Socio-economic related differences in the use of variation sets in naturalistic child directed speech. A study with Argentinian population

ROSEMBERG C. R.; ALAM F.; GARBER, L.; STEIN A.; MIGDALEK M. J.

Montreal

Encuentro; 41 st Annual Meething of the Cognitive Science Society; 2019

University of Manitoba- Department of Psychology

Child directed speech (CDS) compared to speech between adults, shows a higher amount of repetitiveness (Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1977; Söderström, 2007), in particular of naturally occurring clusters of speech with sequences of self repetitions.● This structural phenomena, known as variation sets (Küntay & Slobin, 1996, 2002) imply partial variations in form but a constant intention and have been found to be beneficial for learning (Waterfall, 2006; Onnis et al., 2008).Why to look at the naturalistic environments?● Previous studies focused on the behaviour of variation sets in languages such as Swedish, Croatian, English, Russian, and Hebrew (Wiren et.al, 2016; Tal & Arnon, 2018) were based on data from child-parent dyadic interactions during play in relatively brief elicited situations in the home or in the lab.● Delimited play situations in time, space and objects are likely to elicit dense language input whereas language in everyday routines flows naturally, shows fluctuations, interspersed with silence (Bergelson, 2019), and frequent overlapping conversations among participants (Schegloff, 2000). This might affect the structural properties of CDS.Why to look at SES differences?● Although previous findings indicated socio-economic status? (SES) effects on the quantity of variation sets in Child DirectedSpeech (CDS), they were based on data from child-parent dyadic interactions in play situations (Tal & Arnon, 2018).● SES comprises interrelated factors affecting children?s quotidianity (e.g. different levels of family education, neighborhood,household density, number of participants, etc.). These factors might relate in different ways in diverse cultural contexts (Psaki etal., 2014), and might affect CDS features differently (Pace, 2017)