Discuss And Evaluate The Role of Motherese in Acquiring A Language.

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Discuss And Evaluate The Role of Motherese in Acquiring A Language.

The speaking style used by caretakers around the world when addressing infants is often called ‘motherese’ or ‘parentese’ (Ferguson, 1964). Motherese is the style of talking used by mothers when addressing their eighteen to twenty-four moth old toddlers and has been shown to be preferred over adult-directed speech by infants when given a choice (Fernald, 1985). Moreover, the exaggerated stress and increased pitch typical of infant-directed speech assists infants in discriminating phonetic units (Karzon, 1985).  From birth, a child encounters an immediately facilitative environment allowing him/her to participate as a conversational partner and as the child’s communicational behavior develops, the mother naturally attempts to persuade more verbal participation from the child by altering her own behavior.  

Initially the mother provides object names to the child’s vocalisations but soon begins to request labels and by the middle of the child’s second year the mother is requesting and labeling at an equal rate, establishing dialog. The mother helps to form the child’s speech by distinctly distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable responses, ensuring the child’s verbalisations are not direct imitations but responses to fit specific slots in the dialog. In order to aid learning the mother provides consistency, such as the amount of time devoted to dialog, the rate of confirmation and the probability of reciprocating (Bruner, 1978). Additionally, the mother modifies her speech and when taken together, are called motherese (Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1977) or parentese.

Mothers use paralinguistic variations as well as linguistic alterations as the manner of presentation may be more important than the content of dialog. According to Sachs (1985), the mother produces modifications using a broad range of pitches and loudness and overall, her pitch is higher than in adult to adult conversations. A range of different languages present this pitch contour however some variation is seen (Bernstein, Ratner & Pye, 1984). Infants will respond to intonation patterns before they comprehend language and prefer high, variable pitch (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987). The mother also modifies her rhythm and timing. The duration of vowels is longer than in adult to adult conversation and there are longer pauses between utterances, this rhythm is also seen in signing mothers of deaf children (Fernald, 1994).

Compared to adult to adult speech, motherese exhibits, greater pitch range, especially at the higher end; lexical simplification characterised by the diminutive (“doggie”) and syllable reduplication (consonant-verb syllable repetition); shorter less complex utterances; less dysfluency; more paraphrasing and repetition; limited, concrete vocabulary and a restricted set of semantic relations; more contextual support and more directives and questions.

Conversational style with infants is short and with toddlers it is even shorter as less adult utterances are spoken. During the second half of the child’s first year the mother decreases the length of her utterances and this is positively correlated with improved receptive language skills by the child at eighteen months (Murray et. al., 1990). A mother aids the process of learning a language in which the child uses what he/she knows to decode more mature language, also known as ‘bootstrapping’, by maintaining a semantic-syntactic correspondence (Rondal & Cession, 1990). For example, by way of motherese, the child finds it easier it decipher the syntax of the mother’s utterances.

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Directed speech from the mother to the child adapts and the child’s language matures as motherese is well tuned to the child’s language level (Owens, 1986). The rate of change in language level is initially slow however it speeds up with age. The complexity and the length of the mother’s utterances most primarily change between twenty and twenty-seven months alongside the period of rapid language change for the child. However, at any given time the syntax is mostly consistent (Wells et. al., 1983).

Infant-directed speech also is altered at the phonetic level and these alterations are argued to ...

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