The use by adults of third person forms, especially proper names, to address their children and to refer to themselves has been a feature of parentese which has incited debate as to what motivates these speech adjustments. Some researchers continue to support the posi tion that this adjustment like others is facilitative for the learning of language while others have argued that it is a source of confusion and inconsistency for the child. The present investigation attempts to study these two possible avenues of interpretation by investigating ten mother-child dyads, five with language-impaired children and five with normal language learners of the same language stage in two situations: a teaching situation and a play situation.
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