epiphanies

[Donahue, Mavis L.]

Dear CHILDES colleagues:

Greetings!  Paula Menyuk and I are exploring some issues in the history of
research on child language.  We’re writing to ask you to share with us
your opinions on two questions:

 (1) What article or book was most influential in your early research
career?

(2) Do you think our progress in research on child language has been slow
and incremental, or that certain events abruptly triggered a paradigm
shift? (Note that this is not unlike the question of how language develops
in children.)

In particular, we’re looking for descriptions of “epiphanies” or
“flashbulb moments” when you may have recognized key support for your
theoretical position, or alternatively, that there was a crack in your
paradigm.  Please send these to me directly (mdonahue at uic.edu), and I’ll
post the ideas to our CHILDES list later.

As an example, below is a particularly wry and compelling narrative from
Starkey Duncan at the University of Chicago, describing his own flashbulb
moment:

(from Duncan, S. J. (1995).  Individual differences in face-to-face
interaction.   In P.E. Shrout & S. T. Fiske (Eds), Personality research,
methods, and theory (pp. 241-256).   Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.)

  “The experience of working with our correlational results led to one of
the most memorable moments of my career—an indelible “flashbulb”
recollection.  At the end of a lengthy and arduous process of
videotaping interactions, recording actions, and running correlations,
(Donald) Fiske and I were in a position to reap the fruits of our
labors:  interpreting our results.  Thoroughly immersed in this process,
we were sitting one day in my office discussing a set of results related
to correlations of (a) a participant’s rate of gazing at the partner with
(b) the participant’s total time with the speaking turn in the
conversation.  (These correlations are in Table 5.1 in Duncan & Fiske, 1977).

     The results were intriguingly unexpected and highly consistent across
conditions.  For example, “rate of gazing while speaking” was
negatively correlated with speaking time, whereas “rate of gazing
while not speaking” was positively correlated with speaking time.  That
is, the more frequently a participant gazed at the partner while speaking,
the less speaking time the participant had.  The more
frequently a participant gazed at the partner while listening to the
partner, the more speaking time the participant had.  The same action
appeared to have opposite interactional consequences depending on
whether the participant was the speaker or the auditor.  This was the sort
of unexpected relationship for which we were looking.  What
could this tell us about conversations and more generally about
interaction process?

     Fiske and I discussed the various possible sources of these results.
Were the results associated with a participant’s shifting gaze toward or
away from the partner?  That is, to obtain a count of two gazes at the
partner, a participant must gaze at the partner, gaze away and then gaze
toward again.  Which of these were contributing to the
correlations?  Were the shifts of gaze located near the beginning or end
of a speaking turn, and for which variable?  For example, perhaps the
“gazing while speaking” results involved shifts near the end of speaking
turns, whereas the "gazing while not speaking” results
involved shifts near the beginning of speaking turns.  There were
many questions of this sort.

     At some point in our conversation, the unforgettable moment occurred.
 We both fell silent and looked at each other with the same, unspoken
thought in mind:  None of these questions, necessary for interpreting
the results, could be answered with our data because the data
contained no information on interaction sequences.  Meaningful
interpretation of the results were impossible.

     It is an unforgettable experience to witness, as it were, a large
project of this sort slowly and utterly collapsing.  The image comes to
mind of the standard cartoon situation in which a light tap on a large
vase causes increasingly large, spreading cracks until the entire vase
collapses in pieces, leaving exposed the villain hiding inside.  Absent
from my memory of that moment, however, is any element of humor (p.
247-248).”


*********************************
Dr. Mavis L. Donahue
Professor
Department of Special Education
College of Education
1040 W. Harrison Street, m/c 147
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL  60607
312-996-8139 (voice)
312-996-5651 (fax)