Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Social Functions of Immaturity: Marshallese Children as Moral Liars

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Graduate student Elise Berman (University of Chicago), supervised by Professor John A. Lucy, will investigate how children, when they lie or take stances on the truth or falsity of the statements of others, influence the flow of information. While adults are socialized to calculate their speech, children may not yet know how to correctly manipulate conversation. Consequently, they often say more than they ought. This research will consider what effects this immature speech has on social life and how it is regarded by others. The research will be carried out in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), where adults are known to guard their words carefully and view maintaining social harmony as more important than speaking truthfully. Thus the contrast between adult and child speech will be particularly visible. The researcher will employ a combination of ethnographic methods (participant observation and interviewing), discourse analysis methods (analysis of naturally recorded conversations and linguistic resources), and developmental psychological methods (videotapes of the interactions of six children of different ages for 30 minutes, twice weekly over the course of a year). The research is important because it will contribute to newly developing scientific theory about the social agency and effectiveness of children, as well as linguistic analysis of communication, metacommunication, and language ideologies cross-culturally. In addition, because it will reveal how ideas of truth and deception may vary cross-culturally, findings from this project will aid teachers and others who are responsible for children from other cultures avoid miscommunication by showing them that there are reasons their students speak as they do. This research also contributes to the education of a social scientist.