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‘There car’: ungrammatical parentese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Jill Chafetz ,
Heidi M. Feldman  and
Nancy L. Wareham
Jill Chafetz*
Affiliation:
University of Pitsburgh
Heidi M. Feldman*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
Nancy L. Wareham*
Affiliation:
Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
*
Child Development Unit, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, 3705 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213–2583, USA.
Child Development Unit, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, 3705 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213–2583, USA.
Child Development Unit, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, 3705 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213–2583, USA.
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Abstract

This study of parents with their children demonstrates irregular and unpredictable grammatical features in their child-directed speech. The parents were observed quarterly in parent-child interaction with their oldest child beginning when she was two-years old, and with their younger twin daughters beginning when they reached two years. Language samples were transcribed and analyzed using CHILDES. The parents used grammatical speech with adults. A high proportion (8% to 32% per session) of their utterances to the children contained non-dialectal errors, primarily omissions of closed-class items. A typical example was ‘she a puppet’. The evidence suggests these parents were trying to teach their children language. Their implicit theories of language and learning led to a highy unusual variant of parentese.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 473 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

Acknowledgements: this research was supported by a March of Dimes Social and Behavioral Science Grant (No. 12–210) and a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant (No. PO1-HD23388-01A1). We thank Celia Brownell and Susan Goldin-Meadow for their helpful comments on earlier versions. We also thank the following people for their contributions: Rosalyn Brown, Carol Hallberg, Brain Mac-Whinney and James L. McClelland. We especially thank the family members for their gracious cooperation.

References

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