Skip to main content
×
×
Home

The unintelligibility of speech to children*

  • Ellen Gurman Bard (a1) and Anne H. Anderson (a1)
Abstract

Words artificially isolated from twelve parents' speech to their children (aged 1; 10–3; 0) were significantly less intelligible to adult listeners than words originally spoken to an adult. This effect holds for randomly sampled words and, to a lesser extent, for matched pairs. While parents did not adjust the clarity of word tokens to the linguistic naiveté of the child listeners, they did adjust intelligibility inversely to the observed predictability of the sampled words in their sentence contexts, and words to children proved more redundant in this sense. The relationship of these findings to other work on the clarity of motherese is examined and the implications for the study of children's speech perception outlined.

Copyright
Footnotes
Hide All
[*]

The research reported here was supported by Social Science Research Council project grant HR 6130 to J. D. M. H. Laver and the first author. The authors wish to thank Dr T. G. Bower for help in obtaining informants and Dr Laver, Dr J. Marshall, Dr T. Pitcairn, Dr M. Donaldson-Salter and Mr P. Fisk for discussion of various aspects of the work. Any remaining errors are our own. Address for correspondence: E. G. Bard, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LL.

Footnotes
References
Hide All
Bowerman, M. (1977). The acquisition of word meaning: an investigation of some current conflicts. In Johnson-Laird, P. N. & Wason, P. C. (eds), Thinking. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Broen, P. (1972). The verbal environment of the language-learning child. ASHA Monograph.
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Clark, H. H. (1973). The language-as-fixed effect fallacy: a critique of language statistics in psychological research. JVLVB 12. 335–59.
Clark, H. H. & Clark, E. V. (1977). Psychology and language: an introduction to psycholinguistics. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Cole, R. & Jakimik, J. (1980). A model of speech perception. In Cole, R. (ed.), Perception and production of fluent speech. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Coleman, E. B. (1979). Generalization effects vs. random effects: is a source of Type 1 or Type 2 error? JVLVB 18. 243–56.
Cross, T. (1975). Mothers' speech and its association with the rate of linguistic development in young children. Paper presented at the Third International Child Language Symposium,London.
Cross, T. (1977). Mothers' speech adjustments: the contributions of selected listener variables. In Snow, C. & Ferguson, C. (eds), Talking to children. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Donaldson, M. (1978). Children's minds. Glasgow: Collins.
Erman, L. D. & Lesser, V. R. (1980). The HEARSAY-II speech understanding system: a tutorial. In Lea, W. (ed.), Trends in speech recognition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Garnica, O. (1977). Some prosodic and paralinguistic features of speech to young children. In Snow, C. & Ferguson, C. (eds), Talking to children. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Ingram, D. (1974). Phonological rules in young children. JChLang 1. 4964.
Lewis, M. & Freedle, R. (1973). Mother–infant dyad: the cradle of meaning. In Pliner, P., Crames, L. & Alloway, J. (eds), Communication and affect, language and thought. New York: Academic Press.
Lieberman, P. (1963). Some effects of semantic and grammatical context on the production and perception of speech. L & S 6. 172–5.
Marslen-Wilson, W. & Welsh, A. (1978). Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech. CogPsychol 10. 2963.
Nelson, K. (1977). The conceptual basis for naming. In Macnamara, J. (ed.), Language learning and thought. New York: Academic Press.
Nelson, K. E. (1981). Toward a rare-event cognitive comparison theory of syntax acquisition. In Dale, P. & Ingram, D. (eds), Child language – an international perspective. Baltimore: University Park Press.
Newport, E., Gleitman, H. & Gleitman, L. (1977). Mother, I'd rather do it myself: some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In Snow, C. & Ferguson, C. (eds), Talking to children. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Phillips, J. R. (1973). Syntax and vocabulary of mothers' speech to young children: age and sex comparisons. ChDev 44. 182–5.
Pollack, I. & Pickett, J. M. (1963). The intelligibility of excerpts from conversation. L & S 6. 165–71.
Remick, H. (1976). Maternal speech to children during language acquisition. Neurolinguistics 5. 223–33.
Ringler, N. M. (1973). Mothers' language to their children and to adults over time. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University.
Rosenzweig, M. K. & Postman, L. (1958). Frequency of usage and the perception of words. Science 127. 2636.
Sachs, J. (1977). The adaptive significance of linguistic input to prelinguistic infants. In Snow, C. & Ferguson, C. (eds), Talking to children. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Shatz, M. (1978). On the development of communicative understandings: an early strategy for interpreting and responding to messages. CogPsychol 10. 271301.
Shockey, L. & Bond, Z. S. (1980). Phonological processes in speech addressed to children. Phonetica 37. 267–74.
Slobin, D. I. (1973). Cognitive pre-requisites for the acquisition of grammar. In Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Smith, N. V. (1973). The acquisition of phonology: a case study. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Snow, C. (1977). Mothers' speech research: from input to interaction. In Snow, C. & Ferguson, C. (eds), Talking to children. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Wike, E. L. & Church, J. D. (1976). Comments on Clark's ‘The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy’. JVLVB 15. 249–55.
Wilcox, S. & Palermo, D. (1982). Children's use of lexical and nonlexical information in responding to commands. JChLang 9. 130–50.
Winer, B. (1971). Statistical principles in experimental design. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

Journal of Child Language
  • ISSN: 0305-0009
  • EISSN: 1469-7602
  • URL: /core/journals/journal-of-child-language
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *
×

Metrics

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 22 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 194 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between September 2016 - 13th June 2018. This data will be updated every 24 hours.