10 - Working on young children's utterances: prosodic aspects of repetition during picture labelling

Summary

Introduction

Within that tradition of child language research that has been concerned with a characterization of the speech with which adults address young children, attention has often been drawn to the frequency with which adults reproduce the utterances of the young children with whom they are conversing. The most commonly cited kind of adult reproduction is the expansion (coined by Brown and Bellugi 1964), where adults ‘fill out’ the child's ‘telegraphic’ speech, rendering a syntactically well-formed version of what the child is perceived to have been trying to say. Somewhat less extensively documented, although still commonly mentioned in this literature, is a phenomenon whereby adults produce straight, unexpanded repetitions of the utterances of their child conversants. It is the prosodic characteristics of a subset of these repetition utterances which are the focus of analysis in this chapter.

These repetitions and other kinds of adult reproduction of children's utterances have invoked an extensive terminology and a wide range of overlapping formal definitions in the literature on ‘child directed speech’. Imitation, echo, partial imitation, recasting and modification are just some of the terms which have been used, and which have appeared (with no small degree of arbitrariness and imprecision) as coding categories in quantificational analyses of adult-child interactional data. It is notable that the structural distinctions drawn between these categories have been largely restricted to the lexico-syntactic domain: the phonetic relationships between the child's original utterance and the adult's reproduction have tended to be ignored.