Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T00:16:51.483Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘There car’: ungrammatical parentese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Jill Chafetz ,
Heidi M. Feldman  and
Nancy L. Wareham
Jill Chafetz*
Affiliation:
University of Pitsburgh
Heidi M. Feldman*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
Nancy L. Wareham*
Affiliation:
Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
*
Child Development Unit, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, 3705 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213–2583, USA.
Child Development Unit, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, 3705 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213–2583, USA.
Child Development Unit, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, 3705 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213–2583, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study of parents with their children demonstrates irregular and unpredictable grammatical features in their child-directed speech. The parents were observed quarterly in parent-child interaction with their oldest child beginning when she was two-years old, and with their younger twin daughters beginning when they reached two years. Language samples were transcribed and analyzed using CHILDES. The parents used grammatical speech with adults. A high proportion (8% to 32% per session) of their utterances to the children contained non-dialectal errors, primarily omissions of closed-class items. A typical example was ‘she a puppet’. The evidence suggests these parents were trying to teach their children language. Their implicit theories of language and learning led to a highy unusual variant of parentese.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 473 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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.)

Footnotes

*

Acknowledgements: this research was supported by a March of Dimes Social and Behavioral Science Grant (No. 12–210) and a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant (No. PO1-HD23388-01A1). We thank Celia Brownell and Susan Goldin-Meadow for their helpful comments on earlier versions. We also thank the following people for their contributions: Rosalyn Brown, Carol Hallberg, Brain Mac-Whinney and James L. McClelland. We especially thank the family members for their gracious cooperation.

References

REFERENCES

Feldman, H. M., Scher, M. S. & Kemp, S. (1990). Neurodevelopmental outcome of children with evidence of periventricular leukomalacia on late magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Pediatrie Neurology 6, 296–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Furrow, D. & Nelson, K. (1984). Environmental correlates of individual differences in language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 11, 523–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1986). Function and structure in maternal speech: their relation to the child's development of syntax. Developmental Psychology 22, 155–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollingshead, A. B. & Fitzgerald, M. D. (1958). Social class and mental illness. New York: Wiley.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Snow, C. (1985). The child language data exchange system. Journal of Child Language 12, 271–95.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, P. J. (1982). Amy, Wendy, and Beth: learning language in South Baltimore. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. E., Bonvillian, J. D., Denniger, M. S., Kaplan, B. J. & Baker, N. D. (1984). Maternal input adjustments and non-adjustments as related to children's linguistic advances and to language acquisition theories. In Pellegrini, A. D. & Yawkey, T. D. (eds), The development of oral and written language in social contexts. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Newport, E. L., Gleitman, H. & Gleitman, L. R. (1977). Mother, I'd rather do it myself: some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds), Talking to children: language input and acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Snow, C. E. (1977). Mother's speech research: from input to interaction. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds), Talking to children: language input and acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar