Thought as the basis of speech comprehension

The meanings that underlie speech comprehension are concepts that are in a person’s mind. Speech sounds initially are simply sounds signifying nothing.

The contents of thought are provided by the child’s experience of the environment, i.e. dogs, cats, people, food, and events concerning those objects, and the child’s experience of its own feelings, emotions, desires, and conceptual constructions (thoughts).

Without such contents of thought, the child would have nothing to assign as the meanings of words and sentences. Thought necessarily precedes language.

We cannot find cases of persons who have language but no thought. Language is a system that allows for the labelling of thoughts in terms of physical sound so that the thoughts may be communicated to others.

Thought provides the basis for speech comprehension, which in turn provides the basis for speech production.

Parentese and Baby Talk Parentese (coined by the first author in Steinberg, 1993, p. 22) is the sort of speech that children receive when they are young.

Parentese is also referred to as ‘Motherese’, ‘caregiver speech’, ‘Adult-to-Child Language’ (ACL) (Reich, 1986), and as ‘Child-Directed Speech’ (CDS) (Pine, 1994).

Characteristics of Parentese Immediacy and concreteness Parents generally talk to their children about what is happening in the immediate environment. They do not talk to them about abstract or remote objects and events

What do you expect the child to hear?

A sentence like ‘The dog wants water’ and not ‘Speech comprehension precedes speech production in language learning’ is what a 1- or 2-year-old is likely to hear even from these two authors!

Grammaticality of input The speech directed to children is highly grammatical and simplified. Ungrammatical sentences are found to occur but rarely.

Short sentences and simple structures Speech directed to children by adults tends to consist of short sentences with simple rather than complex structures. ‘The dog wants water’ as opposed to ‘The dog which has been running a lot wants to drink some water’.

Vocabulary: simple and short The vocabulary typically used by adults is simple and restricted. ‘see’ instead of ‘notice’, ‘hard’ not ‘difficult’, which have simplified phonology and structure consonant plus vowel word patterns such as ‘mama’,

Exaggerated intonation, pitch, and stress Adults tend to use higher pitch, slower speech, with more and clearer pauses between utterances, and they place more distinctive stress on words than they do when speaking with other adults.

Adult speech to children refers more to the context of the conversation and often serves to clarify the children’s utterances

These changes will vary depending on the age of the child the adult is talking to. The speech addressed to 2-year-olds will be different in modifications from that addressed to 10-year-olds.

Baby Talk Baby Talk is a form of Parentese but with its own characteristics. While Parentese uses vocabulary and syntax, though simpler than that addressed to other adults, Baby Talk involves the use of vocabulary and syntax that is overly simplified and reduced.

Vocabulary Most Baby Talk involves modifications in vocabulary. There are already established words like ‘bow-wow’ (dog), ‘pee-pee’ (urine), and ‘choo-choo’ (train) in English.

the main sound structure of such words tends to be dominated by a Consonant + Vowel syllable unit that is often repeated. Sometimes it involves a closed syllable as in ‘wan-wan’.

Another construction principle for many Baby Talk words is that they are supposed to represent the sounds that various things make, i.e. they are onomatopoeic. Thus, English ‘bow-wow’ and Japanese ‘wan-wan’ are apparently simulations of the barking of dogs.

Syntax