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Fine lexical tuning in infant directed speech to typically developing children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2020

Lotte ODIJK Open the ORCID record for Lotte ODIJK [Opens in a new window]  and
Steven GILLIS
Lotte ODIJK*
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics & Psycholinguistics (CLiPS) Research Center, Belgium
Steven GILLIS
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics & Psycholinguistics (CLiPS) Research Center, Belgium
*
Address for correspondence: Lotte Odijk, University of Antwerp, Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics (CLiPS) Research Center, Prinsstraat 13, 2000Antwerpen, Belgium Email: lotte.odijk@uantwerpen.be
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Abstract

Do parents fine-tune the MLU of utterances with a particular word as the word is on the verge of appearing in the child's production? We analyzed a corpus of spontaneous interactions of 30 dyads. The children were in the initial stages of their lexical development, and the parents’ utterances containing the words the children eventually acquired were selected. The main finding is that the MLU of the parental utterances containing the target words gradually decreased up to the point of the children's first production of those words. This suggests that parents fine-tune their utterances to support the children's linguistic development.

Keywords

infant directed speechword acquisitionlanguage developmentmean length of utterance
Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , May 2021 , pp. 591 - 604
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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