*Tag questions are questions added at the end of a statement inviting a response from the listener:’ Isn’t it, aren’t we? ‘-are used to invite direct participation and to encourage a child to ask for clarification if necessary. This high percentage of questions makes ‘caretaker speech distinctive.
*Repetition reinforces new words or structures and clarifies meaning.
*Parents often use a higher and wider pitch range when talking to small children, possibly because it keeps the child’s attention. The sing along sing song intervention and exaggerated stress on key words also make caretaker speech distinctive.
*The pace is often slower than in conversations with other adults
Because the baby or young child receives attention as a direct result of any attempts to communicate, so the process is rewarding.
Although the benefits of caretaker speech are clear it’s not possible to identify precisely the links between language structures parents use and their appearance in the child’s language.
*Motherese is about acquiring language, this means children have to be part of a social linguistic community.
*Physical development also plays a part in a child’s ability to articulate particular phonemes.
Motherese is an extraordinarily important part of language acquisition because intellectual speech is based on it, and is one of the first starting parts of language acquisition, this is important to every individual, because language affects all parts of education. .
It is common for mothers (less so for fathers) to conduct constant, simplified verbal interaction with their child, deliberately correcting the child's 'mistakes' in their replies. It is debatable how important 'Motherese' is for the child's language development. Some cultures and some parents do not speak to the child in a simplified way, and some children are hardly spoken to at all by adults. There is no firm evidence that lack of exposure to 'motherese' will hinder the child's language development.
The question is habitually asked Do children learn by imitation?
The Wug Experiment shows that children do not simply imitate.
The ability to form a plural of words which have never been heard before shows how children identify rules in the language around them, and apply those rules in new contexts.
Chomsky's theory
Noam Chomsky, the great Twentieth Century American Linguist, argues that this can only be possible if we are all born with language’s already deep structures coded within our brain. This deep structure is the same for all humans. The grammars of different languages are transformations into a surface representation of the same deep structure.
Note: Chomsky’s theory suggests that only the grammar is innate. No modern linguists seriously suggest we are born with an innate vocabulary.
Chomskyan linguists argue that the similarities of languages all over the world is evidence that they are all versions of the same fundamental structure. For example, the subject > verb > object word order is extremely common.
Derek Bickerton has argued that Pidgins and Creole are even more remarkably similar in their grammars, and that they give us some insight into the structure of the Universal Grammar.
Chomsky's theory of language acquisition
All children go through a Critical Learning Period in the first three years of their life. During this period, the child's Language Acquisition Device or LAD is active. It will be much more difficult for someone to acquire a language outside of the Critical Learning Period.
It is still very hypothetical as to how the Language Acquisition Device actually works, but the relative ease with which infants learn a language provides evidence for its existence.
Alternative views
Chomsky's views have become more and more accepted since they were proposed, and evidence is accumulating to support them. However, there is still argument over just what proportion of our language skill is instinctive and innate, and how much is learned from our environment. For instance, Michael Halliday takes an opposite view to Chomsky. He believes we are born with a 'meaning potential', but not a deep grammar. Grammar he believes, like our vocabulary, is entirely learned by the child.
Parents and caretakers in most parts of the world modify their speech when talking to young children, one example of how people in general use several "registers" in different social settings. Speech to children is slower, shorter, in some ways (but not all) simpler, higher-pitched, more exaggerated in intonation, more fluent and grammatically well-formed, and more directed in content to the present situation, compared to speech among adults (Snow & Ferguson, 1977). Many parents also expand their children's utterances into full sentences, or offer sequences of paraphrases of a given sentence.
One should not, though, consider this speech register, sometimes called "Motherese," to be a set of "language lessons." Though mother's speech may seem simple at first glance, in many ways it is not. For example, speech to children is full of questions -- sometimes a majority of the sentences. If you think questions are simple, just try to write a set of rules that accounts for the following sentences and non-sentences:
- He can go somewhere.
Where can he go?
*Where can he go somewhere?
*Where he can go?
*Where did he can go?
- He went somewhere.
Where did he go?
He went WHERE?
*Where went he?
*Where did he went?
*Where he went?
*He did go WHERE?
- He went home.
Why did he go home?
How come he went home?
*Why he went home?
*How come did he go home?
Linguists struggle over these facts (see the Chapters by Lasnik and Larson), some of the most puzzling in the English language. But these are the constructions that infants are bombarded with and that they master in their preschool years.
The chapter by Newport and Gleitman gives another reason for doubting that Motherese is a set of language lessons. Children whose mothers use Motherese more consistently don't pass through the milestones of language development any faster (Newport, et al, 1977). Furthermore, there are some communities with radically different ideas about children's proper place in society. In some societies, for example, people tacitly assume that that children aren't worth speaking to, and don't have anything to say that is worth listening to. Such children learn to speak by overhearing streams of adult-to-adult speech (Heath, 1983). In some communities in New Guinea, mothers consciously try to teach their children language, but not in the style familiar to us, of talking to them indulgently. Rather, they wait until a third party is present, and coach the child as to the proper, adultlike sentences they should use (see Schieffelin & Eisenberg, 1981). Nonetheless, those children, like all children, grow up to be fluent language speakers. It surely must help children when their parents speak slowly, clearly, and succinctly to them, but their success at learning can't be explained by any special grammar-unveiling properties of parental babytalk.