Parental Speech Research Articles

Language input and child syntax

Existing work on the acquisition of syntax has been concerned mainly with the early stages of syntactic development. In the present study we examine later syntactic development in children. Also, existing work has focused on commonalities in the emergence of syntax. Here we explore individual differences among children and their relation to variations in language input. In Study 1 we find substantial individual differences in children’s mastery of multiclause sentences and a significant relation between those differences and the proportion of multiclause sentences in parent speech. We also find individual differences in the number of noun phrases in children’s utterances and a significant relation between those differences and the number of noun phrases in parent speech. In Study 2 we find greater syntactic growth over a year of preschool in classes where teachers’ speech is more syntactically complex. The implications of our findings for the understanding of the sources of syntactic development are discussed.

Counting nouns and verbs in the input: differential frequencies, different kinds of learning?

Previous research has focused on evaluating the nouns and verbs in parents' input through type/token ratios. This research offers an additional means of evaluating parent speech by first examining the frequencies of individual nouns, verbs and descriptors and second examining the learning task presented to children. Study 1 examines 25 transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels ranging from 0;11 to 2;11 in age. Study 2 examines 50 transcripts from the CHILDES database of Mandarin-speaking caregivers' speech to children ranging from 1;9 to 2;3 in age. The results suggest that the patterns of frequency for individual nouns and individual verbs are different, but that the frequency patterns for nouns and the frequency patterns for verbs are similar in English and Mandarin. Further, this research suggests that in both languages the nouns in parents' input are similarly organized: the most frequent nouns spoken to children tend to name solid objects that share a similar shape. In contrast verbs' meanings in both languages tend to include more variable conceptual relations.

Child and parent speech and language following the Lidcombe Programme of early stuttering intervention

The Lidcombe Programme of early stuttering intervention incorporates operant methods, and outcome data indicate that the procedure is an effective treatment. However, the mechanism or mechanisms responsible for the effects of this treatment remain unknown. One possible mechanism could involve untargeted change to parameters of parent and child speech during the intervention. In this preliminary report, speech samples from nine children were studied before and after treatment. The purpose was to target independent variables for future research. In spite of clear reductions in disfluency and stuttering in the children, there were no corresponding changes in child or parent speech rate, interspeaker turn latencies, or pragmatic functioning, that might account for such treatment effects. In fact, data suggested changes that would not be theoretically predicted to be associated with reductions in disfluent and stuttered speech: Maternal speech rate increased in post-treatment speech samples and the mothers decreased the proportion of their utterances that contained a request for information. However, some children's language measures did not meet developmental expectations during the period of study. Nonetheless, all children's language measures were within or above developmental expectancies during the period of study, which ruled out the possibility that this treatment induces extensive curtailment of language functioning.

Communication disturbances and family psychiatric history in parents of schizophrenic patients.

Parents of schizophrenic patients have demonstrated subtle disturbances of thought, language, and communication. The etiologic relevance of these disturbances is not clear. This study assessed levels of referential communication disturbance in the "natural speech" of schizophrenic patients, nonschizophrenic parents of patients, and control subjects matched to the patients' parents and tested for associations of communication disturbances in parents with family history of psychosis and with schizotypy scale scores. The speech of the patients' parents as a group contained high frequencies of referential failures. Those parents with first-degree family histories of psychosis and/or high schizotypy scale scores made more frequent referential failures than the rest of the parents. Family history was particularly highly associated with failures involving language structural breakdown. The results of this study suggest that referential disturbances in parents of patients may be related to genetic liability in the parents. However, such an effect does not appear to account fully for the sizable differences between parents and controls in levels of communication disturbance.

Context dependency in parental speech

Twelve children, six girls and six boys, were videotaped at two ages: first at a mean age of 11:16 months, second at a mean age of 15:16 months, with a parent in their home while having a meal with a spoon (non‐play situation) and feeding a doll with a spoon (play situation). It was found that parents reliably differentiated between play and non‐play situations by using interaction and instruction frames, respectively. A discriminant function analysis of the relative frequency of seven speech acts used within each frame resulted in the correct classification of 60.42 per cent of the children. These findings are discussed in the light of theories of children's learning in context (Snow, Perlmann & Nathan, 1987), specifically their learning about pretend and real situations (Harris & Kavanaugh, 1993).

Pragmatics of Self‐ and Other‐Reference in Young Children

During the first years of life, children come to understand and talk about a self separate from others. This study examined self‐ and other‐reference and communicative intents expressed by children and parents in dyadic interaction at 14, 20 and 32 months. Research questions included whether children's early use of self‐ and other‐reference pronouns occurred for expression of particular communicative intents, how use changed with age, and whether parent and child pragmatic expressions of self and other were similar. Results showed that children's early explicit reference to self tended to take the form of I rather than me/my/mine, and was used primarily in making statements about their intended actions, in making requests or proposals to their parents and in stating propositions about the world around them. Children during this developmental period were only beginning to refer to the present other with the pronoun you and these instances occurred primarily in making requests or proposals. Despite age‐related increases in pronominal forms and intents, a small set of intents continued to provide the context for most self‐ and other‐reference pronouns. In the communicative contexts in which they explicitly refer to self and other, children did not appear to exclusively mirror those which were observed in parental speech.

Parental Discourse and Codemixing in Bilingual Children

Various explanations for young bilingual children's codemixing have been offered, including that it is influenced by the particular discourse strategies parents use in conversation with their children. To date, Lanza (1992) has proposed the most explicit version of this hypothesis. She suggested that certain parental speech acts in response to children's codemixing encourage continued codemixing while others discourage it. The present study was undertaken to replicate Lanza's study. Five French-English bilingual families in Montreal were studied, starting when most of the children were 2;0 and continuing until they were 2;6. Two analyses were performed; one looked at the relationship between parental style of response and children's rates of codemixing and the second looked at the effect of particular responses on children's codemixing in the next conversational turn. The results of both analyses did not support the hypothesis. We suggest that the differences in sociolinguistic context between the two studies may account for the different results.

Affective reactivity of speech in schizophrenia patients and their nonschizophrenic relatives.

This study compared levels of referential communication disturbance in speech samples from 41 stable schizophrenia outpatients, 46 parents of patients, and 23 nonpsychiatric control participants in affectively positive versus affectively negative conditions. The speech of the patients and parents showed elevated frequencies of reference failures in the affectively positive condition compared with control participants: the speech of the patients became more disordered in the affectively negative condition, whereas the speech of the parents did not. These results support the idea that referential communication disturbances reflect vulnerability, as well as overt illness, but that affective reactivity of these disturbances is associated mainly with the manifest illness. These findings are consistent with biological, cognitive, and psychological theories about the processes underlying stress responsiveness of schizophrenic symptoms more generally.

Communication disturbances in the natural speech of schizophrenic patients and non-schizophrenic parents of patients.

Subclinical communication disturbances in the relatives of schizophrenic patients appear to be heterogeneous in both form and origin. The Communication Disturbances Index (CDI) was applied to the natural speech of stable schizophrenic out patients, non-schizophrenic parents of patients, and control subjects. The parents of schizophrenic patients displayed more frequent overall instances of communication failure in their speech than the controls. The specific types of disturbance that were more frequent were structural lack of clarity, vague references and ambiguous word meanings. The parents did not differ significantly from the patients with regard to total CDI ratings. However, patients made more frequent missing-information references than parents, and parents made more frequent vague references than patients. High CDI scores in parents were associated with more severe lifetime core positive symptoms in their patient offspring.

Parental speech to middle- and working-class children from two racial groups in three settings

ABSTRACTThe speech of 9 middle-class black, 9 middle-class white, 9 working-class black, and 9 workingclass white parents to their preschool children was examined during picture identification, free play, and a meal. The groups were found to be similar in the level and form of parental labeling. The groups differed in the information the parents supplied about objects in the various settings, in the parent's direction of the child's behavior, and in parental sensitivity to the child's age. Within the working-class groups, the frequency of vernacular features in the parents' speech correlated with the quality of information they provided.

Parental speech to SLI children and their younger siblings

ABSTRACT The purpose of this investigation was to compare the nature and frequency of parental recasts (both mothers and fathers) to specific language impaired children (SLI) with that to normal language learning children of the same language stage. The comparisons were made within the framework of discourse function to include conversational contingency and conversational breakdown. In addition, the present investigation examined a natural but infrequently occurring situation where a family has both an SLI child and normal younger siblings of the same language stage. It was found that SLI children at the early stages of development (Stage I/early Stage II) experience a simple recast gap in their linguistic input. Furthermore, it was found that the conversational functional context in which simple recasts occurred for SLI children was also different. Further qualitative analysis revealed a preponderance of New Noun‐Phrase Informational Simple Recasts used with SLI children as opposed to New Verb‐Phrase Information Simple Recasts. These results and their implications are discussed within the context of similarities and differences between mothers versus fathers and SLI children versus normal language learning children.

A local contingency analysis of the fine-tuning hypothesis.

A central question in the study of language development is whether the speech of parents is finetuned to their children's language level. This question was addressed through a local contingency analysis that examined the relationship between adjacent child utterances and parental responses. This analysis was applied to 3 longitudinal corpora from the Child Language Data Exchange System (B. MacWhinney, 1991): Adam (2-5 years old; 65,336 utterances), Sarah (2-5 years old; 64,346 utterances), and Abe (2-5 years old; 40,656 utterances) for 3 different lexical classes (modal auxiliaries, pronouns, and nouns). Results provide support for a developmentally sensitive version of the fine-tuning hypothesis. A contingent relationship in the interactional patterns of parents and their children that changed as a function of lexical class and child age was discovered

Negative evidence in language acquisition

Whether children require “negative evidence” (i.e., information about which strings of words are not grammatical sentences) to eliminate their ungrammatical utterances is a central question in language acquisition because, lacking negative evidence, a child would require internal mechanisms to unlearn grammatical errors. Several recent studies argue that parents provide noisy feedback, that is, certain discourse patterns that differ in frequency depending on the grammaticality of children's utterances. However, no one has explicitly discussed how children could use noisy feedback, and I show that noisy feedback is unlikely to be necessary for language learning because (a) if noisy feedback exists it is too weak: a child would have to repeat a given sentence verbatim at least 85 times to decide with reasonable certainty that it is ungrammatical; (b) no kind of noisy feedback is provided to all children at all ages for all types of errors; and (c) noisy feedback may be an artifact of defining parental reply categories relative to the child's utterance. For example, because nearly all parental speech is grammatical, exact repetitions (verbatim repetitions of child utterances) necessarily follow more of children's grammatical utterances than their ungrammatical utterances. There is no evidence that noisy feedback is required for language learning, or even that noisy feedback exists. Thus internal mechanisms are necessary to account for the unlearning of ungrammatical utterances.

Overregularization in Language Acquisition

Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, resulting in overregularizations like comed, often after a period of correct performance ("U-shaped development"). The errors seem paradigmatic of rule use, hence bear on central issues in the psychology of rules: how creative rule application interacts with memorized exceptions in development, how overgeneral rules are unlearned in the absence of parental feedback, and whether cognitive processes involve explicit rules or parallel distributed processing (connectionist) networks. We remedy the lack of quantitative data on overregularization by analyzing 11,521 irregular past tense utterances in the spontaneous speech of 83 children. Our findings are as follows. (1) Overregularization errors are relatively rare (median 2.5% of irregular past tense forms), suggesting that there is no qualitative defect in children's grammars that must be unlearned. (2) Overregularization occurs at a roughly constant low rate from the 2s into the school-age years, affecting most irregular verbs. (3) Although overregularization errors never predominate, one aspect of their purported U-shaped development was confirmed quantitatively: an extended period of correct performance precedes the first error. (4) Overregularization does not correlate with increases in the number or proportion of regular verbs in parental speech, children's speech, or children's vocabularies. Thus, the traditional account in which memory operates before rules cannot be replaced by a connectionist alternative in which a single network displays rotelike or rulelike behavior in response to changes in input statistics. (5) Overregularizations first appear when children begin to mark regular verbs for tense reliably (i.e., when they stop saying Yesterday I walk). (6) The more often a parent uses an irregular form, the less often the child overregularizes it. (7) Verbs are protected from overregularization by similar-sounding irregulars, but they are not attracted to overregularization by similar-sounding regulars, suggesting that irregular patterns are stored in an associative memory with connectionist properties, but that regulars are not. We propose a simple explanation. Children, like adults, mark tense using memory (for irregulars) and an affixation rule that can generate a regular past tense form for any verb. Retrieval of an irregular blocks the rule, but children's memory traces are not strong enough to guarantee perfect retrieval. When retrieval fails, the rule is applied, and overregularization results.

Reflections of the Environment in Memory

Availability of human memories for specific items shows reliable relationships to frequency, recency, and pattern of prior exposures to the item. These relationships have defied a systematic theoretical treatment. A number of environmental sources ( New York Times, parental speech, electronic mail) are examined to show that the probability that a memory will be needed also shows reliable relationships to frequency, recency, and pattern of prior exposures. Moreover, the environmental relationships are the same as the memory relationships. It is argued that human memory has the form it does because it is adapted to these environmental relationships. Models for both the environment and human memory are described. Among the memory phenomena addressed are the practice function, the retention function, the effect of spacing of practice, and the relationship between degree of practice and retention.

Phonological information for grammatical category assignments

During language acquisition, children must learn how to classify words into the appropriate grammatical category, such as noun or verb. Adults must also assign words to grammatical categories quickly and accurately. Most theories of this task focus on strategies that exploit semantic and/or syntactic correlates of grammatical class. This paper examines a relatively neglected source of information for grammatical category: phonology. Study one demonstrates that English verbs contain fewer syllables than English nouns, a difference that appears strongly in both adult-adult language and parental speech to children. Studies three and four provide evidence that adults and children are sensitive to this difference. Study three reports that adults use pseudowords more often in sentences as verbs if their syllable number is small, whereas they use pseudowords as nouns more often if their syllable number is large. Study four reports that 4-year old children associate pseudowords with actions (the prototypical verb meaning) more often than objects (the prototypical noun meaning) if the pseudowords contain one rather than three syllables. The relevance of the noun-verb syllable difference for connectionist models of linguistic knowledge is discussed. In addition, possible causes of the syllable number difference between nouns and verbs are proposed and evaluated in study two.

Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender.

This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substantial relation between individual differences in vocabulary acquisition and variations in the amount that particular mothers speak to their children. The relation between amount of parent speech and vocabulary growth, we argue, reflects parent effects on the child, rather than child-ability effects on the parent or hereditary factors. We also find that gender is an important factor in rate of vocabulary growth. Early childhood is a period of rapid linguistic development. By 2 years, the average child acquires 900 root words (cf. Carey, 1978) and at least a rudimentary syntax (cf. Brown, 1973). Although there has been considerable recent interest in syntactic development, much less attention has been devoted to lexical development. Yet in tracing the development of language from its inception, lexical development must necessarily be a focus of study because the acquisition of words constitutes the child's initial achievement as a language user. A certain amount of vocabulary must be acquired before words can be combined into sentences, and, indeed, several months elapse between the time children start to produce words and the time they start to produce multiword utterances. In addition, vocabulary and syntax are not independent aspects of language knowledge; for example, verbs frequently encode actions involving relations among entities (e.g., give, feed) which are specified by the verb together with its arguments. A major concern in the recent work on syntactic development has been with the relative contributions of the child's innate preparedness for language versus language input. Yet the rapid growth of vocabulary in early childhood also is a manifestation of the human preparedness for language, and parallel questions arise concerning the relative contributions of capacity and input. Especially at the start of language learning, innate preparedness surely plays a role in acquiring word meanings because inferences about meanings are based on pairings of words with situations. As Quine (1969) has persuasively argued, the variety of aspects of a situation which might be encoded by a word is enormous. Because of this, Gleitman and Wanner (1982) point out, it seemscritical to posit innately available constraints on the possible meanings children entertain.

Infant responses to prototypical melodic contours in parental speech

Visual behavior in 4-month-olds was influenced by melodic patterns prototypic of “naturally approving” and “naturally disapproving” infant-directed speech, independent of linguistic and other contextual information. Approving contours elevated infant looking as compared to disapproving and control contours; disapproving contours inhibited infant looking. The data suggest that individual melodic prototypes may function as didactic caregiving messages for infants.

You don't touch lettuce with your fingers:: Parental politeness in family discourse

Family discourse is essentially polite, enacting its politeness in domain- and culturally specific ways. This study examines parental speech acts of control and metapragmatic comments, as issued from parents to children around the dinnertable in middle-class Israeli, American and American immigrant families. The prevailing style of parental control is both highly direct and richly mitigated. Three key notions combine to set the tone of family politeness: power, informality and affect. Asymmetrical power relations between parents and children license the high level of directness, and the level of informality expected in the family explains its non-offensiveness. The importance of affect is revealed by the salience of linguistic devices indexing positive affect. Yet in addition to the domain-specificity of the system, culture plays an equally important role. Culturally varied perceptions of children's face needs are reflected in differential styles, with Israeli parents drawing heavily on the emotively colored language of mitigation and nicknaming, and American parents paying homage to the child's independence by adherence to first names and the use of conventional forms. The groups differ further in aspects of pragmatic socialization emphasized, as shown by types of metapragmatic comments used. All parents attend to socializing children towards adherence to Gricean norms of conversation, but while American parents explicitly teach rules of conversational management, Israeli parents worry instead about correct language use. Three general implications are drawn for a general theory of politeness. First, there is a need to incorporate the hitherto neglected dimension of speech-events as a determinant factor in evaluating politeness values. Second, the relative importance granted different strategic dimensions in indexing politeness should be reassessed. For directives, mitigation should be considered on a par with choices on a directness continuum. Third, it is suggested that the scope of pragmatic phenomena studied for politeness move beyond specific speech acts to incorporate wider discourse phenomena, such as discourse management.

Didactic adjustments in fathers' and mothers' speech to their 3-month-old infants

Vocal dialogues of 3-month-old infants with their mothers and fathers were recorded during dyadic interactions in the laboratory. Six-minute speech samples were analyzed for syntacticlexical and temporal-melodic features. Both parents adopted strikingly similar speech registers. Segmentation, reduction in syntactic complexity, repetitiveness, and slow tempo were more marked than reported for parental speech to children above 1 year. However, rather than providing proper linguistic models, parents utilized simplified patterns of expressive melodic contours as the most salient units of speech. This tendency is interpretable as age-specific adjustment to infants' integrative capacities. Structural similarities between maternal and paternal baby talk by far outweighed a few quantitative differences. The intuitive nature of recourse to basic nonverbal properties of vocal communication, together with universality across sex, favors the assumption that baby talk is a part of species-specific didactic support to infant communicative development.