Are there socioeconomic differences in the lexical diversity and syntactic complexity of child directed utterances with different pragmatic functions?

ABSTRACT

Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children’s later language development, particularly, child directed speech has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current competence. This article aims to examine linguistic and interactive features of the speech addressed to Argentinean toddlers (mean age 19.9 month) living under different socioeconomic circumstances. We focused on the lexical diversity (VOCD) and syntactic complexity (MLU) that characterize utterances that fulfil different pragmatic functions (comments, requests for verbal and non-verbal response) addressed to children living under vulnerated and non-vulnerated socioeconomic circumstances. Results showed differences regarding lexical diversity between groups of households for requests for non-verbal response, while regarding syntactic complexity differences between groups were found in both requests for non-verbal response and for verbal response.

KEYWORDS:

• Child directed speech
• pragmatic function
• lexical diversity
• syntactic complexity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The denomination of ‘socioeconomic circumstances’ was chosen, since this accounts for the situation in which the households were at the time of data collection and not for an intrinsic characteristic of families and households (Thornton et al., 2021).

2 This work was supported by the CONICET under Grants PIP 80/2015, PIP 702/21 and P-UE 2019-2023; FONCyT under Grants PICT 02896/2019 and PICT 3327/2014; and University of Buenos Aires under Grants UBACyT 20020190100106BA and UBACyT Modality I 20020150100187BA, all of the above under the direction of Celia Rosemberg.

3 Transcription work was supported by the grants previously mentioned in note 2. This work also benefited from the support of a grant to Laura Ramirez from the Society for Research in Child Development (Patrice L. Engle Dissertation Grant for Global Early Child Development. 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas: [Grant Number PIP 80/2015, PIP 702/2, P-UE 2019-2023]; Fondo para la Investigación Cientí­fica y Tecnológica: [Grant Number PICT 02896/2019, PICT 3327/2014]; Universidad de Buenos Aires: [Grant Number UBACyT 20020190100106BA, UBACyT 20020150100187BA]; Society for Research in Child Development: [Grant Number Patrice L. Engle Dissertation Grant. 2019].

Notes on contributors

María Laura Ramírez

María Laura Ramírez is a CONICET’s Doctoral candidate in Educational Sciences, at Buenos Aires University (UBA), Argentina, under the advice of PhD Celia Rosemberg and the co-advice of PhD Adriana Weisleder. Her PhD dissertation aims to describe the pragmatic properties of speech addressed to children from families living under different socioeconomic circumstances in Buenos Aires. In 2019, she received the Patrice L. Engle Dissertation Grant from the Society for Research in Child Development.

Celia R. Rosemberg

Celia R. Rosemberg is Principal Researcher at CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), and Research Director at the Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental (CIIPME – CONICET). She is also Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research focuses on children’s early language experiences across diverse socioeconomic and sociocultural groups.

Maia Julieta Migdalek

Maia Julieta Migdalek is a Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina. She has a degree (BA) in Letters (Linguistics) and a PhD. in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. She teaches Linguistics at the University of Buenos Aires. Her research has focused on early literacy and children's discourse development.