title: 'There car': ungrammatical parentese.
abstract: This study of parents with their children demonstrates irregular and unpredictable grammatical features in their child-directed speech. The parents were observed quarterly in parent-child interaction with their oldest child beginning when she was two-years old, and with their younger twin daughters beginning when they reached two years. Language samples were transcribed and analyzed using CHILDES. The parents used grammatical speech with adults. A high proportion (8% to 32% per session) of their utterances to the children contained non-dialectal errors, primarily omissions of closed-class items. A typical example was 'she a puppet'. The evidence suggests these parents were trying to teach their children language. Their implicit theories of language and learning led to a highly unusual variant of parentese.
authors.affiliation: University of Pitsburgh.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chafetz
authors.forename: H M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Feldman
authors.forename: N L
authors.initials: NL
authors.lastname: Wareham
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D010290:Parents; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014743:Videotape Recording