Do Questions Get Infants Talking? Infant Vocal Responses to Questions and Declaratives in Maternal Speech

Abstract

Maternal questions play a crucial role in early language acquisition by virtue of their special grammatical, prosodic and lexical forms, and their abundance in the input. Infants are able to discriminate questions from other sentence types and produce rising intonations in their own requests. This study examined whether caregiver questions were related to the quantity of infant vocalizations. Thirty‐six infants aged 10 and 14 months participated in a laboratory play session with their mothers. In separate blocks, mothers were instructed to ask questions and to refrain from asking questions. Both block‐level and utterance‐level analyses found no evidence that maternal questions affected the amount of infant‐response vocalizations. Mothers of 14‐month‐olds (but not 10‐month‐olds) tended to repeat questions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Beyond the Words: Comparing Interpersonal Engagement Between Maternal and Paternal Infant-Directed Speech Acts

“…There is evidence that infants are specifically able to discriminate the intonational characteristics of questions from those of statements and exclamations and prefer to listen to questions over statements ( Best et al, 1991 ; Geffen and Mintz, 2011 ; Soderstrom et al, 2011 ; Frota et al, 2014 ). In the meantime, certain methodological issues of these studies imply that young infants’ sentence-type distinctions, according to a straightforward relationship with prosody, remains an open matter ( Van de Weijer, 2002 ; Geffen and Mintz, 2017 ; Reimchen and Soderstrom, 2017 ). What is more, discrimination of, and preference for, the intonational forms of questions, does not show whether infants treat questions as having a different communicative function from declaratives.…”

“…What is more, discrimination of, and preference for, the intonational forms of questions, does not show whether infants treat questions as having a different communicative function from declaratives. On this ground, taking into account the infants’ active participation in ‘dialogues’ with their mothers may constitute a new perspective in the research on infant sentence-type discrimination ( Reimchen and Soderstrom, 2017 ).…”