Granboulan V, Chauvin D, Basquin M, Peltier C, Le Ny J F
Service de pédopsychiatrie, Centre hospitalier intercommunal de Créteil.
Psychiatr Enfant. 1995;38(2):655-91.
Clinicians and parents are familiar with the fact that adolescents have a special vocabulary, but very few studies have examined this. Linguists describe it as deeply metaphoric, creative and lively, thus showing that young people have a deep knowledge of language and truly experience pleasure using words. This contrasts with teachers' complaints about the little taste adolescents show for oral school activities and how poorly they express themselves. Some of them link this to the use of this polysemic and all purpose vocabulary. The context of locution is probably the explanation for these diverging opinions. Using this hypothesis, we have realised a quantitative study of the lexical variations depending on the person the adolescent is talking to in two groups (20 and 19 subjects), from very different social and educational backgrounds. Each teen-ager had to perform the same linguistic task: the description of a photograph on two occasions, once with an adult examiner and once with a friend. We studied the lexical differences between the two narratives. When adolescents are together they use their particular vocabulary four times more than when with an adult. But this qualitative difference is not a quantitative one, such as the length of the narrative or the number and repetition of whole words, and isn't correlated with the lexical stock. The use of this vocabulary runs across gender and social class categories. It can equally be found in high performance and upper class students as well as in underprivileged youngsters of technical schooling. It is the only variable that does not change between the two high schools. Thus this special vocabulary would not be connected to the subject's lexical competence, nor to gender or social background. It is the psychological function of this language that seems to be prominent.
临床医生和家长都熟知青少年有一套独特的词汇，但对此进行研究的却寥寥无几。语言学家将其描述为极具隐喻性、创造性且生动活泼，这表明年轻人对语言有深刻的理解，并能真正从用词中体验到乐趣。这与教师们抱怨青少年对学校口头活动缺乏兴趣以及他们表达能力欠佳形成了鲜明对比。有些人将此归因于这种多义且通用的词汇的使用。言语情境或许可以解释这些不同的观点。基于这一假设，我们对两组（分别为20名和19名受试者）来自截然不同社会和教育背景的青少年，根据其交谈对象进行了词汇变化的定量研究。每个青少年都要完成相同的语言任务：两次描述一张照片，一次是与成年考官，一次是与朋友。我们研究了两次叙述中的词汇差异。青少年在一起时使用他们独特词汇的频率是与成年人在一起时的四倍。但这种质的差异并非量的差异，比如叙述的长度或完整单词的数量及重复情况，且与词汇储备无关。这种词汇的使用跨越了性别和社会阶层类别。在成绩优异的上层阶级学生以及接受技术教育的贫困青少年中都能同样发现它。这是两所高中之间唯一不变的变量。因此，这种特殊词汇与受试者的词汇能力、性别或社会背景均无关联。这种语言的心理功能似乎才是突出的。
