Parental Responses to Grammatical and Ungrammatical Child Utterances

Abstract

A descriptive study of the distribution of parental response types across grammatically correct and incorrect child utterances was done to examine the possibility that parents respond differentially to grammatical and ungrammatical child utterances. Free-play interactions of 2 subject groups, each containing 10 parents and their language-learning children (Group 1: MLU between 2 and 2.5; Group 2: MLU between 3 and 3.5), were analyzed. Frequencies of 6 parental response types following correct and incorrect child utterances were compared. Results showed differences in distribution of several of the parental response types, depending on the grammaticality of preceding child utterances. These differences were larger for Group 1. The largest distributional differences occurred for 2 parental response types--expansions and topic extensions. Parents expanded ungrammatical utterances more frequently than grammatical utterances and extended the topic more frequently after grammatical than ungrammatical utterances. Implications of these results for child language learning are discussed.