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Mothers' speech to children and syntactic development: some simple relationships*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

David Furrow ,
Katherine Nelson  and
Helen Benedict
David Furrow
Affiliation:
Yale University
Katherine Nelson
Affiliation:
Yale University
Helen Benedict
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Abstract

This study investigated the relationships between children's linguistic environments and their language acquisition. Speech samples taken from seven firstborn children and their mothers when the children were 1; 6 and 2; 3 were analysed within a number of semantic and syntactic categories to determine correlations between mothers' speech and subsequent language development. Several characteristics of mothers' speech (e.g. utterance length, use of pronouns) significantly predicted later child speech. The significant correlations suggested that mothers' choice of simple constructions facilitated language growth. Further, they showed that the motherese code differed from adult-adult speech in ways which aided language development. Differences between our study and previous investigations of environmental effects on language development probably resulted from the failure of earlier investigations to take into account children's level of language competence at the time when environmental effects were assessed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , October 1979 , pp. 423 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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Footnotes

[*]

The first author was supported by a Canada Council pre-doctoral fellowship; the research was partially supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. We would like to thank Melissa Furrow for aid in the syntactic analysis. Katherine Nelson is now at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Address for correspondence: David Furrow, Department of Psychology, Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

References

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