Parental Speech Research Articles

Parents' speech to toddlers: the effect of play context.

ABSTRACTThe language of mothers and fathers to their toddler sons and daughters at play with three different types of toy was analysed for both sentence types and structural elements. Two of the play contexts, dolls and vehicles, were highly sex-role stereotyped, and the third, shape sorters, was neutral. Few differences in speech were found as a function of either parent or child gender. Each of the three play contexts, however, elicited its own language pattern. With dolls, parental speech was characterized by a relatively large amount of language and a frequent use of questions and nouns, especially by contrast with vehicle play, which involved little language. Play with shape sorters elicited a high proportion of directives and attentionals and a relatively low variety in language. These results suggest that children who play frequently with dolls may receive more opportunities to learn and practise language than do children who select other toys for play. In this way early toy preferences may contribute to differential socialization by parents.

A cross-cultural study of parental speech to infants

A cross-cultural study of parental speech to infants

Didactic adjustments in parental speech to three-month-old infants: Age-specificity, and universality across sex of parent

Didactic adjustments in parental speech to three-month-old infants: Age-specificity, and universality across sex of parent

Conversation and Cooperation: Child Linguistic Maturity, Parental Speech, and Helping Behavior of Young Children

LAWRENCE, BARBARA M. Conversation and Cooperation: Child Linguistic Maturity, Parental Speech, and Helping Behavior of Young Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1926-1935. The relationship between parental communicative behaviors, child linguistic maturity, and children's cooperative behavior was examined in a study of 60 children (20 each at approximately 18, 24, and 30 months of age) and their parents in a laboratory setting. Significant relationships were found between linguistic maturity of the children, the speech of the parents, and the children's helping behavior. Child mean length of utterance (MLU) was a better predictor of cooperative behavior than child age. No comparable relationships were found for parents' nonverbal behaviors. The results support a hypothesis of verbal mediation of this social behavior.

Conversation and Cooperation: Child Linguistic Maturity, Parental Speech, and Helping Behavior of Young Children

Conversation and Cooperation: Child Linguistic Maturity, Parental Speech, and Helping Behavior of Young Children

Parental speech to language delayed children: a home intervention study.

AbstractThe study aimed to change a mother's verbal interaction with her language delayed twin boys in order to improve the language model which she provided. A single subject research design was used to evaluate the effects of treatment in which mother played language games with one of the twins. Home observations were conducted in which all of the twins' utterances were recorded and the mother's verbal behaviour was coded. Results showed that mother substantially increased her level of verbal interaction with the twins and also increased the proportion of her statements and questions relative to demands. In addition, the twins increased the number and length of their utterances in response to treatment. Further, the changes in both mother's and the twins' verbal behaviour generalized to extra‐treatment settings.

Parental Speech Modification to Young Children

Summary The present study compared the speech of fathers and mothers to their young daughters in the age ranges of 19 to 29 months and 32 to 43 months. Verbatim transcripts of audio tape recordings of the verbal interactions of 20 father-daughter dyads and 20 mother-daughter dyads engaged in free play in the family home revealed the degree of parental speech modification to be a function of the age of the child. Both fathers and mothers adjusted certain aspects of their speech relative to child age and displayed very similar patterns of speech adjustment.

Swings and roundabouts in parental speech: the effect of repetition and referent location on word intelligibility

Swings and roundabouts in parental speech: the effect of repetition and referent location on word intelligibility

Changing the Speech of Autistic Children and Their Parents

The parents of nine autistic preschool children were trained in behavior modification and operant techniques of teaching speech. The study used a multiple baseline design with Group 1 completing behavior modification training while Group 2 remained on the waiting list. Then, Group 1 entered speech training while Group 2 began behavior modification. Finally, Group 2 received speech training. Videotape assessments of parents and child were made pretreatment and after each stage of training. The tapes were coded reliably for the parents' speech oriented and non-speech oriented language and the childrens' speech and non-speech behaviors. There was no change in parental speech oriented language following behavior modification but a substantial rise in such language was noted after speech training. Both mothers and fathers changed after training, although mothers were consistently more active than fathers. Both before and after training, the parents of the more verbal children emitted more speech oriented langu...

Syntactic and conversational characteristics of fathers' speech

The verbal interactions of 16 fathers and 16 mothers with their 2-year-olds were assessed during free play. On the basis of the amount of time the father spent with his child weekly, fathers were divided into two groups, those spending a high proportion of time and those spending a low proportion of time. Each parent's speech was coded for a number of syntactic and conversational features. No differences were found between fathers and mothers in the use of these features. Furthermore, the results suggest that the amount of time fathers spend with their children does not dramatically affect the syntactic or conversational features of their speech, since the two groups of fathers did not differ for these features.

Two's Company, Three Makes a Difference: An Examination of Mothers' and Fathers' Speech to Their Young Children

STONEMAN, ZOLINDA, and BRODY, GENE H. Two's Company, Three Makes a Difference: An Examination of Mothers' and Fathers' Speech to Their Young Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 705-707. The present study examined how conversations between parents and offspring change as a function of the number of family members interacting. The verbal interactions between 18 2-year-old children and their mothers and fathers were audiorecorded during 2 dyadic sessions, 1 with each of the parents alone with the child, and 1 triadic session, in which all 3 family members participated. The results revealed that parental speech to their young children is influenced by the gender of their offspring and the number of family members interacting in the situation. Children, on the other hand, displayed little variation across the family situations. These results were discussed in terms of the roles which mothers and fathers occupy within the family system.

Parental Speech to Five-Year-Old Children in a Game-playing Situation

Parental Speech to Five-Year-Old Children in a Game-playing Situation

Parental Speech to Five-Year-Old Children in a Game-Playing Situation

Children in a Game-playing Situation. CmLw DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 580-582. The speech of fathers and mothers was studied as they played a table game with 5-year-old sons or daughters. Analysis of the data revealed that fathers used more directly controlling language with their children than did mothers, whereas mothers preferred indirectly to directly controlling language. There were also consistent patterns suggesting that the interaction in like-sex (father-son, mother-daughter) dyads was different from that in cross-sex (father-daughter, mother-son) dyads. Parents used more complex language with cross-sex children, whereas they seemed to initiate play sooner and finished sooner with like-sex children. These findings were seen to underscore the need to look at likeand cross-sex dynamics in studies of linguistic input to children.

Observations on the role of logically constrained sentences in the comprehension of 'before' and 'after'.

ABSTRACTSentences were constructed in which the terms before and after were embedded in logically constrained and logically reversible sequences. As in French & Brown (1977), pre-school children found the constrained sentences easier to comprehend. These findings add a new dimension to Clark's (1971) original before and after study in which the effect of logically constrained sentences was not considered. The results of the two studies are consistent with a growing literature (including current formulations of semantic feature theory) which implicates contextual cues and child strategies in the comprehension process, and raises questions about the role of parental speech in the child's comprehension of temporal terms.

A pragmatic analysis of spontaneous imitations

ABSTRACTChildren's imitations were analysed as a function of parental speech acts for six children in early Stage I of language acquisition. The relative frequency with which children imitated mothers reflected the relative frequency with which mothers imitated children (Spearman rank correlation = 0·77). Although parents' imitative expansions could all be categorized as having primary speech act functions (e.g. request for information) from the parents' point of view, expansions constituted a separate class of speech events in terms of children's responses. The children imitated imitations far more frequently than non-imitative speech acts in the same category. These findings suggest that individual differences in children's propensity to imitate may arise from the degree to which parents provide a model of imitation as a speech act.

Prosodic, paralinguistic, and interactional features in parent-child speech: English and Spanish

ABSTRACTParents employ a special register when speaking to young children, containing features that mark it as appropriate for children who are beginning to acquire their language. Parental speech in English to 5 children (ages 0; 9–1; 6) and in Spanish to 4 children (ages 0; 8–1; 1 and 1; 6–1; 10) was analysed for the presence and distribution of these features. Thirty-four paralinguistic, prosodic, and interactional features were identified, and rate measures and proportions indicated developmental patterns and differences across languages. Younger children received a higher rate of features that marked affect; older children were addressed with more features that marked semantically meaningful speech. English-speaking parents relied comparatively more on paralinguistic and affective features, whereas Spanish-speaking parents used comparatively more interactional features. Despite these differences, there was a high degree of similarity across parents and languages for the most frequently occurring features.

Interrogative types in parental speech to language-learning children: A linguistic universal?

The present study investigated the frequency of occurrence of various interrogative types in the language of American mothers (English) and Israeli mothers (Hebrew) to their 24-month-old language-learning children. It was found that both groups of mothers produced a similar hierarchy of the various wh-questions. The relation between these specific wh-questions and concept development in the child is discussed. It was also found that American mothers produced significantly more questions that required the child to respond with a yes-no answer, while Israeli mothers produced significantly more wh-questions which placed the cognitive burden of the verbal interaction on the child.

A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech

Speech samples were taken from 21 children aged 16-40 months covering a wide range of mean utterance length. Presence or absence of 14 grammatical morphemes in linguistic and nonlinguistic obligatory contexts was scored. Order of acquisition of the morphemes was determined using two different criteria. The rank-orderings obtained correlated very highly with a previously determined order of acquisition for three children studied longitudinally. Age did not add to the predictiveness of mean length of utterance alone for grammatical development in terms of which morphemes were correctly used. The approximately invariant order of acquisition for the fourteen morphemes is discussed in terms of three possible determinants of this order. Frequency of use in parental speech showed no correlation with order of acquisition, but grammatical and semantic complexity both correlated highly with acquisition order.

Spectral Analysis of Fluctuations in Sound Energy in Certain Insects and Humans

Power density spectra of the fluctuations in sound energy are presented in stridulations emitted by Pterophylla Camellifolia. The original emplitude recording, used for the computation of power spectra, reveals a characteristic temporal pause-stridulation-pause pattern possibly related to the insect's available metabolic energy. It is suggested that power spectra be used not only for insect identification and philogenetic characterization, but also to define normal as well as pathological speech patterns including the tracing of possible genetic involvement of speech defects by analysis of the speech of siblings and parents of probands.

On the Formation of the Indo-European Demonstrative

1. In spite of the common practice of speaking of 'pronominal inflection' in explaining the origin of certain case endings in various Indo-European languages, and, in particular, when discussing the declension of adjectives in Germanic, it is generally recognized that the inflection of the pronoun, of all the categories of forms with which we have to deal in Indo-European grammar, is the most disparate and least tractable to reconstruction by the comparative method. It is indeed probable that there was no fixed pronominal declension in the parent speech-fixed, that is, to the same extent as the declension of the nouns. This too is generally recognized, especially in the instance of the personal pronouns of the first and second persons.l However, the same thing is only slightly less true of the demonstratives of the third person, and indeed of the demonstrative par excellence, Gk. ho, he, to, Skt. sa(s), sa, tad, Goth. sa, so, pata. The lack of agreement between the stems of the oblique cases of this pronoun in these three languages, especially between Greek on the one hand and Sanskrit or Gothic on the other, would seem to indicate clearly enough the striking lack of a settled inflection without need for further evidence-for example, the dative singular feminine, Gk. tii (<tdi), Skt. tasyai, Goth. pizai. The case endings, to be sure, are in agreement (and also with the fem. a-stem noun, for that matter), but the stem is t-/tosy-/tes-.2 Even within such a unified dialectal group as Germanic it is often impossible to reconstruct a Proto-Germanic form which will satisfy the testimony of the different historical forms, e.g. the dative singular masc. and neut. Goth. pamma with -mmbut OHG demu, OSax. themu with -m-; or OE psem, OIcel. ]eim with a diphthongal stem, PGmc. ai, vs. the simple e of the former. 2. The variety of stem formation and of case ending can of course to some extent be attributed to developments and reformations in the history of the several branches of Indo-European, but the result is the same as far as our reconstruction of the forms of the parent speech is concerned: we are eventually left with a few bare stems and recurring 'pronominal elements' attached to the stems, optionally it would appear, and a few case endings actually characteristic of the pronoun as opposed to the noun. 3. Significant for the prehistory of the Indo-European demonstratives is the documented history of demonstratives in modern languages. It is well known that by use a demonstrative tends to become weaker and weaker in its deictic force, and is therefore continually reinforced by being compounded with itself or with other demonstratives or with adverbs. These compounds furnish the