The present issue comprises five articles
based on studies in Russian, Bulgarian, Romani, and Polish. It opens
with a text entitled The acoustic characteristics of Russian vowels in
children of 4 and 5 years of age by Elena E. Lyakso and Alexandra D.
Gromova from the Saint-Petersburg State University. The purpose of the
study was to examine the process of development of first and second
formants, and the duration and intensity of Russian vowels in child speech.
Five normally developing Russian children during the fourth and fifth
years were recorded in situations of free interaction with their mothers
and the investigator. Measurements were made of 1) the fundamental
frequency and the first two formants in words, 2) the intensity of these
harmonics, and 3) the vowel and its stationary part duration. It turned
out that the formant characteristics do not correspond to those in adult
speech as yet.
The second article is entitled Between adults, siblings, and Teddy-Bears:
How Bulgarian children acquire personal deixis?, written by Juliana
Stoyanova (Sofia University). The author analyzed the child's initial
use of the 3rd person verb and pronoun forms for referring to self and
the addressee, or pronominal reversals. The Bulgarian sample includes
5 longitudinally studied children as well as 2 children who were each
tape-recorded in 60-min. sessions. The Bulgarian data were compared with
the data reported on Polish (Smoczyńska, 1992, see reference in Stoyanova's
article). The results add some language-specific (Bulgarian) and style-specific
data to the discussion about the development of self- and other-reference.
The third article on Measuring children's assertiveness from conversational
samples was prepared by Barbara Jacennik from the University of Warsaw.
The Polish speaking children with whom the conversations were tape-recorded
were 21 primary school students between 7 and 11 years. The adult partner
was instructed to use a conversational style that would encourage child
participation - to speak in a friendly, non-evaluative, peer-like manner.
The children's behaviors were judged as "active participation in
conversation" or as "passive or withdrawal from conversation". The
article demonstrates an application of conversational analysis to
children's communicative assessment focusing on assertiveness.
The fourth article was prepared by Encho Gerganov (New Bulgarian
University) and Hristo Kyuchukov (Veliko Tarnovo University). The title
is Word associations in Romani. Some prototypes in cross-cultural
perspectives. The article is a preliminary report on word associations
given by Romani people living in Bulgaria. Seventy-three Roma participated
in a pilot experiment. They came from different regions of Bulgaria and
spoke different Romani dialects. The results of the Romani word association
experiment were added to the database of word associations for 7 languages
and cultures (shown in the previous work of the first author - Gerganov,
2003, see reference in the article). It turned out that white is the
prototype and black is the variant in Romani culture, while in Bulgarian
the prototype is black and the variant is white. It was also found that
night is the prototype and day the variant in Bulgarian culture but in
Romani culture the relation is reversed although both cultures had coexisted
for hundreds of years.
The issue ends with the article entitled The influence of interpersonal
communication on human development by Stefan Frydrychowicz from the Adam
Mickiewicz University in Poznań. In his exploration of the phenomenon of
interpersonal communication, the author considers four dimensions as follows:
transmitting information, sender's emotional attitude towards the message
and its receiver, cooperation between participants (joint activity),
relationship between the participants. His goal is to answer the question:
What characteristics should the course of interpersonal communication have
in terms of these dimensions to warrant its impact on human development?
Barbara Bokus
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