The pragmatic function and lexical diversity of utterances addressed to argentinian children from middle and low SES

RAMIREZ, MARÍA LAURA; QUIROGA, MACARENA SOL; ROSEMBERG, CELIA RENATA

Congreso; International Association for the Study of Child Language; 2021

Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children?s latter language development (Hart & Risley, 1995). Differences in the pragmatic function of child-directed speech (CDS) has been related to SES disparities in populations that differed socio-culturally and linguistically from the one of Argentina. 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). This work aims to analyze the pragmatic function of CDS addressed to low and middle SES children from Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. Twenty 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 was coded in petitions of action, comments and requests of new or known information. The lexical diversity (VOCD) of each type of pragmatic utterance was 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<0.001) were more frequent in the middle-SES group; petitions of action  (t(18)=4,185, SE=4,946, p=,001) were more frequent in the low-SES group. VOCD could only be measured for three pragmatic functions. Results showed no SES differences but significant differences between pragmatic functions. Lexical diversity was significantly higher for contextualize talk (t(36)=-3,899, SE=4,266, p<0.001) followed by action request (t(36)=6,006 SE=2,937, p<0.001) and finally requests for new information (t(34)=8,260, SE=4,149, p<0.001).