The determinants of baby talk: relationship to context

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Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between context and mothers' speech to prelinguistic infants. In the first phase, videorecordings of a mother talking with her infant were transcribed; in the second phase, 48 mothers were asked to select the utterance most apt for a series of drawings representing different contexts of mother–infant interaction. Data analyzed with respect to syntactic and semantic features revealed that the informational content of mothers' speech is different in relation to various contexts. Furthermore, different syntactic types are chosen in relation to different contents. Results are discussed in relation to a hypothesis assuming that mothers' speech is determined by particular interactive rules operating in the mother–infant dyad.

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