins the instant either participant vocalizes alone, and it is held by that participant until the other vocalizes alone, at which point the other participant takes the turn. By virtue of the turn, the AVTA system is able to compute five vocal states (Feldstein & Welkowitz, 1987; Jaffe & Feldstein, 1970) that are subsumed by the turn: vocalizations (V), pauses (P), switching pauses (SP), and interruptive and noninterruptive simultaneous speech (ISS and NSS, respectively). Figure 1 diagrams an interactional sequence. The numbered line at the bottom represents 250-msec units. The arrow s that point down denote the end of speaker 1's turns; those that turn up denote the end of speaker 2's turns.

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Vocal behavior in the dyadic interactions of preadolescent and early adolescent friends and acquaintances

Adolescence, Fall, 2002 by Stanley Feldstein, Tiffany Field

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