A construction based analysis of child directed speech

Abstract

The child directed speech of twelve English-speaking mothers was analyzed in terms of utterance-level constructions. First, the mothers' utterances were categorized in terms of general constructional categories such as Wh-questions, copulas and transitives. Second, mothers' utterances within these categories were further specified in terms of the initial words that framed the utterance, item-based phrases such as Are you . . . , I'll . . . , It's . . . , Let's . . . , What did . . . . The findings were: (i) overall, only about 15% of all maternal utterances had SVO form (most were questions, imperatives, copulas, and fragments); (ii) 51% of all maternal utterances began with one of 52 item-based phrases, mostly consisting of two words or morphemes (45% began with one of just 17 words); and (iii) children used many of these same item-based phrases, in some cases at a rate that correlated highly with their own mother's frequency of use. We suggest that analyses of adult-child linguistic interaction should take into account not just general constructional categories, but also the item-based constructions that adults and children use and the frequency with which they use them.

The acquisition of early verbs in French: Assessing the role of conversation and of child-directed speech

“…Earlier studies show that the frequency and the pattern of occurrence of words in CDS influence the composition of children's vocabulary. Correspondences between children's language and CDS are found concerning the proportion of nouns and verbs produced (Choi & Gopnik, 1995;Gopnik & Choi, 1990;Tardif, Shatz, & Naigles, 1997), the contexts in which words are used (Harris, Barrett, Jones, & Brookes, 1988), the meaning of novel words (Clark & Grossman, 1998) and the use of certain forms (Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2003). For verbs, Aksu-Koç (1998) finds a correspondence between the distribution of different inflections found in the child's speech and that in the mother's, while Naigles and Hoff-Ginsberg (1998) find a relation between the place verbs occur in mothers' utterances and the range of syntactic frames they appear in, and the order of acquisition of first verbs by the children.…”

Building Language Competence in First Language Acquisition

“…15,16 Let me give two examples. If a particular utterance is heard very frequently with a consistent communicative function, it may initially be learned as an unanalysed, 'frozen' formula (e.g.…”

Overcoming language barriers: Interfaces between disciplines

“…Goodman, Dale, and Li (2008) demonstrate that the most frequent words are not the first words learned (function words vs. content words), but that frequency is influential within each word class (nouns vs. verbs). From a more syntactic perspective, Cameron-Faulkner et al (2003) consider how likely two words are to co-occur with each other in maternal speech as the best means of predicting the sorts of forms that children are likely to use. Furthermore, the preciseness with which a corpus is selected for completing frequency counts affects whether age of acquisition can be predicted accurately from the data.…”