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The unintelligibility of speech to children: effects of referent availability*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Ellen Gurman Bard  and
Anne H. Anderson
Ellen Gurman Bard*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Anne H. Anderson
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
*
HCRC, University of Edinburgh, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK.
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Abstract

Speech addressed to children is supposed to be helpfully redundant, but redundant or predictable words addressed to adults tend to lose intelligibility. Word tokens extracted from the spontaneous speech of the parents of 12 children aged 1;10 to 3;0 and presented in isolation to adult listeners showed loss of intelligibility when the words were redundant because they had occurred in repetitions of an utterance (Experiment 1) or referred to an entity which was physically present when named (Experiment 2). Though children (N = 64; mean age 3;5, S. D. 6·1 months) recognized fewer excerpted object names than adults (N = 40), less intelligible tokens appeared to induce child listeners to rely on the word's extra-linguistic context during the recognition process (Experiment 3), much as such tokens normally induce adults to rely on discourse context. It is proposed that interpreting parental utterances with reference to non-verbal context furthers linguistic development.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , October 1994 , pp. 623 - 648
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by an ESRC IRC grant to the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow and by ESRC Project Grant HR 6130 to J. Laver and E. G. Bard. The authors are grateful to Lothian Regional Council for access to nursery schools; to teachers, informants, and subjects for their patience and good will; to Frances Macnamara for help in running Experiment 3; and to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Aix-en-Provence, in August, 1991.

References

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