Caregivers' here-and-now talk may help children to learn the meaning of words and other aspects of the language system. However, if this talk were referring only to the here-and-now, it would at the same time obscure one of the major characteristics of language, namely its displaced and informative use. Results of analysis of child-directed speech (CDS) addressed to four children learning French - followed longitudinally from the time they were between 1;3 and 1;5 to the time they were between 1;8 and 2;3 - confirm that CDS refers most often to the here-and-now. Detailed analyses show, however, that a sizeable proportion of this talk makes reference to moments and/or entities other than the immediately present ones or refer to aspects that are not given as such in the situation, suggesting that CDS, while contextually situated, preserves one of the characteristic uses of language. Moreover, displaced and informative uses of language, though present from the early period, increase with children's own developing ability to use language informatively
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Akhtar, N., Carpenter, M. & Tomasello, M. (1996). The role of discourse novelty in early word learning . Child Development, 67, 635-45.
2.
Akhtar, N., Dunham, F. & Dunham P.J. (1991). Directive interactions and early vocabulary development: the role of joint attentional focus. Journal of Child Language , 18, 41-9.
3.
Bloom, L. (1970). Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ).
4.
Bloomfield, L. (1935). Language (London: Allen & Unwin).
5.
Bornstein, M.H., Tal, J., Rahn, C., Galperin, C.Z., Pecheux, M., Lamour, M., Toda, S., Azuma, H., Ogio, M. & Tamis-LeMonda, C.S. (1992). Functional analysis of the contents of maternal speech to infants of 5 and 13 months in four cultures: Argentina, France, Japan and the United States. Developmental Psychology, 28, 593-603.
6.
Bretherton, I., McNew, S. & Beeghly-Smith, M. (1981). Early person knowledge as expressed in gestural and verbal communication: when do infants acquire a 'theory of mind'? In M. E. Lamb & L. R. Sherrod (eds), Infant Social Cognition (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).
7.
Brown, R. (1977). Introduction. In C. E. Snow & C. A. Ferguson (eds), Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
8.
D'Odorico, L., Salerni, N., Cassibba, R. & Jacob, V. (1999). Stability and change of maternal speech to Italian infants from 7 to 21 months of age: a longitudinal study of its influence on early stages of language acquisition. First Language, 19, 313-46.
9.
Dunham, P.J., Dunham, F. & Curwin, A. (1993). Joint-attentional states and lexical acquisition at 18 months. Developmental Psychology, 29, 827-31.
10.
Dunn, J. (1988). The Beginnings of Social Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press ).
11.
— ( 1991 ). Understanding others: evidence from naturalistic studies of children. In A. Whiten (ed.), Natural Theories of Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), 51-61.
12.
Dunn, J.Bretherton, I. & Munn, P. (1987). Conversation about feeling states between mothers and their young children. Developmental Psychology, 23, 132-9.
13.
Dunn, J. & Munn, P. ( 1985). Becoming a conversationalist despite (or because of) having an older sibling. Child Development, 60, 399-410.
14.
— (1987). Development of justification in disputes with mother and sibling. Developmental Psychology, 23, 791-8.
15.
Eisenberg, A.R. ( 1985). Learning to describe past experiences in conversation . Discourse Processes, 8, 177-204.
16.
Golinkoff, R. (1993). When is communication 'a meeting of minds'?Journal of Child Language, 20, 199-207
17.
Greenfield, P.M. & Smith, M. (1976). The Structure of Communication in Early Language Development (New York: Academic Press).
18.
Hampson, J. & Nelson, K. (1993). The relation of maternal language to variation in rate and style of language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 20, 313-42.
19.
Harris, M., Jones, D., Brookes, S. & Grant, J. (1986). Relations between the nonverbal context of maternal speech and rate of language development. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 4, 261-8.
20.
Hockett, C.F. (1958). A Course in Modern Linguistics ( New York: Macmillan).
21.
Hoff-Ginsberg, E. (1990). Maternal speech and the child's development of syntax: a further look. Journal of Child Language, 17, 85-99.
22.
Hood, L. & Bloom, L. (1979). What, when and how about why: a longitudinal study of early expressions of causality. Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 44 (6), Serial no. 181.
23.
Hudelot, C., Preneron, C. & Salazar Orvig, A. (1990). Explications, distance et interlocution chez l'enfant de 2 à 4 ans. Cahiers d'Acquisition et de Pathologie du Langage (CALaP), 7/8, 241-55.
24.
Lamb, S. (1991). Internal state words: their relation to moral development and to maternal communications about moral development in the second year of life. First Language, 11, 391-406.
25.
Locke, J.L. ( 1993). The Child's Path to Spoken Language ( Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press).
26.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
27.
McDonald, L. & Pien, D. ( 1982). Mother conversational behavior as a function of interactional intent. Journal of Child Language, 9, 337-58.
28.
Miller, P.J. & Sperry, L.L. ( 1988). Early talk about the past: the origins of conversational stories of personal experience. Journal of Child Language , 15, 293-315.
29.
Ninio, A. (1992). The relation of children's single word utterances to single word utterances in the input. Journal of Child Language , 19, 87-110.
30.
O'Neill, D.K. (1996). Two-year-old children's sensitivity to a parent's knowledge state when making requests. Child Development, 67, 659-77.
31.
Pan, B.A., Imbens-Bailey, A., Winner, K. & Snow, C. (1996). Communicative intents expressed by parents in interaction with young children. Merrill Palmer Quarterly , 42, 248-66.
32.
Penman, R., Cross, T., Milgrom-Friedman, J. & Meares, R. (1983). Mothers' speech to prelingual infants: a pragmatic analysis. Journal of Child Language, 10, 17-34.
33.
Pine, J.M. ( 1992). Maternal style at the early one-word stage: re-evaluating the stereotype of the directive mother. First Language, 12, 169-86..
34.
Pinker, S. (1995). The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press).
35.
Sachs, J. ( 1983). Talking about the there and then: the emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In K. E. Nelson (ed.), Children's Language, Vol. 4 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).
36.
Schlesinger, I.M. (1989). The origin of relational categories. In Y. Levy, I. M. Schlesinger & M. D. S. Braine (eds), Categories and Processes in Language Acquisition (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 121-78.
37.
Shatz, M. ( 1994) A Toddler's Life: Becoming a Person ( New York: Oxford University Press).
38.
Smith, C.B., Adamson, L.B. & Bakeman, R. (1988). Interactional predictors of early language. First Language, 8, 143-56.
39.
Snow, C.E. (1978). The conversational context of language acquisition . In R. N. Campbell & P. T. Smith (eds), Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language: Language Development and Mother-child Interaction (New York: Plenum Press).
40.
Sylvester-Bradley, B. & Trevarthen, C. ( 1978). Baby talk as an adaptation to the infant's communication. In N. Waterson & C. Snow (eds), The Development of Communication (Chichester: Wiley & Sons).
41.
Tomasello, M. & Farrar, M.J. (1986). Joint attention and early language. Child Development, 57, 1454-63.
42.
Tomasello, M., Mannle, S. & Kruger, A.C. (1986). Linguistic environment of one to two year old twins. Developmental Psychology, 22, 169-76.
43.
Tomasello, M. & Todd, J. ( 1983). Joint attention and lexical acquisition style . First Language, 4, 197-212.
44.
Veneziano, E. (1990a) Les premières manifestations des conduites d'explication . In I. Berthoud, C. Favre & E. Veneziano, Construction et reconstruction des conduites d'explication. Cahiers d'Acquisition et de Pathologie du Langage (CALaP), 7/8, 11-20.
45.
— (1990b). Functional relationships between social pretend play and language use in young children. Poster presented at the Fourth European Conference on Developmental Psychology, Stirling, Scotland.
46.
— (1996). De la co-référence contextualisée à la co-référence déplacée: les bienfaits du manque de correspondance dans la situation immédiate . Interaction et Cognitions, 1, 457-79.
47.
— (1999). L'acquisition de connaissances pragmatiques: apprendre à expliquer. Revue PArole, 9/10, 1-28.
48.
— (2001). Interactional processes in the origins of the explaining capacity. In K. Nelson, A. Aksu-Koc & C. Johnson (eds), Children's Language. Vol. 10: Developing Narrative and Discourse Competence (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 113-41.
49.
— (in press). Language in pretense during the second year: what it can tell us about 'pretending' in pretense and the 'know-how' about the mind. In R. Mitchell (ed.), Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
50.
Veneziano, E. & Sinclair, H. (1995). Functional changes in early language: the appearance of references to the past and of explanations. Journal of Child Language, 22, 557-81.
