Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-04T04:23:27.208Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fine lexical tuning in infant directed speech to typically developing children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2020

Lotte ODIJK Open the ORCID record for Lotte ODIJK [Opens in a new window]  and
Steven GILLIS
Lotte ODIJK*
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics & Psycholinguistics (CLiPS) Research Center, Belgium
Steven GILLIS
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics & Psycholinguistics (CLiPS) Research Center, Belgium
*
Address for correspondence: Lotte Odijk, University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics (CLiPS) Research Center, Prinsstraat 13, 2000Antwerpen, Belgium Email: lotte.odijk@uantwerpen.be
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Do parents fine-tune the MLU of utterances with a particular word as the word is on the verge of appearing in the child's production? We analyzed a corpus of spontaneous interactions of 30 dyads. The children were in the initial stages of their lexical development, and the parents’ utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired were selected. The main finding is that the MLU of the parental utterances containing the target words gradually decreased up to the point of the children's first production of those words. This suggests that parents fine-tune their utterances to support the children's linguistic development.

Keywords

infant directed speechword acquisitionlanguage developmentmean length of utterance
Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , May 2021 , pp. 591 - 604
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnon, I., & Clark, E. V. (2011). Why ‘brush your teeth’ is better than ‘teeth’: children's word production is facilitated in familiar sentence-frames. Language Learning and Development, 7(2), 107–129. doi:10.1080/15475441.2010.505489CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i01CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benders, T. (2013). Mommy is only happy! Dutch mothers’ realisation of speechsounds in infant-directed speech expresses emotion, not didactic intent. Infant Behavior & Development, 36, 847–862. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2013.09.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benedict, H. (1979). Early lexical development: comprehension and production. Journal of Child Language, 6(2), 183–200. doi:10.1017/S0305000900002245CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bergelson, E., & Swingley, D. (2012). At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns. PNAS, 109(9), 3253–3258. doi:10.1073/pnas.1113380109CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brent, M. R., & Siskind, J. M. (2001). The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition, 81, B33-B44. doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(01)00122-6CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cooper, R., & Aslin, R. (1990). Preference for infant-directed speech in the first month after birth. Child Development, 61(5), 1584–1595. doi:10.2307/1130766CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fernald, A. (1992). Human maternal vocalisations to infants as biologically relevant signals: an evolutionary perspective. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 391–428). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fernald, A., Taeschner, T., Dunn, J., Papousek, M., De Boysson-Bardies, B., & Fukui, I. (1989). A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language, 16, 477–501. doi:10.1017/s0305000900010679CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fischer, C., & Tokura, H. (1996). Acoustic cues to grammatical structure in infant-directed speech: cross-linguistic evidence. Child Development, 67(6), 3192–3218. doi:10.2307/1131774CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genovese, G., Spinelli, M., Romero Lauro, L. J., Aureli, T., Castelletti, G., & Fasolo, M. (2020). Infant-directed speech as a simplified but not simple register: a longitudinal study of lexical and syntactic features. Journal of Child Language, 47, 22–44. doi:10.1017/S0305000919000643CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimm, R., Cassani, G., Gillis, S., & Daelemans, W. (2019). Children probably store short rather than frequent or predictable chunks: quantative evidence from a corpus study. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 80. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00080CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Brookes Publishing.Google Scholar
Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M., & Lyons, T. (1991). Early vocabulary growth: relation to language input and gender. Development Psychology, 27, 236–248. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.27.2.236CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kavanaugh, R. D., & Jirkovsky, A. M. (1982). Parental speech to young children: a longitudinal analysis. Merrill-Palner Quarterly, 28(2), 297–311.Google Scholar
Keren-Portnoy, T., Vihman, M., & Lindop Fisher, R. (2019). Do infants learn from isolated words? An ecological study. Language Learning and Development, 15(1), 47–63. doi:10.1080/15475441.2018.1503542CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ko, E. (2012). Nonlinear development of speaking rate in child-directed speech. Lingua, 122, 841–857. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.02.005CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah: Lawrence ErlbaumGoogle Scholar
Mattys, S., & Jusczyk, P. (2001). Do infants segment words or recurring contiguous patterns? Journal of Experimental Psychology, 27(3), 644–655. doi:10.1037//0096-1523.27.3.644Google ScholarPubMed
Molemans, I. (2011). Sounds like babbling. A longitudinal investigation of aspects of the prelexical speech repertoire in young children acquiring Dutch: normally hearing children and hearing-impaired children with a cochlear implant. (PhD), Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerpen.Google Scholar
Murray, A. D., Johnson, J., & Peters, J. (1990). Fine-tuning of utterance length to preverbal infants: effects on later language development. Journal of Child Language, 17, 511–525. doi:10.1017/s0305000900010862CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ninio, A. (2016). Learning transitive verbs from single-word verbs in the input by young children acquiring English. Journal of Child Language, 43(5), 1103–1130. doi:10.1017/S030500091500046XCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pan, B. A., Rowe, M. I., Singer, J. D., & Snow, C. E. (2005). Maternal correlates of growth in toddler vocabulary production in low-income families. Child Development, 76(4), 763–782. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00498-i1Google ScholarPubMed
Phillips, J. R. (1973). Syntax and vocabulary of mothers’ speech to young children: age and sex comparisons. Child Development, 44(1), 182–185. doi:10.2307/1127699CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team. (2018). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from https://www.R-project.org/Google Scholar
Roy, B. C., Frank, M., & Roy, D. (2009). Exploring word learning in a high-density longitudinal corpus. Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, July 29-August 1, 2009, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands.Google Scholar
Seidl, A., & Johnson, E. (2006). Infant word segmentation revisited: edge alignment facilitates target extraction. Developmental Science, 9(6), 565–573. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00534.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sherrod, K. B., Friedman, S., Crawley, S., Drake, D., & Devieux, J. (1977). Maternal language to prelinguistic infants: syntactic aspects. Child Development, 48, 1662–1665. doi:10.2307/1128531CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snow, C., & Ferguson, C. (Eds.). (1977). Talking to children: language input and acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Snow, C. E. (1977). The development of conversation between mothers and babies. Journal of Child Language, 4(1), 1–22. doi:10.1017/s0305000900000453CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soderstrom, M. (2007). Beyond babytalk: re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to preverbal infants. Developmental Review, 27, 501–532. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2007.06.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swingley, D., & Humphrey, . (2018). Quantitative linguistic predictors of infants’ learning of specific English words. Child Development, 89(4), 1247–1267. doi:10.1111/cdev.12731CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van den Berg, R. (2011). A longitudinal study of the development of syllable types in toddlers acquiring Dutch: a comparison between hearing impaired children with a cochlear implant and normally hearing children. (PhD), Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerpen.Google Scholar
van der Weijer, J. (1998). Language input for word discovery. (PhD), Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Van Severen, L. (2011). A large-scale longitudinal survey of consonant development in toddlers’ spontaneous speech. (PhD), Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerpen.Google Scholar
Wang, Y., Houston, D. M., & Seidl, A. (2018). Acoustic properties of infant-directed speech. In Frühholz, S. & Belin, P. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception (1 ed., pp. 93–116). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Weisleder, A., & Fernald, A. (2013). Talking to children matters: early language experience strenghtens processing and builds vocabulary. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2143–2152. doi:10.1177/0956797613488145CrossRefGoogle Scholar