Socio-economic status related differences in the pragmatic characteristics of child directed speech.

RAMÍREZ MARÍA LAURA

Mendoza

Workshop; ISSBD REGIONAL WORKSHOP; 2019

Early linguistic environment has been shown to have an impact on children?s language development (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003; Huttenlocher et al., 2002). Differences in the pragmatic functions of child-directed speech (CDS) has been related to socioeconomic (SES) disparities (Hart & Risley, 1995; Mastin et al., 2016) in populations that differed socio-culturally and linguistically from the Argentinian population. This work aims to analyze the pragmatic functions of the CDS addressed to low and middle SES children from the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. Twenty children (age: 8-20 months) were recorded for 4 hours during daily activities. The pragmatic functions of CDS utterances were determined using a coding system that draws on the proposals of Snow et al. (1976) and Jackson-Maldonado et. al (2011). Lexical properties were analyzed using CLAN. Results showed significant SES differences between the relative number of certain types of pragmatic utterances: requests for new information (t(18)=-2,653, SE=-4,700, p=,016) and comments about present objects or states (t(18)=-4,277, SE=-13,800, p