Clarification and the child's learning of grammar

Abstract

The notion of clarification in language addressed to children was introduced by Ferguson, following a distinction made by Hockett between what he called frequency and clarity norms. The term is intended by Ferguson to be a descriptive label for some of the characteristics of motherese, but it has functional implications. If mothers ‘clarify’ their speech, particularly by slowing it down so that what is normally unstressed or reduced in speech becomes stressed or full, then relationships among grammatical items often obscured in fast speech may become apparent in a ‘clarified’ variety. This paper reviews work by Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman (NGG) which appears to indicate that there is a correlation between certain clarified forms in maternal speech — auxiliary-initial structures — and growth of auxiliaries in the child. Evidence is examined, from corpora available to the author, which bears on maternal use of auxiliaries in English, and the characteristics of auxiliary growth in children's language. We will consider types of auxiliaries and their phonetic realizations, in detail, in relation to three questions: (a) How ‘clarified’ are auxiliaries in input language? (b) How close is the relationship between mother's use of auxiliaries and their growth in the child? (c) To what extent is the child's use of auxiliaries based on what we might want to call syntactic generalizations?