clarification and the child's learning of grammar

Clarification and the Child's Learning of Grammar

Paul Fletcher

University of Reading

ABSTRACT

The notion of clarification in language addressed to children was introduced by Ferguson, following a distinction made by Hockett between what he called frequency and clarity norms. The term is intended by Ferguson to be a descriptive label for some of the characteristics of motherese, but it has functional implications. If mothers 'clarify' their speech, particularly by slowing it down so that what is normally unstressed or reduced in speech becomes stressed or full, then relationships among grammatical items often obscured in fast speech may become apparent in a 'clarified' variety. This paper reviews work by Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman (NGG) which appears to indicate that there is a correlation between certain clarified forms in maternal speech - auxiliary-initial structures - and growth of auxiliaries in the child.

Evidence is examined, from corpora available to the author, which bears on maternal use of auxiliaries in English, and the characteristics of auxiliary growth in children's language. We will consider types of auxiliaries and their phonetic realizations, in detail, in relation to three questions: (a) How 'clarified' are auxiliaries in input language? (b) How close is the relationship between mother's use of auxiliaries and their growth

in the child? (c) To what extent is the child's use of auxiliaries based on what we might want to

call syntactic generalizations?

A general con t en t ion o f this paper is that i f we want to learn about the process

o f language acquisi t ion in children, part icularly wi th respect to certain aspects o f

syntax, we need to pay closer a t ten t ion to the phonet ic details o f the data available

to them, and to the phonet ic characterist ics o f the language they use. For too long

we have assumed that the data they are presented with is in the form o f the

or thographic t ranscript ions in which we record their conversat ion, and this has led

to some systematic mis in te rpre ta t ion o f aspects o f chi ldren 's language ability and

what underl ies it. This is part icularly relevant in the area that I have been interested

94 Language Sciences, Volume 6, Number 1 (1984)

in, the acquisition of auxiliaries and verb inflections. Here, writing grammars of transcriptions, rather than of what the transcriptions stand for, has led to misleading description and theorizing. For us to learn about the child's transition from sound to syntax, we need to pay more attention to sound and make fewer assumptions about syntax, in the early years of language development.

This general point will be justified in detail by examining aspects of verb-form development. The syntactic and semantic importance of the categories in English included under this heading needs no rehearsal; I would, however, like to embed the discussion of my own data in the more general issue of the relationship between input language and language acquisition, not least because this is a topic of obvious relevance to language intervention. Recently, the crude opposition of nativist vs. environmentalist, with reference to explanation in language acquisition, has been replaced by a more subtle view of the interaction between the child's own resources and the characteristics of the language he hears. A particularly articulate and industrious group (henceforth GNG) headed by L. Gleitman (see for example Gleitman 1981, Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman 1977, and Gleitman, Newport, and Gleitman 1984) has been influential in (in their own words) 'identifying subcomponents of language that are more or less environmentally influenced at particular learning periods'. Now, the idea of specific environmental effects is an exciting one for those working in language development, because it offers a liberation from the sterility of the nativist/environmentalist dichotomy.

Of central importance is the claim by Gleitman et aL that the 'effects of maternal speech are significantly modulated by biases in the child learner about how to store and manipulate incoming information'. The way in which the child learns

is not simply a straightforward response to the linguistic environment; it is an interaction between his learning biases and incoming information. The data to back

up these claims come from 15 mother-child pairs whose conversations were recorded at six-month intervals; at the first recording time the children were aged 12 to 27 months. Child growth scores on various measures were calculated between the first recording time and the second, and aspects of maternal speech at Time I correlated

with the growth scores. Ten measures of maternal speech were used. These included measures on sentence-type (e.g., the incidence of Declaratives, Yes-No Questions,

Wh-questions), Expansions and Repetitions, MLU, and with reference to the ratio of simple to complex sentences in the data, a measure termed S-nodes per utterance. For the children, MLU was calculated, along with two other general categories of growth - grammatical functor measures (auxiliaries per verb-phrase and inflections per noun-phrase), and propositional content measures (verbs per utterance and noun phrases per utterance). Of the resulting fifty cells in a correlation matrix, only four were significant; our interest focuses on two of these. One is a highly significant positive correlation between the maternal use of yes-no questions and the child's

Clarification and the Child's Learning of Grammar 95

auxiliaries/verb-phrase growth; the other is a significant negative correlation between the use of imperatives and the growth of auxiliaries. These correlations indicate that mothers who use initial auxiliaries at Time 1 will find their children tending to use more auxiliaries at Time z than mothers who act otherwise, z

The paucity of correlations overall is used by GNG to argue for the limited effect of environment on language growth; and the yes/no question-auxiliary growth relation to construct a plausible argument as to why this particular feature of maternal language should have an effect on learning rate. Specifically, it is the initial

position of the auxiliary in yes/no questions which has the consequence (they claim) that it is stressed and uncontracted, 3 which facilitates the learning of auxiliaries by

children. (Of course, I must make clear that GNG are very chreful never to interpret the correlations they compute as indicating cause-effect relations; the argument they construct is offered as a plausible one from which hypotheses can be formulated.) This phonetic hypothesis in itself is intriguing, and is a notion to which we shall return. But there is a further piece of the argument which links the GNG findings to the broader context of current language learning theories (e.g., Wexler and Culicover 1980). For these learnability theories to work, they require that the learner hear data of moderate complexity: it must be at least complex enough to provide information about transformational relationships in the language. There is no point in having the input so simple that the relationship between, for example, will you eat your toast and you will eat your toast is never available to the child. He needs this kind of data in order to appreciate the structure dependence of the rule in English that moves the first auxiliary of the declarative form to a position in front of the subject NP for the interrogative. Within the theory we are considering he will expect structure dependence by virtue of his innate resources, but he will need evidence as to how this is instantiated. Thus, more complex input, which lays bare the relationships, will be of more use to him than arguably simpler input in which only declaratives, say, appear. The yes/no question-auxiliary growth relation, it is suggested, carries the further possibility that the more the mother introduces this form into the input, the more likely the child is to intuit the question-declarative relationship that will be a crucial part of his grammar. In a field notably lacking in explanatory hypotheses which can be addressed by data, the attraction of this elegant linkage of learnability theory, linguistics, and language acquisition data is

very obvious. Now, if GNG are to be seen to be right about the route children take from sound

to syntax in respect of auxiliaries, two important conditions must be maintained: it has to be the case that the auxiliaries in input are clarified, that is, stressed and uncontracted, and in addition there should be evidence that children make the syntactic generalization that the elements in pre-subject position and those in post- subject position belong to the same category. We will consider these issues in turn.


The idea that (a) non-contracted and stressed forms favor learning and (b) that such forms are to be found in the input to children is not unique to GNG and their

sentence-initial auxiliaries. The two strands of this assumption are often collapsed

under what I will call, after Ferguson (1977), the clarification hypothesis. In his 1977 paper Ferguson isolated three general categories o f modification in maternal

language, which he called simplifying, expressive-identifying and clarifying. The term

'clarifying' comes from Hockett (1955: 220) who contrasted what he called 'clarity' and 'frequency' norm phonological analysis. A phonological description based on a

clarity norm takes as its data a slow, careful articulation of speech which preserves full vowel forms, does not simplify final clusters and does not evince a variety of

assimilation features. A frequency norm phonological analysis insists on 'accepting

. . . a n y utterance which is produced by a native-speaker and understood, or understandable, by other native-speakers'. The frequency norm analysis, therefore,

treats the 'reduced' and 'simplified' forms of fast conversation directly, and does not

derive them from canonical forms. There is a general assumption in the literature

that mothers provide children with a clarity norm as the result of speaking more

slowly: a natural consequence of speaking slowly is to pronounce words more nearly like their canonical forms. 4 For Ferguson the term 'clarification' is a purely

descriptive label, but it has the seeds of a hypothesis in it. The phonetic effects

of slower speech on the mother's output makes that output 'clearer' for the child;

one might even suppose that if the clarifications have the effect o f reducing the

number of phonetic variants a lexeme has in the input, then not only will

phonological generalizations be easier to make, but morphological and syntactic

relations will be more readily accessible. We can see emerging here yet another

example of the linguist/child analogy. Whatever Hockett may have considered

desirable, the general practice among linguists setting up phonological descriptions

is to use clarity norms to set up lexical entries in terms of canonical forms, and then

to relate these systematic phonemic level forms to the phonetically reduced, simplified or assimilated forms of fast speech by rule; the fast speech forms are

derived from the clarified forms. As the linguist, so the child; it is surely easier, or

so we would assume, for the child to organize his lexical entries on the basis of the canonical forms, and then cope with the complexities o f fast speech later, when he

has laid the foundations. This may seem logical and reasonable, but does it fit the facts? Can we say generally that speech to children is clarified in the way it has been

supposed, and can we in particular assume that auxiliaries in initial position are clarified, that is, are stressed and uncontracted?

The number of data-based studies looking at the issue of clarification generally is limited, the nature of the data and the dependent variables vary, and the area

obviously needs further study. Nevertheless, a brief review at this point will be

helpful. There is one study (Shockey and Bond 1980) which bears on assimilation.

Clarification and the (]rild's Learning of Grammar 97

The data source was a group of eight mother-child pairs study (the exact ages of the

children are not reported, though the range is 2-4 years), and mother-child, mother-

adult conversations were recorded in an informal setting. The recorded samples were

analyzed in terms of the frequency of four assimilatory processes common in the local accent (that of Colchester, England). One of the rules is palatalization o f

word-final alveolar stops before a glide (e.g. [hit + ju:] > [hltj 'u:]). This rule, like

the others, is variable - it is not applied every time the structural description for its

application is met. The data Shockey and Bond present are somewhat unsatisfactory in that the mother-adult base is much smaller than that of mother to child.

Nevertheless, it appears that the palatalization rule, for example, applies in speech to

children about one-third of the time its SD is met, whereas in speech to adults the

proportion is about one sixth. This is the opposite effect to that expected if speech

to children is clarified by comparison to that to adults. Shockey and Bond find similar results with their remaining three processes.

Another study which may seem to cast doubt on the clarification hypothesis generally is that of Bard and Anderson (1983). They tested the assumption that

parental speech to children would be more intelligible than speech to adults, by

asking adult subjects to identify words segmented from both kinds o f speech. They found that their listener judgements provided exactly the opposite finding to the one

expected; words spoken to children are, in isolation, less intelligible than the same words spoken to adults. It is worth quoting here the first part of the conclusion to

Bard and Anderson's paper:

The work reported here was originally intended to protect language acquisition theories against the complications attendant on considering the problems of speech recognition in the linguistically naive. It has not fulfilled this aim, because parental speech is not easier to decipher, word for word, than ordinary conversational speech, but very dependably harder to decipher 1983 (288).

In other words, if these findings are generalizable, the child has to deal with fast speech (or at least with some form of non-clarified speech) at the beginning, and has

to construct phonological and syntactic representations on this basis. There are, however, two recent studies which seem to make the clarification

hypothesis more plausible. Malsheen (1980) examined voice onset times in plosives

in mother-child and mother-adult conversation, to children in the earliest stages of language-learning. She found that mothers speaking to holophrastic children would

reduce the oyerlap in their VOT times which tended to appear when they were

talking to adults. To adults, VOT times for voiced targets tended to stray into the long lag region and vice versa; this tendency was much less obvious to the early

language learners for whom, in general, short lag was preserved for voiced plosive

targets, and long lag for voiceless. Another detailed phonetic study is that by


Bernstein (1982), which considers the characteristics o f vowels in speech to children

as compared to speech with other adults. Her claim is that vowels do undergo clarification processes in speech to children; however, the kinds of words that

undergo clarification differ at different stages o f the child's development. At the

holophrastic stage, only maternal content word vowels were clarified; when children were producing three to four word utterances, they heard clarified vowels for function words as well. Clarification, in Bernstein's sense, means 'peripheralizing'

vowels so that they are maximally distinct. The general picture on clarification is, therefore, somewhat confused; in additon,

while Bernstein's function words presumably include auxiliaries, there is no specific

analysis o f them in her account. It is time, therefore, to examine some data of our own in order to assess the claim, on which so much depends, that auxiliaries in initial

position are 'clarified' or 'stressed and uncontracted' in input to children. The data comes from an intensive longitudinal study of a single child (see

Fletcher 1982a). The advantages and drawbacks o f such data bases are well-known.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the natural history o f the development

o f auxiliaries and inflections in British English in rather more detail than previous

studies. A large part of the data consist of conversations between mother and child,

and it covers the period from 2;4 to 4;4. It can, therefore, be used as a case-study of maternal auxiliary use and the development of these forms in the child. Before

examining an analysis of maternal auxiliary use at 2;4 and the child's changing use

between 2;4 and 2;10 (detailed in Malan 1983) we should consider the range of

auxiliary forms to be found in adult to adult speech. Take for example have, used as

an auxiliary. We might expect the following range of forms, from most careful to least careful, in the pronunciation of a sentence orthographically transcribed as

have y o u go t a match?: [ha~v ~ hov ~ ov ~ v ] . That is, the phonetic realization of the sentence-initial auxiliary may be as reduced as a labio-dental fricative o f brief

duration. Similar variants can be listed for other auxiliaries:

Orthographic Phonetic Variants Transcription Forms

will [wll ~ wol ~ ol ~1]

can [kaen ~ kon ~ k.n]

shall [fael ~ fol ~ f ! ~ f ] do [du: ~ do ~ d]

did [did ~ d]

is [ I z ~ az ~ z] am [aem ~ ~m ~ m]

are [a: ~ a ]


These are the forms we can expect in adult to adult speech. What happens in speech to children (or at least, the speech of one British mother to her child)?

There are two interesting features of the data analyzed by Malan, which seems in general to fit well the view of phonetic input characteristics taken by Shockey

and Bond, and Bard and Anderson, and do not accord with the view that input

generally, or auxiliaries in particular, are clarified:

(1) The range of sentence initial auxiliaries used to the child is restricted.

Approximately 70% of the forms are accounted for by six auxiliary types, as

follows:

shall

are is have

do did

.20

.13

.11

.09

.08

.08 (2) The majority of auxiliaries used to the child are unstressed: the proportion o f

initial unstressed auxiliaries is 82%, which is a remarkable figure in relation to

the GNG hypothesis. If we look at the most commonsentence-initial auxiliary

shall, all but one o f its occurrences fall into the unstressed category, with shall

we realized as [f~wt:] or simply [ f w c ] , in some cases. When initial are (which

accounted for 13% of initial auxiliary forms) was realized, it was contracted to a brief, unstressed [a ]. Forms of have and do also tended to be reduced, with

have realized as [hay] or [av], and do you realized as [dsu: ] . Malan's analysis suggests that, for this mother-child pair at least, initial auxiliaries in mother-

child speech are as prone to reduction and contraction as medial auxiliaries (and

as we know they are in adult-adult speech).

With this in mind, how is the mother's use o f auxiliaries at Time I , both in range t

and phonetic character, reflected in the child's forms at Time2? (a) The distribution o f fronted auxiliaries displayed broad similarities with those in

the maternal data. The majority belonged to the modal and BE categories,

which were those used most frequently by the mother in yes/no questions at

the earlier stage. However, out of the modals used by the child, 80 were forms o f CAN, which was a modal hardly used by the mother at Time 1. Whether or

not this is a local peculiarity of our data or not is impossible to tell, since GNG treat auxiliary as a general category, and do not provide figures for individual

auxiliaries, or even for sub-groups like 'modal ' and 'other' . If this feature o f our data does turn out to be more general, the GNG way of treating their results

could be misleading. A significant correlation based on a category 'auxiliary' is open to a radically different interpretation than the one reported, if different

members o f the category are represented in the mother's and child's speech.


(b) Phonetic characteristics of the input forms, for those maternal auxiliaries at

Time 1 that were used by the child at Time2, tended to be maintained by the child. Occurrences of shall, reduced in the mother's speech, were similarly

reduced by the child. Forms of is, which were produced as [zz] by the mother, were maintained as [IZ] by the child; and the child tended not to use are, which

had been pronounced at Time i as [ a ] by her mother.

We must, of course, be cautious about drawing any hard and fast conclusions on the basis of data from a single mother-child pair. But let us for the moment act

as if we can, and consider what effect these data have on the GNG hypothesis. First, whatever it is that may enable the child to 'track and store' auxiliaries

across non-initial and initial positions in structures, it is not the salience o f stressed items in initial position. There is no evidence in our data that auxiliaries in initial

position are stressed or unreduced. This fact puts in some doubt the second

assumption that GNG make, that it is a comparison of the 'medial, unstressed' with their initial, stressed counterparts, together with his disposition to expect structure-

dependent movement rules, which enables the child to make the appropriate

generalizations about subject-auxiliary inversion. If anything, the fact that the initial

auxiliaries are phonetically similar to their medial counterparts should make identification, in the cases where it is appropriate, relatively straightforward and so

reduce the explanatory load on an innate disposition - but that is a point we will

return to.

The second point that is clear from our data is that the range o f auxiliaries used

in initial position and that used in medial position is asymmetrical. Shall, for

example, which is (according to Palmer 1974) a discourse-oriented form, referring

to an activity initiated by one of the participants in a conversation, only appears in

initial position. Its restricted meaning effectively limits it, for both mother and

child, to initial position, and the question of generalization across initial and medial

positions does not arise. Third the number of non-modal auxiliaries used, apart from is, is vanishingly small at this stage in the child's development. There are occasional

forms o f do or did (do Tony go there, did he march [ ~ ] mens down), and occasional

have forms; the occurrence of these is limited to the verb got: e.g., have you got a

red one o f these. Given that the modals are normally used not to ask questions but to initiate or request permission for action, and taking this together with the

positional asymmetry o f forms like shall, and the very limited use of other forms,

it would appear that conclusions about subject-auxiliary inversion generalizations the

child may have made, at around the age of three, are premature to say the least.

If the two crucial conditions for the GNG hypothesis, namely, auxiliary clarification and the existence o f structure-dependent generalizations are seen not to hold, where

does that leave us in relation to explaining normal language acquisition? The link

between input and acquisition, the interaction between the child's internal and

Clarification and the (3fild's Learning of Grammar 101

external resources, which looked like being a fruitful source of hypotheses, has not

been maintained. Let us consider normal language acquisition again, in the linght of the new

evidence. There is no question that the three-year-old uses some auxiliary forms, in

both medial and initial position. There appears to be a relatively close relationship

between the forms used earlier by the mother and those used later by the child, both in terms of the types of auxiliaries used and their phonetic shape. There seems at

least room for doubt, though, that a subject-auxiliary inversion rule underlies all aspects of the child's auxiliary use. There is, however, no necessary reason why all

aspects of the child's language have to be rule-governed, simply because these aspects

are assumed to be rule-governed in the adult language. There are several places in

the literature where it is argued that what could be interpreted, from an

adultocentric point of view, as rule-based structures of a particular kind could

be achieved by the child by alternative strategies. Chomsky (1980: 54) suggests that the child's early two and three word utterances may be based on semantic categories.

Matthews (1981: 187) argues that sentences the child uses may be based on

'collocational schemata' rather than generated by rule; and Ingram (1975) makes a

similar point in relation to sentences like I saw the man you like. This can be

considered as a complex sentence with a relative clause you like the man embedded

into a matrix clause I saw the man. Rules deleting coreferential NPs and the optional

relative marker would produce the sentence I saw the man you like. In an adult corpus, this may well be the description given the sentence. But if a four-year-old

produced it, how are we to know that it is not the result of a low-level strategy which

involves the concatenation of two simple sentences I saw the man, and you like?

Given that we do not have the child's intuitions available to us, we have to look very

closely at the corpus he produces. If we fred that in that corpus the only relative

clauses produced are of the kind that can be produced by putting together simple

clauses, and there are no relative clauses where the antecedent becomes subject

(he kissed the girl that likes you), then our suspicions of a low-level strategy being

brought to bear, rather than the full resources of the grammar, would seem well-

founded. The general point is one that was nicely made by Lenneberg: it is not legitimate

to assume that a form used by a child has the same systemic value as it would have

when used by an adult. To relate it to our present concerns, it seems as if premature

assumptions about subject-auxiliary inversion have been made which on closer

examination of the data seem inappropriate. The child we have looked at seems

capable of picking up and using certain auxiliaries appropriately, without the benefit of a syntactic generalization. A closer look at the sounds the child hears and uses suggest an interpretation of language development that is radically different to that

implicit in the clarification hypothesis and explicit in the GNG account of auxiliary


learning. Instead of operating with clarified forms, it seems as if the child is given fast

speech forms from the start, and instead of having syntactic relations laid out for him at the beginning, as it were, he has to get from the fast speech forms to the syntactic representation. Now, in some respects, the fact that initial auxiliaries may be unstressed and reduced will help recognition that they are the same form, because unstressed can initially ([k~n] [k~]) will be very similar to medial can ([Ion]

[kn] ); similarly, have initially ([hay] [,~v] [v] ) will resemble medial have forms

because they are both unstressed. We know from the speed with which children

extract morphological regularities that phonetic similarities with consistent and relatively transparent semantic function are salient enough for the three-year-old to

fasten onto, even if they are relatively brief and certainly unstressed. This is best documented in the case of verb endings. The child whose auxiliaries we examined earlier, for example, at Time 2 had, unusually, overgeneralized the -en ending on

verbs like broken, taken, to other verbs like putten, maden which are not marked in this way in English (see Fletcher 1982b for details). So she used the -en form

without an auxiliary to refer to past events in utterances like me maden that, me

haden strawberries at lunchtime, in that shop where y o u getten m y slides. The

strategy seems initially to have been phonologically based - she applied it only to

verbs which ended in alveolar stops - but then became more general. She gave it up and reverted to correct past tense endings at about 3 ;4.

If she can recognize and generalize the syllable [an] paradigmatically at this age,

then there seems no reason why she could not, for example, generalize [kan] syntagmaticaUy, across initial and medial sentence positions. But it seems unlikely that she would be able to do this with the various forms of be immediately, or recognize the relevance of do/did initially as tense-carriers, or understand that medial 'll ( [ a l ] ) can be a counterpart of both will and shall, s The system will, to begin with, be only partial: the route from sound to syntax, so far as the auxiliary system is concerned, must be longer and slower than might have been supposed, and it may well be that some aspects of it are not incorporated into a system by the child until she has had the opportunity to compare whatever representation she has made on the basis of sound in the input, to the more transparent relationships embodied in the orthography.

The analysis of a single child, and a British child at that, can in no way be said to have replicated Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1977), or superseded their reanalysis of their original results (Gleitman, Newport, and Gleitman, in press). Nevertheless, the data reported here are intriguing enough to suggest that a replication on normal (British English) children would be useful, to determine if the absence of clarification in respect of initial auxiliaries is a general phenomenon, and if there is as close a link between individual maternal auxiliaries, and those used by

Clarification and the Ofild's Learning of Grammar 105

the child, as the GNG correlations seem to suggest. At the beginning of this paper, we highlighted the GNG explanation of the development of auxiliaries in terms of an interaction between aspects of the input and specific internal resources. The kind of resource envisaged was a principle, like the expectation or structure-dependence, on which the child (and the linguist) need to rely in order to make the appropriate generalizations for subject-auxiliary inversion. Whether or not a structure-dependency expectation is part of the child's language-learning equipment, we do not know. Nor is there anything in the argument developed here that can bear directly on its existence, s Nevertheless, it seems possible that lack of attention to the phonetic data available to (and used by) the child may have over-estimated the extent of syntactic generalization made by the child in respect of auxiliaries, and so over- emphasised the role of structure dependence. A more realistic appraisal of the characteristics of child speech and child directed speech is required to resolve these

issues. The road from sound to syntax may be lengthier and more circuitous than reliance on orthographic transcriptions would have us suppose.

NOTES

* This research was supported in part by the SSRC under Grant no. HR 9674. Address for correspondence: Department of Linguistic Science, University of

Reading, Reading, RG6 2AA, UK. 1. It is quite possible that imperative use and yes/no question use reflect two

different styles of child-direction on the part of the mothers in the study. 'Yes/no question' is a misnomer for the forms the mothers in this study were likely to be using, which are usuaUy can- and will- initial structures functioning as indirect commands. So, for example, similar contexts might elicit from one mother the imperative 'eat your toast', but from another the 'yes/no question' wi l l you ea t your toast. The forms are distinct but their function is the same.

2. GNG do not make clear what they mean here by 'stressed'. The claim, it must be emphasized, would make input to children quite unlike adult-adult conversation as far as initial auxiliaries are concerned. Adults would usually only stress these forms contrastively. Some initial auxiliaries could be regarded as 'uncontracted', in relation to their medial counterparts (e.g., forms of will

initially all have an initial [w], while medially the contracted form is either

[1] or [al ]). This could not, however, be said of all members of the category. We will assume, for the sake of argument, that GNG are claiming that, whether or not initial auxiliaries are stressed, their realizations are much closer to canonical forms than their medial counterparts, and for simplicity's sake will

refer to them as 'clarified'. 3. The assumption the mothers adopt 'lento' speech when addressing their children


4.

5.

is widespread, though there appears to be little empirical support. The two most commonly cited studies are Garnica (1977) and Broen (1972). Garnica's study suggests only that the duration of some content words (verbs and color terms) may be longer in speech to young children than in adult to adult speech, and that in sentences like 'take the green square', there may be two primary stresses rather than the usual one. Broen assess rate of speech by using words-per-minute (averaged over a five minute span) in mother's speech to younger and older children under two conditions, free-play and story-teUing. The rate to adults was checked by recording mother talking to experimenter. Since words per minute in free play is likely to provide spuriously low figures (because of the likely incidence of pause), the only reasonable comparison in this data is between the mother story-telling, and talking to the experimenter. This produces (for speech to younger children) figures of 115 wpm and 132 wpm. This difference seems too small to support the assumption of an overall difference in speech rate in motherese. As Kaiise (1983) points out, some relationships between the canonical and reduced forms of some auxiliaries are not predictable from other phonological relationships. So, while the child may be able to relate is ([ iz]) t o ' s ([z]) by analogy with the plural, there is no such clue elsewhere to the relationship between will ([wll]) and 'll ( [a l ] ) . It is simply that, if it is the case that a number of auxiliary forms tend to be phonetically similar across different places in sentence structure, and children do in those cases make the connection, the principle of structure dependence bears less of an explanatory load than if the auxiliaries in the two positions were phonetically quite different. (For arguments in favor of such an explanatory principle, see Chomsky 1980b: 39, White 1981: 243).

R E F E R E N C E S

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Language, 10. 265-92. Bernstein, N.E.

1982 "An Acoustic Study of Mothers' Speech to Language-Learning Children," Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston University.

Broen, Patricia 1972 The Verbal Environment of the Language-Learning Child," ASHA

Monograph 17. Chomsky, Noam

1980 Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University Press.


Ferguson, Charles A. 1977 "Baby Talk as a Simplified Register," in Talking to Children. pp.

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Fletcher, Paul 1982a The Acquisition of English Perfective Forms and Function~ Final

Report, SSRC Grant No. HR 6974. 1982b "Verb-Form Development: Lexis or Grammar?" in Proceedings of the

Second International Congress of Child Language. C. Thew and C. Johson (eds.), Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.

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