The unintelligibility of speech to children: effects of referent availability.

Full Abstract

Speech addressed to children is supposed to be helpfully redundant, but redundant or predictable words addressed to adults tend to lose intelligibility. Word tokens extracted from the spontaneous speech of the parents of 12 children aged 1; 10 to 3; 0 and presented in isolation to adult listeners showed loss of intelligibility when the words were redundant because they had occurred in repetitions of an utterance (Experiment 1) or referred to an entity which was physically present when named (Experiment 2). Though children (N = 64; mean age 3; 5, S.D. 6.1 months) recognized fewer excerpted object names than adults (N = 40), less intelligible tokens appeared to induce child listeners to rely on the word's extra-linguistic context during the recognition process (Experiment 3), much as such tokens normally induce adults to rely on discourse context. It is proposed that interpreting parental utterances with reference to non-verbal context furthers linguistic development.

Author information

Author/s: Bard, E G (EG); Anderson, A H (AH);

Affiliation: HCRC, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of child language (J Child Lang), published in ENGLAND. (Language: eng)

Reference: 1994-Oct; vol 21 (issue 3) : pp 623-48

Dates: Created 1995/03/15; Completed 1995/03/15; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 7852475, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

External Links for this article
(including full text providers, if available):

Click Electronic Full-text Provider Links to see options for finding the electronic full text links to this article. Note there may be a subscription or fee required for access to the full text. See our FAQ for information on finding FREE full text articles.

This article may also be located in paper journal collections available in many libraries. Use the Journal and Publication Information above to find the full article.