Abstract
ABSTRACTThis study demonstrates a striking absence of variability in the speech which mothers address to children of the same age within the 1- to 5-year range. Speech to children of 1; 0, 1; 8, 2; 3 and 5; 0 years was analysed for aspects of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse structure. Discriminant function analyses showed that the age of the child to whom a mother was speaking could be predicted very accurately from her speech. The rate at which mothers' speech changed was greatest when the children were 1; 8–2; 3, and least when they were 2; 3–5; 0. These trends in the evolution of the maternal speech register are interpreted as responses to concurrent changes in children's language behaviour.
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