first child versus later child

[bernicot]

In our study we compared only child and second child. The sample was
composed of twenty native French-speaking children: ten were the only child
in the family (5 girls and 5 boys) and ten were the second child in a
two-child family (5 girls and 5 boys). The children were 3½ years old. Our
main results are as follows.
- In only children, syntactic development (MLU) is more advanced than it is
in second-born children.
- Qualitative analysis suggests that more second-born children than only
children exhibit slow syntactic development and a small vocabulary.
- Only children appear to produce a higher percentage of non-contingent
utterances than do second-born children, who produce more contingent
utterances that follow up on either their own last utterance or the last
utterance of their mother. Second-born children thus appear to be more
attuned to the topic of conversation than only children.
- Qualitative analysis also suggests that a distinctive feature of only
children is an inverse relationship between non-contingency and
between-speaker contingency. In other words, more non-contingent children
are also less contingent upon their mother, and vice versa. This relation
does not apply to the second-born children tested here. One can thus
conclude that in only children, strong non-contingency tends to be
associated with weak mother-contingency.
- Second-born children appear to maintain and develop a topic of
conversation with their mother for a greater number of speaking turns than
only children.

Bernicot, J. and Roux, M. (1999). The pragmatic aspects of only children and
second born children: analysis of conversations between French-speaking
mothers and children children. In J. Verschueren. Pragmatics in 1998 :
Selected papers from the 6th International Pragmatics Conference, Vol.2.
Antwerp : International Pragmatics Association.


For French-reading people:
Bernicot, J. et Roux, M. (1998). La structure et l’usage des énoncés :
comparaison d’enfants uniques et d’enfants secons-nés. In J. Bernicot, H.
Marcos, C. Day, M. Guidetti, V. Laval, J. Rabain-Jamin, et G. Babelot
(Eds.). De l'usage des gestes et des mots chez l'enfant (pp. 5-26). Paris:
Colin.
May be ordered at:http://www.alapage.com
in Quicksearch/books enter: Bernicot