‘Replying’ to mothers' questions: A way to lexical acquisition

Abstract

A longitudinal study of six children between 11 an 17 months, growing up in a Hebrew-speaking environment, shows that children's ‘replies’ to mothers' questions consist at first of partial or complete reproductions of lexical items of the mothers' previous ‘turns’ and only later of non-imitative, clearly semantic replies. With increasing age, children reply to an increasing proportion of question-containing turns. Mothers sometimes provide the answer to their own question within the same turn. Children's replies reproducing lexical items contained in the answer part of the mothers' turns are considered transitional between clearly imitative and clearly semantic replies. The proportion of question-cum-answer turns followed by ‘transitional’ replies increases also with age. Mothers utter more of those kinds of question that children reply to more, namely, efo ‘where’, ma ‘what’ and yes/no questions. Qualitative and quantitative changes in the children's replies indicate progressive conventionalization of the children's repertoire, at first sonoric and then semantic. Conventionalization is considered to result from the coordination of the child's conversational and imitative abilities. When the child's functioning bears on question-cum-answers turns, a new result is likely to supervene leading the child to further conversational and language-specific proficiency.