Learning Language from Mothers' Replies

It has long been assumed that mothers who reply by supplementing their children's remarks will facilitate the process of language development. So far, however, research on this issue has been highly selective, focussing on two such replies: expansion and extension. It has more or less overlooked what might be called "embedded extension" where children's remarks are incorporated into more complex replies. Consequently, this paper will present a first attempt to investigate the role of embedded extension in child language development. It will describe a study of twenty-four mothers and children who were videotaped in their homes once when the children were aged twenty to twenty-two months and again when they were three months older. This paper will show that the frequency with which the mothers used a particular type of embedded extension in the first recording was significantly but nonetheless imperfectly related to the frequency with which the children used the corresponding construction in the second recording. Scrutinizing the "imperfections" more closely, the paper will suggest that if embedded extensions do influence child language development other, previously unconsidered, factors are also involved.