1. Lexically Restricted Utterances in Russian, German, and English Child-Directed Speech.
- Author
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Stoll, Sabine, Abbot-Smith, Kirsten, and Lieven, Elena
- Subjects
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CHILDREN'S language , *VERBAL ability in children , *LANGUAGE awareness in children , *INTERPERSONAL communication in children , *COMMUNICATIVE competence in children , *ORAL communication , *LEXICAL access , *LEXICON , *LANGUAGE & languages - Abstract
This study investigates the child-directed speech (CDS) of four Russian-, six German, and six English-speaking mothers to their 2-year-old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word-order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003 ) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the three corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
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