The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics

Overview

The nature of caregivers' speech to young children has been investigated to examine how it varies as a function of children's age or linguistic ability. Research shows that caregivers' speech styles vary in several dimensions: para-linguistic dimension (e.g. the height and range of pitch), syntactic dimension (e.g. simplicity), lexical dimension (e.g. baby-talk words), semantic dimension (e.g. references to here and now), and discourse dimension (e.g. repetition) (Garton, 1992). Research also reveals that caregivers tune their speech to the children's age or linguistic ability for some dimensions (Snow, 1995).

Another set of studies addressed the effects of caregivers' speech on the timing of language development and style of language acquisition by children. Studies have examined the proportions of directive or descriptive utterances and utterances including nouns or verbs to see whether they are related to the patterns of language acquisition by children (Pine, Lieven & Rowland, 1997). Maternal responsiveness affects the timing of language development in children (Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein & Baumwell, 2001).

Furthermore, since the 1980s, investigations have focused on the caregiver–child pair as a unit, based on the view that children develop through their active participation in interactions with their companions (e.g. Rogoff, 1990). In these studies, conversations between children and their caregivers have been an important focus, because language acquisition is thought to be embedded in a sociocultural context.

Comparative studies between Japan and North America revealed that Japanese mothers are more affection or empathy oriented and less information oriented than North American mothers (e.g. Bornstein et al., 1992).