CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Dan I. Slobin (Human Development, UC Berkeley) and Nini Hoiting (Royal Institute for the Deaf "HD Guyot", Netherlands), October 15, 1999.

"Variations in Child-Directed Speech as a Guide to Language Form and Use."

Parents often vary form and content in successive utterances to small children. We introduce the notion of "variation set" to characterize a series of utterances that express a constant intention, along with lexical substitution and various sorts of rephrasing and reordering. A variation set can help the child discover argument structures of verbs, discourse pragmatics of speech acts, and cultural levels of event analysis. These notions will be explored using data of parental interaction with preschool children in two spoken languages (English, Turkish) and two signed languages (American Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands).