Maternal language to prelinguistic infants: syntactic aspects.
Maternal speech to children has been shown to vary by age and language ability of the children. Previous studies have usually involved children over 1 year of age. In this study maternal speech to male and female 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants was recorded in the laboratory. Mothers used shorter utterances to 8-month-olds than to 4- or 6-month-olds, presumably in response to the infant's changing level of comprehension. Mothers used more sentences with subjects, verbs, or objects deleted to 8-month-olds and more complex sentences to 4-month-olds.
D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008425:Maternal Behavior; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D013997:Time Factors