Caretaker talk

Partly as a response to mentalist claims that the input that children receive from
their caretakers is ‘degenerate’ (see Miller and Chomsky 1963), in the 1970s researchers
into L1 acquisition set out to examine the nature of caretaker talk empirically. Important
collections of papers were published by Snow and Ferguson (1977) and Waterson and
Snow (1978). Other studies have continued to be published since, particularly in the
Journal of Child Language. We will concentrate on the main findings of this research.
A number of studies have shown that caretakers adjust their speech formally so
that the input that children receive is both clearer and linguistically simpler than the
speech they address to other adults. Broen (1972) found that speech addressed to two
year-olds has only half the speed used with other adults. Garnica (1975) showed that
adults use a higher pitch when talking to children. Sachs (1977) found that mother tune
the pitch, intonation, and rhythm of their speech to the perceptive sensitivity of their
children. Such modifications are often linked with additional clues provided by gesture
and gaze.
Comparative studies of the speech adults address to other adults and the speech
they address to children have shown that caretakers also made adjustments in lexis and
syntax (Snow 1976; 1977). They use a higher ratio of content words to functors and also
restrict the range of vocabulary items employed (i.e. they manifest a low type-token
ratio). Modifications in syntax are evident in a lower mean length of utterance (MLU), a
measure that reflects both the length and the overall linguistic complexity of utterances.
Caretakers use fewer subordinate and coordinate constructions, and correspondingly
more simple sentences. They avoid sentence embeddings and they produce sentences
which express a limited range of syntactical and semantic relations.
It has been suggested, however, that these characteristics are not necessarily found
in the talk of all caretakers and, in particular, that they may reflect the particular child-
rearing practices of middle-class, English-speaking parents. Harkness (1977) and Ochs
(1982) respectively provide evidence to suggest that formal simplifications are not the
norm in caretaker talk in Kenya and Western Samoa. Ochs and Schieffelin (1984) argue
that many of the characteristics of talk observed in while, middle-class American
caretakers are a reflection of a cultural predisposition for experts to assist novices and
that this may not be evident in other cultures. Crago (1992) documents how Inuit
children in Arctic Quebec are traditionally expected to learn language through observing
and listening to others rather than through participating in conversations shaped by
questions from adult caretakers.
Irrespective of cultural differences, adults’ speech to children has been shown to
be remarkably well-formed, thus refuting the mentalist claim that the input children
receive is degenerate. For example, Cross (1977) found few examples of speech which
was not fluent or intelligible, or of run-on sentences (in each case, less than 10 per cent
of the mothers’ total utterances). Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977) reported that
only one out of 1,500 utterances was disfluent.
Another rather different type of adjustment concerns the kinds of topics that get
talked about. Parents tend to follow the here-and-now principle by talking about topics
which can be understood in terms of objects physically present or actions that are taking
place at the time. They avoid talking about activities that are displaced in time and space
1
until the child has developed the necessary concepts to understand them. Parents have
also been found to prefer topics that are familiar to their children. Ferrier (1978) has
pointed out that much of the communication with young children centres on routine
activities: eating, having a bath, getting dressed, looking at picture books, playing games,
etc. These activities involve caretaker and child in joint attention on a common set of
objects and actions.
Caretaker speech is also characterized by interactional modifications. Both child
and adult caretakers make plentiful use of attention-getters (for example, ‘Look!’ or
‘Hey!’). Adult caretakers make special efforts to ensure that what they say is understood
by their children by frequently checking comprehension and repeating all or parts of their
utterances, as in this example from Snow (1972):
Pick up the red one. Find the red one. Not the green one.
I want the red one. Can you find the red one?
They are also ready to allow the child to initiate and control the development of
topics. Some caretakers apprear to be particularly skilful in the strategies they use to
sustain and extend a conversation which their children have started. Frequently, however,
their attempts to communicate are not successful, either because the caretaker fails to
understand what the child has said or because the child cannot understand the caretaker.
In the case of the former the caretaker is likely to probe further by means of requests for
clarification (such as ‘Mm?’) or requests for confirmation which often take the form of
an expansion of what the caretaker thinks the child has tried to say. When the child does
not understand the caretaker, the caretaker uses repetitions and paraphrases to sort out the
problem. These features, of course, are not unique to caretaker talk but they have been
shown to be especially frequent in comparison to discourse involving adult addressees.
As we will see later, the availability of semantically contingent input (i.e. input that is
closely linked in meaning to something that the child has already said) has been found to
be an excellent predictor of the child’s rate of progress.
Of considerable interest to researchers is the extent to which the adjustments are
‘fine-’ or ‘rough-tuned’. Krashen (1980) defines fine-tuning as the provision of the
specific linguistic features which the child is ready to acquire next and claims that
caretaker-talk is characterized only by rough-tuning. As evidence he cites the positive but
‘not strikingly high’ correlations between linguistic input complexity and linguistic
competence in children found by Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977). Krashen is
surely right in claiming that caretakers do not aim their input at specific linguistic
features, but he probably underestimates the extent to which adult caretakers are sensitive
to their children’s progress. As we will see when we discuss the relationship between
input frequency and acquisition, Wells (1985) provides evidence to suggest that adults
step up the frequency of specific linguistic features in their input shortly before their
children first use them in their own speech. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence to show
that adjustments in caretaker talk occur on a continuous scale; that is, they are responsive
to the development evident in individual children at different stages of acquisition. Cross
(1977) considers that this justifies claiming that the input is fine-tuned.
Researchers have also considered the purposes served by caretaker talk. Ferguson
(1977) suggests three possible functions: (1) to aid communication, (2) to teach language,
and (3) to socialize the child. It is the first of these that seems to be the most important.
2
Caretakers seek to communicate with their child and this leads them to modify their
speech in order to facilitate the exchange of meanings. As Brown (1977: 26) put it, the
primary motivation is to communicate, to understand and to be understood, and to keep
two minds focused on the same topic. Brown and Hanlon (1970) have shown that
mothers do correct children to ensure that what they say is true. Thus, if a child mislabels
an object (for example, refers to a horse as ‘doggie’), the mother is likely to respond with
either an explicit correction (such as ‘No, it’s a horsie’) or an implicit correction (for
example, ‘Yes, the horsie is jumping’). Mothers also pay attention to their children’s
pronunciation of words and draw their attention to politeness formulae (for example,
when to say ‘thank you’). However, they pay little attention to the grammatical
correctness of their children’s speech, allowing even blatant errors to go uncorrected. In
general, then, if caretakers talk serves to teach syntax and to socialize the child into the
adult’s culture it does so only indirectly, as offshoots of the attempt to communicate.
How do caretakers determine the nature and the extent of the modifications that
need to be made? Gleason and Weintraub (1978) suggest that they must form a general
idea of children’s linguistic ability, particularly their ability to understand. They argue
that they do not have an accurate knowledge of the specific linguistic features the
children have mastered. Of crucial importance is the extent to which children
comprehend what is said to them and the extent to which they signal their comprehension
or lack of it to their caretakers. Children tend to become inattentive when they do not
understand, causing their caretakers to modify their speech until attention is restored.
Cross (1977; 1978) found little evidence that the mothers in her study were able to
monitor their own or their children’s syntactic levels, but she did find that they evaluated
the extent to which the children were able to demonstrate an understanding of their
previous utterances. The fact that caretaker modifications have been observed in the
speech that even four-year-old children address to their younger siblings (see Shatz and
Gelman 1973), also suggests that they must be based on a very general assessment of the
learner’s communicative abilities.
In summary, there is now plentiful evidence to show that the speech that
caretakers address to children is well-adapted to their linguistic abilities, particularly
comprehension. Three main features of caretaker talk stand out: (1) it is more
grammatical than speech addressed to adults, (2) it is simpler, and (3) it is more
redundant. However, as Snow (1986) has pointed out, it cannot be concluded on the basis
of these findings that there is no innate component in L1 acquisition, as the studies do not
enable us to determine the relative importance of innate and input factors. The studies
show only that the claim that children receive degenerate input is unwarranted. (Ellis,
1994, pp. 248-251)