[The adolescent's lexicon: study of lexical variations in normal adolescents depending upon the listener].

Abstract

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.