The unintelligibility of speech to children

Journal of Child Language - Tập 10 Số 2 - Trang 265-292 - 1983
Ellen Gurman Bard1, Anne H. Anderson1
1University of Edinburgh

Tóm tắt

ABSTRACTWords 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.

Từ khóa


Tài liệu tham khảo

Cole, 1980, Perception and production of fluent speech

10.1016/S0022-5371(79)90145-2

10.4159/harvard.9780674732469

Erman, 1980, Trends in speech recognition

Newport, 1977, Talking to children

10.1126/science.127.3293.263

Nelson, 1977, Language learning and thought

Marslen-Wilson, 1978, Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech, CogPsychol, 10, 29

Smith, 1973, The acquisition of phonology: a case study

Phillips, 1973, Syntax and vocabulary of mothers' speech to young children: age and sex comparisons, ChDev, 44, 182

Lewis, 1973, Communication and affect, language and thought

Cross, 1977, Talking to children

Donaldson, 1978, Children's minds

Ringler N. M. (1973). Mothers' language to their children and to adults over time. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University.

Snow, 1977, Talking to children

Slobin, 1973, Studies of child language development

10.1159/000259996

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.

Remick, 1976, Maternal speech to children during language acquisition, Neurolinguistics, 5, 223

Shatz, 1978, On the development of communicative understandings: an early strategy for interpreting and responding to messages, CogPsychol, 10, 271

10.1016/S0022-5371(73)80014-3

Pollack, 1963, The intelligibility of excerpts from conversation, L and S, 6, 165

Lieberman, 1963, Some effects of semantic and grammatical context on the production and perception of speech, L and S, 6, 172

Garnica, 1977, Talking to children

Clark, 1977, Psychology and language: an introduction to psycholinguistics

Bowerman, 1977, Thinking

Nelson, 1981, Child language – an international perspective

Winer, 1971, Statistical principles in experimental design

10.1016/0022-5371(76)90023-2

Wilcox, 1982, Children's use of lexical and nonlexical information in responding to commands, JChLang, 9, 130

Sachs, 1977, Talking to children

Ingram, 1974, Phonological rules in young children, JChLang, 1, 49

Broen P. (1972). The verbal environment of the language-learning child. ASHA Monograph.