The quality of child-directed speech depends on the speaker's language proficiency

Abstract

Many children learn language, in part, from the speech of non-native speakers who vary in their language proficiency. To investigate the influence of speaker proficiency on the quality of child-directed speech, 29 mothers who were native English speakers and 31 mothers who were native speakers of Spanish and who reported speaking English to their children on a regular basis were recorded interacting with their two-year-old children in English. Of the non-native speakers, 21 described their English proficiency as 'good', and eight described their English proficiency as 'limited'. ANCOVAs, controlling for differences in maternal education and child language level, revealed significant effects of group on lexical and grammatical properties of child-directed speech that the literature has identified as positive predictors of child language development. These results suggest that the child-directed speech of native speakers and non-native speakers with good proficiency provide a richer database for language acquisition than the child-directed speech of speakers with limited proficiency.

Keywords: bilingual development; child-directed speech; immigrant families; non-native input.

Figure 1.

Mean residual differences from a sample mean of zero for measures of child-directed speech by speaker Proficiency Group, with variance attributable to maternal education level and child English vocabulary scores removed from MLUw, and with variance attributable to maternal education, child English vocabulary score, and duration of the recorded interaction removed from all other measures. Error bars indicate 1 standard error above and below the means. *** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05.