Adult Conversational Teaching Techniques

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Adults engage in very little direct language teaching, but they do facilitate their children's language acquisition. Although very little time is spent in direct instruction, many caregiving and experiential activities relate to language acquisition. Obviously, these parental techniques vary with the language maturity of a child and the culture and language involved. While several parental factors may affect children's language development, the level of maternal education seems to be most highly correlated (Dollaghan et al., 1999).

Adult Speech to Toddlers

The affect of a parent's behavior on her child's language acquisition varies with the age of the child (Masur, Flynn, & Eichorst, 2005). Around a child's first birthday, nonverbal behavior seems to influence her infant's vocabulary growth in a positive way. In contrast, maternal verbal behavior is more important for her child's vocabulary growth during the 13- to 17-month ages, especially her verbal responses to her child and her supportive directions. These changes reflect her child's increasing ability to comprehend and use verbal information. Intrusive verbal directions by the mother negatively influence vocabulary growth.

Throughout the first two years of life, parents talk with their children, label objects and events, and respond to their children's communication. It would be simplistic, however, to assume that a child just applies the labels heard to his or her pre-existing internal concepts. Meaning is also derived from the communication process (Levy & Nelson, 1994). Although words are constrained initially by the conversational context, they are later used more flexibly as a child encounters the word in other contexts and gradually modifies its meaning. Within the conversational context, parents aid acquisition by engaging in modeling, cueing, prompting, and responding behaviors that affect the linguistic behaviors of their children.

Modeling: Motherese (Parentese)

Children's speech occurs in conversation and generally serves to maintain the exchange. As noted previously, conversational behavior is well established by the time a child begins to speak. Almost from birth, a child encounters a facilitative verbal environment that enables him or her to participate as a conversational partner.

As a child's communication behaviors develop, its mother unconsciously modifies her own behaviors so that she requires more child participation. For example, the mother may not accept babbled responses once her child begins to use single words. Instead, she may respond to babbling with "What's that?"-a request for a restatement. In a second example, when the child follows her pointing, the mother may ask a question. Whether the child responds with a gesture or a smile, the mother will supply an answer. In a third example, once the child is able to vocalize, the mother "ups the ante" and withholds the names of objects or repeatedly asks the name until the child vocalizes. Then mother gives the label.

Word learning depends on the establishment of joint reference. Mothers are very effective at following their child's line of regard, then labeling the object of the child's attention. The more time allotted to such joint attending, the larger a child's vocabulary as a toddler (Akhtar, Dunham, & Dunham, 1991; Tomasello, Mannle, & Kruger, 1986). In short, a child is more likely to learn a symbol when focused on the referent as he or she is during joint attending (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). As might be expected, mismatches between the focus of a child's attending and the adult's labeling of that focus occur frequently-approximately 30 to 50 percent of the time (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986; Tomasello & Mannle, 1985). When this occurs, the caregiver attempts to redirect the child both nonverbally and verbally (Baldwin, 1993). As a result, 18-month-old toddlers may learn some words from only one exposure.

Although first words express semantic knowledge and a child's conversational intent, they are learned within interactive contexts. Those structures modeled most frequently by mothers are most likely to be used by their children. Data from English and Modern Hebrew demonstrate that nearly all the utterances of young children mirror patterns used by their mothers.

Initially mothers provide object names, but within a short time they begin to request labels from children. By the middle of the second year, mothers are labeling and requesting at approximately equal rates, and dialog is fully established. This dialog becomes the framework for a new routine. The mother begins to shape the child's speech by distinguishing more sharply between acceptable and unacceptable responses. The child's verbalizations are often responses that fill specific slots within the dialog, such as answering a question. Within the dialog, the mother provides consistency that aids her toddler's learning. These consistencies include the amount of time devoted to dialog, the number of turns, the repetition rate, the rate of confirmation, and the probability of reciprocating (Bruner, 1978).

In addition, mothers make other speech modifications that, taken together, are called motherese (Newport, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1977) or parentese. The characteristics of motherese are listed in the table below. Compared to adult-adult speech, motherese exhibits (a) greater pitch range, especially at the higher end; (b) lexical simplification characterized by the diminutive ("doggie") and syllable reduplication (consonant-verb syllable repetition); (c) shorter, less complex utterances; (d) less dysfluency; (e) more paraphrasing and repetition; (0 limited, concrete vocabulary and a restricted set of semantic relations; (g) more contextual support; and (h) more directives and questions.

As you know, mothers use a short utterances when conversing with their infants. They use even shorter, less adult utterances with toddlers. The lowering of a mother's MLU, beginning in the second half of a child's first year, is positively related to better receptive language skills by a child at 18 months of age, although there seems to be no measurable effect on expressive language (Murray et al., 1990). Mothers aid their baby's bootstrapping, mentioned previously, by maintaining semantic-syntactic consistency (Rondal & Cession, 1990). For example, in utterances addressed to children, mothers use agents as subjects almost exclusively. A mother's behavior makes it easier for her child to decipher the syntax of mother's utterances.

As her child's language matures, a mother's speech directed to a child likewise changes. Motherese seems well-tuned to the child's language level.

The amount of maternal speech, of partial repetitions of a child, of gestures accompanying speech, and of initiated statements commenting on her child's activity or eliciting attention vary with a child's overall language level. Thus, the dependence on nonlinguistic contextual cues, such as gestures, decreases with an increase in a child's linguistic abilities. These dynamic elements appear to be strongly related to a child's subsequent development. At age 2, the amount of shared attention and maternal gestures and relevant comments are positively correlated with a child's verbal learning a year later (Schmidt & Lawson, 2002).