[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Motherese/ Caretaker talk/ Child-directed Speech
It is proved through research that In early mother-child communication most salient aspect is "motherese": the slow, stylized way most people adopt when talking to babies. Along with emerging mutual activities of mother and child, motherese may well be the main vehicle for early linguistic development. This is evidenced by its properties: typical prosodic melodies, accentuation of phonemic features, simplified semantics, distinctiveness of syntactic boundaries, and, in particular, control of the child's attentional reactions. Indeed, there are data showing that motherese affects the infant's gaze movements much more than does usual conversational speech.
Socialization of attentional control, therefore, seems to be one of the major preconditions of language acquisition.It has been suggested (Hirsh-Pasek, Treiman, & Schneiderman, 1984) that the commonly cited study by Burger, M. L., & Landerholm, E. (1991) underestimated the amount of feedback that parents provide because it overlooked cases in which an adult repeats and corrects a child's utterance before proceeding further with the conversation. However, the Hirsh-Pasek et al. study documents this kind of feedback only for two-year-olds from upper-middle class environments. Perhaps it occurs somewhat more extensively than this, but there remains the old objection that children who receive very little attention from parents or other caretakers also develop perfectly adequate and elaborate grammars. At least at present, then, it seems unlikely that repetition with expansion and correction constitutes a general solution to the overgeneralization problem.
To explore the possible effects of parent word use on the child's acquisition of particular words and on the meanings of those words, we discuss evidence for frequency, salience in utterances, and nonlinguistic contexts of some event words from our own and others' research. In our work, we examined uses of content words, including event words, in a sample of 21 middle-class mothers as well as uses of four spatial terms......
