Are there lexical or syntactic differences in how SES groups perform different pragmatic functions in CDS?

ROSEMBERG CELIA RENATA; MIGDALEK MAIA; RAMÍREZ MARÍA LAURA

Encuentro; SRCD 2021 Biennial Meeting; 2021

Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children?s latter language development (Hart & Risley, 1995). In particular, child-directed speech (CDS) contribution to language development has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current linguistic competence (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1986). Some studies, mainly with North American and Western Europe populations (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991, 1998; Rowe, 2008) have provided evidence that the pragmatic function of CDS differs across socio-economic groups. Here we aim to analyze the pragmatic function of child directed utterances and their linguistic features in an understudied population from the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Specifically, the analysis focused on the distribution of utterances with different types of pragmatic functions addressed to low and middle SES children, as well as the lexical diversity and the syntactic complexity of each of these types of utterances. Forty children (age: 8-20 months) were recorded in their homes for 4 hours during daily life. Drawing on Snow et al. (1976) and Jackson-Maldonado et. al (2011), the pragmatic function of CDS utterances were coded in action requests, comments, information requests and rituals. The lexical diversity (VOCD) of each type of pragmatic utterance and their syntactic complexity (MLU) was analyzed using CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). Results showed significant SES differences between the relative number of certain types of pragmatic utterances: comments (t(38)=-4.072, SE=-10.63, p