Under normal circumstances, human infants are certainly helped in their language acquisition by the typical behavior of older children and adults in the home environment who provide language samples, or input, for the child. Adults such as mom, dad and the grandparents tend not to address the little creature before them as if they are involved in normal adult-to-adult conversation. There is not much of this: Well, John Junior, shall we invest in blue chip industrials, or would grain futures offer better short term prospects? However, there does seem to be a lot of this: Oh, goody, now Daddy push choo-choo? The characteristically simplified speech style adopted by someone who spends a lot of time interacting with a young child is called caregiver speech.

Salient features of this type of speech (also called “motherese” or “child-directed speech”) are the frequent use of questions, often using exaggerated intonation, extra loudness and a slower tempo with longer pauses. In the early stages, this type of speech also incorporates a lot of forms associated with “baby talk.” These are either simplified words (tummy, nana) or alternative forms, with repeated simple sounds and syllables, for things in the child’s environment (choo-choo, poo-poo, pee-pee, wa-wa).

Built into a lot of caregiver speech is a type of conversational structure that seems to assign an interactive role to the young child even before he or she becomes a speaking participant. If we look at an extract from the speech of a mother to her child (aged 1 year 1 month) as if it were a two-party conversation, then this type of structuring becomes apparent. Notice how the mother reacts to the child’s actions and vocalizations as if they were turns in the conversation. (This example is from Brunner, 1983.)

Caregiver speech is also characterized by simple sentence structures and a lot of repetition. If the child is indeed in the process of working out a system of putting sounds and words together, then these simplified models produced by the interacting adult may serve as good clues to the basic structural organization involved. Moreover, it has generally been observed that the speech of those regularly interacting with very young children changes and becomes more elaborate as the child begins using more and more language. Several stages in the early acquisition process have been identified.