University of Duisburg/Essen

Child-directed speech.
Modifications in linguistic input
to children and their possible functions

by

Philipp Rott

Table of Contents

I. Introduction 1

II. Some Remarks on Terminology 2

III. Grammatical Aspects of Child-Directed Speech 7

III.1. Phonetic and Prosodic Aspects of Child-Directed Speech 7

III.1.1. Phonetics of Child-Directed Speech 8

III.1.1.1. Principles of Phonological Modification 9
III.1.1.2. Functions of the Phonetic Features 10

III.1.2. Prosodic Features in Child-Directed Speech 11

III.1.2.1. Principles of Prosody in Child-Directed Speech 12
III.1.2.2. Functions of Prosodic Features 13

III.2. Lexical Components of Child-Directed Speech 16

III.2.1. Principles of Word Use in Child-Directed Speech 18
III.2.2. Functions of Lexical Components in Child-Directed Speech 20

III.3. Syntactic Aspects of Child-Directed Speech 21

III.3.1. Simple and Complex Syntactic Strucures in Child-Directed Speech 22
III.3.2. Redundancy Features 24

IV. Non-Verbal and Pragmatic Aspects in Interaction with Language-Learning Children 25

IV.1. Context in Early Interaction 26
IV.2. Conversational Aspects in Early Interaction 28
IV.3. Non-Verbal Signs in Early Interaction: Gestures, Smiles and Gaze-Coupling 29
IV.4. Concluding Remarks on Non-Verbal and Pragmatic Aspects 31

V. Conclusion 32

VI. Bibliography 33

I. Introduction

Anyone who has seen and heard a child speak his/her first words and who has noticed how much language determines the progress of a child in becoming independent of his/her parents and in mastering interaction with others must have wondered why it is that children can fulfil such an obviously complex task in such a surprisingly little time with seemingly little effort. It appears almost impossible that the child can achieve so much all by himself/herself. Thus, quite frequently, people consider the linguistic input that is available to the child as a crucial factor for the child′s language acquisition: "It is no wonder that he has learned to speak so fast, with so many people around speaking to him and showing him how to speak!" is an utterance I heard quite often when my son was at the age when he started producing his first words. But did I really help him to learn language? Of course, I noticed my own speech modifications as well as that of other people when conversing with him. But does this special register, which nearly everyone (at least in our western culture) seems to adapt when adressing children, really make a difference? Do we even teach our children to speak? I will not attempt to answer these questions in the present paper, as much more research is needed in this area. However, I want to give an overview on the different features of the language used when adressing children. It will be shown on which principles of modification these features are based and which functions they might serve for the child. Moreover, it will be argued that some features of the speech to children may possibly facilitate language acquisition, but that the language used to them is not necessarily simplified language.

II. Some Remarks on Terminology

Before examining the different features of the language that is used when talking to a child, one has to consider a much more basic, yet in my view elementary problem: What exactly are we talking about when we speak of Motherese as compared to other terms used to label this register? What differences - if any - are there between Motherese, Baby Talk, Child-Directed Speech or Caregiver Talk. Do all these terms imply the same concept? When having a look at the literature, one might even get the impression that the labelling of the phenomenon seems to be merely a question of taste. It may seem pedantic to insist on a clear and reasonably defined terminology; but, due to the amount of labels which all seem to designate the same phenomenon - though they actually do not, as will be shown -, any analysis of this register which does not consider the various terms and their use in psycholinguistic literature and which does not give a clear definition of its subject matter is bound to fail in that its results will remain vague. When linguists became interested in the nature of linguistic input to young children in the 1960s, the common term to describe this special kind of input was Baby Talk. This term is nowadays often felt to carry "adverse connotations of triviality" and, thus, is considered inadequate to signify an input which is said to serve a "very positive purpose" (Cattell, 2000: 104). Nevertheless, the reason for choosing this term may become clear when one considers the circumstances of its emergence: it was not designed to describe a closely-analysed register of one language, but rather a newly discovered sociolinguistic phenomenon, which seemed to occur in several languages: "Anthropological linguists and fieldworkers were publishing papers in the 1950s and 1960s about the phenomenon of ′Baby Talk′ as a special register of the languages they had studied. They documented Baby Talk primarily as an interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon, but often reported as well the local beliefs that it aided children in learning to talk."(Snow, 1994: 3)

Thus, the term Baby Talk was not coined by psycholinguists who were interested in research on linguistic input to children learning a first language, but by sociolinguists or anthropological linguists gathering information about the different registers in a language. What they found out was that people change their way of speaking when adressing a baby or a child, and consequently they called this register Baby Talk. Of course, one may argue that the term is ambiguous in that it might refer to adults adressing babies, but also to the special kind of ungrammatical and phonologically reduced speech of little toddlers. (cf. Crystal, 1992: 37) The Oxford Companion to the English Language even gives this meaning of the term as first choice. Baby Talk is described as the "kinds of speech used by small children. (…) In the utterances of young children there is little grammar, vocabulary is idiosyncratic, and pronunciation immature (…)". (MacArthur, 1992: 101) One example of the two-fold use of the term Baby Talk to refer to both of these at least conceptually different registers at a time - without explicitly calling attention to the ambiguity of the term - can be found in Crain & Lillo-Martin (1999). While they use the term to describe how "(…) toddlers or young children (…) speak in only simple sentences, and use incorrect grammar (…)" (p. 5), only some pages later do they state that adults "(…) talk differently to children than to other adults, using what is sometimes called ′Motherese,′ [sic] or ′baby-talk′." (p. 14) In fact, Clark & Clark (1977) use the term with yet another meaning. They refer to only one specific feature of adult talk to young children as Baby Talk, namely to the "(…) ′baby talk′ words that are considered appropriate in talking to very young children. For example, adult speakers of English often replace the words for animals by words for their sounds - miaow, woof-woof - or by a diminutive form of the adult word - kitty, doggie. (…)" (p. 322) I

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