Topic selection in parent‐child discourse∗

Abstract

In any successful conversation, a speaker must select both what is said and how it is said on the basis of various estimates of the listener's abilities, knowledge, and interests. When we consider “linguistic input to children,” we are dealing with conversations in which there are great disparities between the partners in all of these areas. To date most research on input has focused on the tendency of speakers to simplify their speech for the younger listener. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which adults might introduce material that is outside the child's current system, but that the child is ready to acquire. The selection of input for a particular child optimally involves two sensitive types of tuning: finding a conversational level on which the child can understand something of what is being said and presenting new information in a framework that will further the child's development. This paper reports a longitudinal study of the “fine tuning” of parents’ speech to a child over a particular conceptual domain: reference to events that happened outside the current context at an earlier point in time. Reference to the past in the adults’ speech was chosen for study since temporal reference is a complex part of language acquisition where one finds both the child's comprehension and usage changing gradually over a long period of time. We conclude that speakers are sensitive to specific cues from the linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior of the child, and that speakers use these cues in selecting topics that (1) structure the conversation to allow the child to participate most effectively, and (2) present opportunities for the child to acquire new forms at appropriate times.