The Language Spoken to Children

The language spoken to young children has been shown to constitute a special speech style. It is marked by certain phonological substitutions and a special lexicon, an assumption by the adult of a leading role in the conversation, and a tendency by the adult to respond to the child by repeating or expanding the child’s utterances. Syntactic characteristics of adult language to children have been studied with both naturalistic and experimental data. Such language tends to have shorter and less complex sentences, to be repetitious, and to vary with the linguistic maturity of the child. Frequency of forms and constructions in adult speech does not seem to be related to order of acquisition by the child. In general, we know very little about the effects of adult language on acquisition, primarily because we know very little about the child’s processing of input.