child-directed speech

In LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, a term used for the whole range of DISTINCTIVE LINGUISTIC characteristics found in adult speech addressed to young children. In early studies it was frequently referred to as baby-talk (a term still widely used in popular parlance), but the notion includes far more than the often stereotyped use of endearing pronunciations and words (such as doggie, /den/ for then, etc.) and is primarily characterized with reference to the use of simplified SENTENCE STRUCTURES, and certain types of linguistic interaction (such as the expansion of a child’s sentence into a full adult form, e.g. Dadda gone ⇒ Yes, daddy’s gone). The study of baby-talk, or ‘language INPUT’, became a major focus of language acquisition studies in the early 1970s, a particular stimulus coming from SOCIOLINGUISTICS. An early argument of Chomsky’s was that child-directed speech was highly degenerate in quality (involving many errors, false starts, etc.), but later research has established a great deal that is systematic in the input of adults to children. The term is now uncommon in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS because of its apparent restriction to babies (as opposed to young children generally) and its ambiguity (talk by babies as well as to babies). It was replaced by MOTHERESE, and also by more general notions such as caregiver or caretaker speech, before the present term came to be widely used.