Tailoring the input to children’s needs

Subtitle:fine lexical tuning in infant directed speech: normally hearing infants and hearing impaired infants with a cochlear implant

We often speak differently to children than to adults: we call this child directed speech. We do this for several reasons: to attract and keep the child's attention, to show affection and to help the child learn the language. The current dissertation investigates child directed speech addressed to normally hearing (NH) children and children with a cochlear implant (CI). The current dissertation aimed to investigate the development of child directed speech during the first two years of the child’s life and to analyze and compare speech directed to children with CI with speech directed to NH children. We were particularly interested in child directed speech as a dynamic phenomenon. Parents seem to adapt their language to the language level, and specifically the use of words, of their child. In doing so, they make use of fine lexical tuning. The current thesis investigated how parents use fine lexical tuning in different aspects of their speech, namely utterance length, articulation and the use of grammatical inflections. This has been investigated by comparing the use of certain words in parents' speech with the children's word births. When a child uses a word for the first time, we speak of a word birth. In this study we compare the use of a certain word from nine months before word birth and follow the evolution up to six months after word birth. The results show that in the period before word birth, parents start to articulate the vowels more and more clearly, until the moment their child pronounces the word itself. After that, the articulation of the vowels of that particular word becomes a lot less clear again. Fine lexical tuning was also found in other aspects, such as utterance length and the use of grammatical inflections. Parents appear to have tacit knowledge of the words their children are learning and tailor their speech specifically to their child's word knowledge. Moreover, this thesis showed that parents adapt their speech to their child's hearing status, as parents of children with CI speak with shorter sentences, clearer articulation and with fewer word inflections.

Publication year:2022

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Open