CDS

"Even four year olds adjust their language when speaking to a two year old. The way that adults talk to babies is similar to the way they talk to dogs."

(Hirsh-Pasek and Treiman, 1982)

• Attract and hold the baby’s attention;
  
• Help the process of breaking down language into understandable chunks;
  
• Correct virtuous errors;
  
• Make the conversation more predictable;
  
• Encourage language development and conversational skills.

• Higher pitch and exaggerated intonation and stress
• Repeated sentence frames
• Repetition and partial repetition of adult’s own words
• Questions and commands
• Frequent use of the child’s name and an absence of pronouns (Durkin disputes this)
• Absence of past tenses
• A large number of one word utterances (holophrases)
• Omission of inflections e.g. plurals and possessives
• Fewer verbs, modifiers (adjectives in front of nouns) and function     words (such as ‘at’ ‘my’)
• Use of concrete nouns
• Use of expansions – the adult fills out the child’s utterance
• Use of re-castings – baby’s vocab put into a new utterance

Does child-directed speech influence children’s language development?

• A parent’s use of questions with ‘yes/no’ answers seems to be connected with many aspects of children’s language development;

• Complexity in a parent’s language CAN hinder a child's language development;

• The use of child-directed speech improves the child’s use of auxiliary verbs such as ‘could’, ‘have’, ‘did’, ‘might’.