Encoding: a child's use of language

"You're lying," "I don't think you are telling the truth," "Fibber," "I don't believe you," "You liar"—these are alternate ways of formulating a single message, and there are many others. We use "Fibber" in one context, "You're lying" in another, and "I don't believe you" in a third, and we seem to make these distinctions without effort. Occasionally we wonder how to broach a delicate subject, but most of the time we speak without deliberation. Yet encoding a message is a complex process, however straightforward the message may be. Samovar and Porter (1988) define encoding as "an internal activity in which verbal and nonverbal behaviors are selected and arranged according to the rules of grammar and syntax appli­cable to the language being used to create a message" (p. 17). In short, when we encode a message, we must have some awareness of the receiver if we want to be understood. The other half of the process is decoding—that is, "the [receiver's] internal processing of a message and the attribution of meaning to the source's behaviors that represent the source's internal state of being" (p. 18).

A look at how children use language gives us a better understanding of what takes place in the encoding process. Children astonish adults with their verbal facility. The three-year-old can formulate sentences, repeat all sorts of long words and colloquial expressions, and use several tenses correctly. Some three-year-olds have a vocabulary of nearly 1,000 words. The five-year-old speaks in correct, finished sentences and even uses complex sentences with hypothetical and con­ditional clauses. At this age the structure and form of language are essentially complete. But what about the encoding abilities of the child?

Egocentric Speech

To study the functions of language in children, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1962) made exhaustive observations and analyses of the way children speak both when they are alone and when they are in the company of other children. He also devised a series of experiments to determine how objective children try to be in communicating information.

A typical Piaget experiment follows this pattern. A child is shown a diagram of a water tap—sometimes Piaget uses a diagram of a bicycle—and given a precise explanation of how it works. Once it has been established that the child under-stands the experimenter's explanation, he or she is asked to repeat it (with the aid of the diagram) to another child. In another variant of this procedure, the child is told a simple story and asked to repeat it to a second child. How do children perform these communication tasks? According to Piaget, not very well. He found that though a child fully understood an explanation or story, he or she was not necessarily successful in communicating it to another child.

Why should this be? It is not that the child lacks the necessary vocabulary. Nor is he or she by any means inarticulate. Piaget's work led him to the conclusion that in the child under age seven or eight, language has two distinct functions and that two kinds of speech exist: egocentric and socialized speech.

As Piaget describes patterns of egocentric speech in the child, he gives us a perfect example of a poor encoder, someone whose speech does not adapt information to the receiver.

Although he talks almost incessantly to his neighbours, he rarely places himself at their point of view. He speaks to them for the most part as if he were thinking aloud. He speaks, therefore, in a language which …above all is always making assertions, even in argument, instead of justifying them …The child hardly ever even asks himself whether he has been understood. For him, that goes without saying, for he does not think about others when he talks.

Piaget believes that until a child is seven or eight, egocentric language con­stitutes almost half of his or her spontaneous speech, and his book, The Language and Thought of the Child, is full of amusing "conversations" between children in which virtually no communication takes place:

L: "Thunder rolls."

P.: "No, it doesn't roll."

L.: "It's water."

P.: "No, it doesn't roll."

L.: "What is thunder?"

P.: "Thunder is . . ." (He doesn't go on.)

In contrast to egocentric speech, socialized speech involves adapting information to the receive and in some sense adopting his or her point of view; it involves social rather than nonsocial encoding. Piaget goes beyond his findings about language to argue that the adult "thinks socially, even when he is alone, and …the child under 7 thinks egocentrically, even in the society of others" (1962).

One team of researchers went on to a further examination of this discrepancy between the communication skills of children and adults. Their strategy was to create a communication problem in the form of a game called "Stack the Blocks. Pairs of children, separated by an opaque screen so that they could not see each other, were given sets of blocks with designs that had low codability—that is, they were difficult to describe. Describing the design of the block so that the listener could identify it and stack his or her blocks in the same order was the communication problem.

The children's descriptions showed little social encoding. For example, one block was described by different children as "somebody running," "eagle," "throw­ing sticks," "strip-stripe," and "wire." In the role of speaker, some kindergarteners and first-graders made comments such as "It goes like this" using one finger to trace the design in the air—which of course the listener could not see because he or she was behind a screen (Krauss, in Walcher, 1971). In general, children tended to use private rather than socially shared images; as a result their messages were often idiosyncratic.

Variations of the Stack the Blocks experiment have been conducted with children of all grade levels as well as with adults. Although nursery school children seem totally unable to complete this communication task, effectiveness in com­munication clearly increases with age (as measured by grade level).

According to Piaget's view, then, the speech of children, even at age seven, is of necessity egocentric. Thus they are unable to encode messages effectively for the benefit of others. Their competence in communicating is linked with physical and intellectual development.