Article: Ochs, E. (1979). Transcription as theory. In by E. Ochs & B. Schieffelin (Eds.) Developmental pragmatics (pp. 43-72). New York: Academic Press.
This article advocates the use of transcriptions for the study of child language behavior. It also claims that there has been a widespread “lack of attention to transcription among developmental psychologists”. (p. 44)
The article presents a series of symbols and tables to transcribe verbal and nonverbal (inter)actions of children.
The author encourages selectivity: a transcript shouldn’t have too much information!
In my opinion, a very important statement made by the author is that “the transcript should reflect the particular interests […] of the researcher”.
Other important notes regard some features of adult-adult conversations, as opposed to young children interactions:
- Utterances as contingent.
- Each turn of the conversation as (usually) relevant to the previous turn.
The author suggests that a different system of transcription should be used for child-child and adult-child interactions.
She also discusses a series of “transcription biases” (top to bottom and left to right). For example, in an adult-child interaction she decides to place the adult in the right column, to counter-balance the left to right bias.
The article stresses the importance of nonverbal interactions (eye gaze, gesture, action) in the analysis of the behavior of children.
Through the whole article, it is clear that the author is exploring a new ground. It almost looks like (which I don’t consider a negative point) she is constructing her model/proposal together with the reader.
Yes, I think this is one of the very earliest, if not the earliest article to talk in this way about transcribing.
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