CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH (CDS)
A speech register used by adults when addressing infants. Also known as motherese, parentese, caretaker talk, baby talk.
Parents simplify their speech in consistent ways when speaking to children. For English speakers, the linguistic modifications include:
Phonological features: simplification, higher pitch, emphatic stress, greater pausing, longer pauses, a slower speech rate.
Lexical features: restricted vocabulary, local topics, special forms.
Syntactic features: shorter utterances, less complex utterances.
In addition, CDS is characterised by less dysfluency than adult speech and much repetition and rephrasing. It may employ its own lexical variants (beddy byes).
Many of these modifications potentially assist the child in the bootstrapping process of identifying words and recognising phrase boundaries, or in making matches between words and objects in the real world. However, in the light of Chomsky’s ‘poverty of stimulus’ argument, the major issue is whether CDS is accurate, explicit and comprehensive enough to provide the infant with the data it needs in order to acquire a language.
In fact, CDS is not as ‘degenerate’ as Chomsky argued. It is generally well formed syntactically, though it contains more imperatives and questions than normal conversation. While nativists are correct in asserting that adults rarely correct infants’ language, a great deal of indirect teaching takes place when parents echo, revise or expand their child’s utterances. Parents also support acquisition with scaffolding, where the adult’s initiating utterance provides a syntactic and lexical framework for the infant’s responses (You want milk? You want juice? You want milk or juice?). Furthermore, it appears that adults fine-tune their CDS as the child’s understanding of language progresses.
CDS thus provides a richer source of linguistic data than was once assumed. However, it has proved difficult to establish precisely how the modifications to adult speech assist the infant. No correlation has been found between the degree of simplification in the carer’s CDS and the rate at which the infant acquires language. Furthermore, CDS does not appear to be universal. In non-western societies, it may have different characteristics. There are even cultures in which the child is exposed to adult discourse but no language is specifically directed towards it.
Within a given culture, CDS is strikingly consistent across carers suggesting either that it is transmitted as folk knowledge or that the speaker somehow taps into their own experience of language acquisition. Similarities have been traced between CDS, foreigner talk and some pidgins and creoles. One nativist view holds that, in constructing any of these forms, speakers draw upon an innate sense of what constitutes the basic properties of language. This may be a relic of the Universal Grammar which enabled us to acquire our first language.
See also: Creolisation, Foreigner talk, Input, Nativism, Scaffolding
Further reading: Gallaway and Richards (1994); Snow (1986, 1995); Valian (1996)
