Child-Directed Speech (CDS)

Motherese = parentese = caregiver/caretaker speech = baby talk = nursery talk = infant-directed speech A nonstandard form of speech used by adults in talking to toddlers and infants When addressing infants, many adults adopt a particular type of speech, known as infant-directed speech (IDS). IDS is characterized by exaggerated intonation (i.e. it is usually higher in pitch), as well as reduced speech rate, hyperarticulation (i.e. a measure of clear speech defined by having large amounts of acoustic space between vowels as measured by formants), shortening and simplifying of words, shorter utterance duration, and grammatical simplification. Reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) is repeated exactly or with a slight change. While UG theorists view the role of input as limited to parameter-setting, interactionists such as Richards and Gallaway (1994) maintain that CDS might be expected to facilitate language acquisition in a wide variety of ways, including: managing attention promoting positive affect improving intelligibility facilitating segmentation providing feedback provision of correct models reducing processing load encouraging conversational participation explicit teaching of social routines. (Richards and Gallaway, 1994, p. 264)

Characteristics of the Input from CDS

Semantic Contingency: the caretaker talks with the child about objects and events to which the child is already paying attention. Facilitative, though the final causal link is not clear. Explicit formal corrections are unusual, but recasts are common. CHILD: Fix Lily MOTHER: Oh . . . Lily will fix it Recasts offer children useful negative evidence (at least implicitly) about their own hypotheses on the TL. Substantial empirical evidence for positive correlations between the proportion of recasts used by a childs caretakers, and his or her overall rate of development. 2. There is a relationship between CDS formal characteristics and childrens developing control of particular constructions. For example, there seems to be a relationship between the caretakers use of inverted yes-no questions, for example Have you been sleeping?, and childrens developing control of verbal auxiliaries in English as a first language, presumably because the fronted auxiliary is perceptually more salient than questions marked through intonation only (Pine, 1994, pp. 25-33).

3. Despite the potential usefulness of CDS as input data, it is clear that caretakers are not typically motivated by any prime language teaching goal, nor is their speech in general specially adapted so as to model the target grammar. Instead, its special characteristics derive primarily from the communicative goal of engaging in conversation with a linguistically and cognitively less competent partner, and sustaining and directing their attention (Pine, 1994, p. 19). 4. Cross-cultural studies of interaction with young children have made it clear that styles of CDS found in middle class Anglophone societies are far from universal, and that societies can be found where infants are not seen as conversation partners (see review by Lieven 1994). For example, in Trackton, a poor rural community studied by Heath (1983), in the south-eastern USA, children are not usually addressed directly by adults, until they can themselves produce multi-word utterances. Similarly among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, infant babbling is seen as bird talk and something to be discouraged rather than engaged with (Schieffelin, 1979). As children nonetheless learn to speak perfectly well under these widely differing conditions, this cross-cultural evidence seems to challenge strongly environmentalist explanations of language learning, by weakening any notion that finely tuned CDS is actually necessary. However, Lieven and others point out that even in cultures where child-directed speech of the Western type is rare or absent, children are constantly in group settings, and surrounded by contextualized talk routines. In such settings, their early utterances frequently include partial imitations and the production of unanalyzed and rote-learned segments, picked up in routinized situations (Lieven, 1994, p. 62). Indeed, in some cultures, such as that of the Kaluli, adults actively teach language by requiring children to imitate conversational routines directly. We also know that children will not normally learn a language to which they are merely exposed in a decontextualized way, for example on television (Snow et al., 1976, quoted in Lieven, 1994, p. 59). The study of child language development cross culturally supports the idea that children will only learn to talk in an environment of which they can make some sense and which has a structure of which the child is a part. (Lieven, 1994, p. 73) As a result of a study on language function used by adults addressing an infant, Matychuk (2005) found that CDS aids the language development of the infant by providing more interactive negotiation, which is argued to be the crucial factor in language development.

Baby Talk Register (BTR) Evidence of BT refutes overwhelmingly the rather off-hand assertions of Chomsky and his followers that the preschool child could not learn language from the complex but syntactically degenerate sample his parents provide without the aid of an elaborate innate component it has turned out that parental speech is well formed and finely tuned to the childs psycholinguistic capacity. The corollary would seem to be that there is less need for an elaborate innate component than there at first seemed to be. (Brown, 1977, 20; see also Snow and Ferguson 1977) Motherese Hypothesis Those special restrictive properties of caretaker speech play a causal role in language acquisition. (Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman 1977) Research results challenge the Motherese Hypothesis, suggesting a more general role for the BTR in adultinfant interaction, linking it to culture and to affective interaction rather than to language teaching per se. (Lust, 2006)

Table 6.2 Essential Properties of Baby Talk Register (Lust, 2006, p. 111) PROSODY SYNTAX 1. high pitch 4. short sentences 2. exaggerated contours 5. parataxis (the combination of 3. slow rate clauses or phrases without the use of conjunctions) 6. telegraphic style 7. repetition LEXICON 8. kin terms and body parts 9. infant games 10. qualities 11. compound verbs 12. hypocorism (the use of a pet name, especially a diminutive or abbreviated form of somebody's full name) EXTENDED USES 19. child speech 20. animals 21. adult intimacy (as well as affection, bullying or condescension)

PHONOLOGY 13. cluster reduction 14. liquid substitution 15. reduplication 16. special sounds

DISCOURSE 17. questions 18. pronoun shift

Clifton Pye studied language acquisition and parental input in the subsistence farming community of Zunil, a small village in the Western Highland regions of Guatemala. He analyzed the speech of adults to children and compared it to speech to other adults. In Zunil, most houses had dirt floors and adobe walls, and people had few material possessions. Babies were kept close to their mothers, either strapped to their backs or nearby, and accompanied them on daily activities, but vocal interaction between infants and parents [was] minimal (Pye 1986, 86); the child was most often ignored and conversation revolve[d] around matters of interest to the adults or older children (87). Mothers frequently reduced their voice so much that it became a whisper. At the same time, the speech rate continues at a normal pace or may even be increased slightly (88). Mothers speech to children did not have high pitch or exaggerated contour or slow rate, and was about equal in morphological complexity, MLU [Mean Length of Utterance] and amount of repetition (94). The complex system of verb terminations in this language was preserved, as in k-o-e-in-kama:/aspect-object-go-subject-root termination/ (Ill go and bring it), spoken by a mother to a 1.10 year-old child with a lexicon of fewer than fifty words (92). Several of the proposed BTR features from table 6.2 did hold; motherese involved special words for qualities, special sounds and repetition. However, not only does Quiche speech to children lack many of the simplifying features found in other communities, it also contains features which increase its complexity: special sounds, a special verbal suffix, few overt noun phrases, diminutives (Pye 1986, 98), or additional instructions frequently added to the end of sentences. These results mean it no longer seems possible to maintain the strong version of the Motherese Hypothesis, which predicts that the features of speech to children play an essential role in language acquisition . . . It would appear that no single feature need be present in the input for children to acquire language (98). In their analyses of the effects of English motherese, Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman (1977) reached converging conclusions. They found that although mothers speech to children was simple in certain ways (e.g., mothers tended not to talk in long complex sentences with subordinate clauses), it was in other ways more complex than that addressed to adults. It had more transformed utterances, fewer declaratives (87 percent to adults, 30 percent to infants), more imperatives and more questions; in general, a wider range of constructions and more inconsistency of types. (Imperatives and questions both involve null sites, e.g., stop that, and questions involve both null sites and displacements, e.g, What do you want ; cf. chapter 2.)

How does experience work? Is BTR a language-teaching mechanism? Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman 1977 provided scientific test of the motherese hypothesis to address this question. Recognizing that mothers vary in the degree to which they use BTR, they reasoned that if a mother shows a greater amount of motherese, then, following (1), the child should show faster language acquisition. They also tested a Fine Tuning Hypothesis: if a mother is acting as teacher, then as the mothers speech grows in complexity, then so should the childs. Fifteen American motherdaughter pairs in three age groups were studied (1215, 1821, and 2427 months), with childrens MLUs ranging from 1.00 to 3.46 (mean 1.65). The pairs were interviewed twice, six months apart. Both times, adult speech was recorded, analyzed and coded for various specific measures: e.g., for specific measures of length, complexity, utterance type, and repetition, as was child speech. Correlations were then computed between every property of maternal speech and growth in child language on relevant measures (the researchers partialled out variance due to the childs age and language level). Results showed that the vast majority of properties of maternal speech did not correlate positively with developing complexity in child speech. The length or complexity of a mothers utterances did not correlate with the same features in the childs language; nor did amount of repetition by the mother correlate with any form of growth measured. Growth of complex sentence structures in the childs speech did not correlate with any property of maternal speech. Only two correlations were significant: (a) the number of yes/no questions in the mothers speech (e.g., Do you want to take a bath now?) correlated with the development of overt auxiliaries in the verb phrases of child speech (e.g., I will jump), although absolute amount of auxiliaries used in mothers speech did not; and (b), noun phrase inflections (e.g., plurals) in the child developed in correlation with amount of deixis (e.g., Thats a dog) in the mothers speech. A Fine Tuning Hypothesis was not supported. Mothers MLU was found to correlate with age, but not with language development in children. These findings disconfirm a strong form of the Motherese Hypothesis, although they do not suggest that children cannot or do not attend to specific properties of the input. They suggest a semi autonomous unfolding of language capabilities. Effects of maternal input are those which match the biases of the learner, which act as a filter through which the linguistic environment exerts its influence (137). These results begin to factor out which properties of the input infants may select. The input is not the primary determinant of the universal aspects of language knowledge, e.g., those involved in complex sentence formation, but it may affect language specific factors which require induction, e.g., the lexical form of the auxiliary verb used in English, or the morphology involved in English pluralization. Differences between adult-to-adult speech and adult-to-child speech (Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman 1977) only 1/1500 adult-to-child utterances are ungrammatical adult-to-child utterances are shorter than adult-to-adult utterances: MLU=4.24 vs. MLU=11.94 (MLU is the measure of the average, or mean, length of the utterances used) adult-to-child utterances contain fewer embeddings (the use of subordinate clauses as in Wheres the one that Granny gave you) and conjoinings (the use of and to conjoin two phrases as in I gave them to Toby and to you or two clauses as in The mouse got scared and he ran away) adult-to-child utterances are articulated more clearly adult-to-child utterances are more repetitive adult-to-child utterances show higher pitch and exaggerated intonation adult-to-child utterances are more redundant, given the situational context. The context makes the meaning of the utterance highly predictable.

However, The child is not presented with neat packages of structures (there is a range of syntactic types in CDS: imperatives (Look at Muffy!), interrogatives (Wheres Muffy?), and declaratives (Muffy broke it)) nor is the child always presented with fully explicit structures (there are many elliptical utterances, such as subjectless questions (Want some juice?) and imperatives (Dont eat that)). Perhaps the real value of CDS is in eliciting conversation rather than teaching language. As Pine (1994) has pointed out, much of CDSs form probably arises from need to communicate with someone who is cognitively and linguistically naive, with the early grammatical simplicity possibly a by-product of the semantic simplicity of the utterances. Another problem is that many of the claims for CDS as a teaching tool were originally based on observations of adult-child interactions in western industrialized societies, largely in the United States. Later cross-cultural studies have highlighted the fact that there is wide cultural variation in terms of familial connections to the child and attitudes to young childrens mental and linguistic states that in turn produces wide variation in the talk addressed to children. However, while CDS is culture specific, the acquisition of language by age five is universal. Aid to cognitive development Studies have found that responding to an infants babble with meaningless babble aids the infants development; while the babble has no logical meaning, the verbal interaction demonstrates to the child the bidirectional nature of speech, and the importance of verbal feedback. (Wikipedia, Baby Talk) Variations in the quality of the linguistic environment a child is exposed to (i.e. variations in the input) might not have any measurable effect on the speed or the ease of language acquisition. (Snow, 1994, p. 11)

Questions regarding universality Researchers Bryant and Barrett (2007) have suggested that baby talk exists universally across all cultures and is a species-specific adaptation. Other researchers[who?] contend that it is not universal among the world's cultures, and argue that its role in helping children learn grammar has been overestimated. As evidence they point out that in some societies (such as certain Samoan tribes; see Shore 1997), adults do not speak to their children at all until the children reach a certain age. Furthermore, even where baby-talk is used, it is full of complicated grammatical constructs, and mispronounced or non-existent words. Other evidence suggests that baby talk is not a universal phenomenon. Schieffelin & Ochs (1983), for example, describe the Kaluli tribe of Papua New Guinea who do not typically employ infantdirected speech. Language acquisition in Kaluli children was not found to be significantly impaired. In other societies, it is more common to speak to children as one would to an adult, but with simplifications in grammar and vocabulary, with the belief that it will help them learn words as they are known in the standard form. In order to relate to the child during baby talk, a parent may deliberately slur or fabricate some words, and may pepper the speech with nonverbal utterances. A parent might refer only to objects and events in the immediate vicinity, and will often repeat the childs utterances back to them. Since children employ a wide variety of phonological and morphological simplifications (usually distance assimilation or reduplication) in learning speech, such interaction results in the "classic" baby-words like na-na for grandmother, wawa for water, or din-din for dinner, where the child seizes on a stressed syllable of the input, and simply repeats it to form a word.

In any case, the normal child will eventually acquire the local language without difficulty, regardless of the degree of exposure to baby talk. However, the use of motherese could have an important role in affecting the rate and quality of language acquisition.

Diminutives In English adding a terminal /i/ sound at the end, usually written and spelled as /ie/, /y/, or /ey/, is a common way to form a diminutive which is often used as part of baby talk, examples include: kitty (from cat or kitten) doggy (from dog) milky (from milk, also spelled as milkie) poopy (from poop) Phrases Baby talk phrases and sentences often skip out small words, imitating young children who can make little sense of sentence composition, such as to, at, for, my, so and as, and articles (the, a, an), thus resulting in an incomplete sentence, such as I need go potty or I want blanket. Sometimes, demonstratives are used instead of pronouns (he, I, it, she etc), as it may help children learn people's names, for example, Daddy wants Susie to eat her cereal instead of standard adult-type speech, I want you to eat your cereal as pronouns are often confusing to young children.

Vocabulary Baby talk often involves shortening and simplifying words, with the possible addition of slurred words and nonverbal utterances. Some utterances are invented by parents within a particular family unit, or are passed down from parent to parent over generations, while others are quite widely known and used within most families, such as wawa for water, num-num for a meal, ba-ba for bottle, or beddy-bye for bedtime, and are considered standard or traditional words. Baby talk usually consists of a muddle of words, including names for family members, names for animals, eating and meals, bodily functions and genitals, sleeping, pain, possibly including important objects such as diaper, blanket, pacifier, bottle, etc., and may be sprinkled with nonverbal utterances, such as goo goo ga ga. A fair number of baby talk and nursery words refer to bodily functions or the genitals, partly because bodily functions such as urination and defecation may be quite exciting for young children. Scientific terms may be harder for them to understand and pronounce, so baby talk may be more convenient for a young child. Moreover, such words reduce adults discomfort with the subject matter, and make it possible for children to discuss such things without breaking adult taboos. However, some, such as pee-pee and poo-poo have been very widely used in reference to bodily functions to the point that they are considered to be standard words, so adults negative reaction to such terms has recently faded. Some examples of widely-used baby talk words and phrases in English include:

poppet (term of endearment for a young child) passie or paci (pacifier, often used as an abbreviation) binkie (pacifier) brekkie (breakfast) din-din (dinner) num nums (food/dinner) yum-yum (meal time, informally interpreted as an expression of delight towards a pleasanttasting food) botty (rear end) didee (diaper, chiefly American) cootchie-coo (term of endearment used for a young child) lickle (little) ickle (little; chiefly British) teensy-weensy (very small, tiny) Itty-bitty (little or small) widdle (little; chiefly American) widdo (little) beddy-bye (go to bed, sleeping, bedtime) sleepy-bye (go to bed, sleeping, bedtime) oopsie-daisy or whoopsie-daisy (accident) pee-pee (urination or penis) wee-wee (urination or penis) sissy (sister or urination) widdle (urine; chiefly British) pewie (smelling bad) poo-poo or doo-doo (defecation) poopie or -y (soiled diaper, defecation) stinky (defecation) whoopsie (defecation) Nappy (take a nap) Sippie (baby cup) baba (blanket, bath, bottle, brother, baby or an onomatopoeic term for sheep, used as a generic baby-talk term for words starting with the letter b) blankie (blanket) boo-boo (wound, pain or bruise) bow-wow (dog) bubby or bubba (brother) bye-bye (goodbye)

dada (dad, or rarely dog, diaper, or dummy, British equivalent of pacifier, sometimes used as a generic baby-talk term for words starting with the letter d) dum-dum (dummy, British equivalent of pacifier) doedoes (In South African English, the equivalent of beddy-bye) doggy or -ie (dog) dolly or -ie (doll) drinky (drink) gee-gee (horse) goo goo ga ga (nonverbal utterance imitating a baby which has not yet learned to speak) huggle or huggie (hug, Huggies is also a brand of diapers and baby products) mama (mother or rarely milk) moo-moo or moo-cow (cow) milkie or -y (milk) no-no (taboo, something which is not good) night-night (goodnight, bedtime) icky (disgusting) yucky (disgusting) jammies (pyjamas) lolly (sweets US candy) nana (grandmother) Boo-boo (bruise or hurt) owie (wound or bruise) potty (toilet, especially a chamber pot for a young child) puffer (train) choo-choo (train) quick-quick (haste, hurry, doing something quickly, chiefly British) scrummy (tasty) tummy (stomach or abdomen) uh-oh, sometimes written as uh-uh or oh-oh (toddler's expression towards anything that is not good or has gone wrong) wawa (water) wuv (love) uppie or -sie (wanting to be picked up) vroom-vroom or brrrm-brrrm (car)

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