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Differential responding to two- and three-year-olds' utterances: the roles of grammaticality and ambiguity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

David Furrow ,
Constance Baillie ,
Jennifer McLaren  and
Chris Moore
David Furrow*
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
Constance Baillie
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
Jennifer McLaren
Affiliation:
Mount Saint Vincent University
Chris Moore
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3M 2J6.
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Abstract

Mothers have been found to respond differently to grammatical and ungrammatical utterances in young children's language. However, parents indicate that they are conscious only of responding to communicative aspects of their children's speech, not grammar. Further, researchers have looked to the understandability of utterances to explain the effects of grammaticality on maternal responses. The present study addressed the question of whether it is actually grammatical form that mothers respond to, or whether it is ambiguity in the communicative functions of children's utterances. Three mother-child dyads were videotaped in a free play setting when the children were 2;0 and 3;0. Children's spontaneous comprehensible utterances were rated for grammaticality and ambiguity of function, and mothers' responses to them were noted. Results indicated that mothers responded differentially to both the ambiguity and grammaticality of children's utterances, and that these two factors had some degree of independence in their effects on mothers' responses.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 1993 , pp. 363 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a grant (No. 410–89–0352) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Chris Moore and David Furrow. We are grateful to Barbara D'Entremont for her assistance in statistical analyses, and to the students in our language acquisition classes for their coding.

References

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