5 Caregivers’ role in modelling language use
Parent–child interactions like those in Section 3 were used by some researchers to argue that Child Directed Speech was not rich enough to learn the rules of grammar because children never received explicit feedback on what was ungrammatical and, if they did, they ignored it. To make language learnable, according to these researchers, children needed extra constraints in the form of an innate grammatical blueprint that guided them toward their native language (Chomsky, 1965; Pinker, 1994).
More recent work, considering a broader range of children, languages, and communicative contexts shows that far from being impoverished, child-adult interactions are a rich source of social, physical, and linguistic information – data that children use to home in on the conventional forms and meanings of their language (Pullum and Scholz, 2002; Reali and Christiansen, 2005). For instance, Chouinard and Clark (2003) found that on average 60 per cent of children’s early unconventional language was reformulated by adults in the next conversational turn into something more conventional. Moreover, in many cases (up to 45 per cent of the time) children responded to the reformulation by offering something more conventional themselves, as the examples below show (1–3):
(1) Child (2 years, 1 month): les mettre dans le garage.
Adult: il faut les mettre dans le garage? [adds more conventional pronoun, modal verb]
Child: faut les mettre dans le garage. [uptake of conventional modal verb]
(2) D (2 years, 4 months, as his father picked him up in his arms and swung him near the top of the stairs): Don’t fall me down stairs! [unconventional use of non-causative verb]
Father: Oh, I wouldn’t drop you downstairs. [adult models conventional use]
D: Don’t drop me downstairs. [uptake of a conventional causal verb in a causative construction]
(3) Abe (2 years, 5 months): I want butter mine.
Father: OK give it here and I’ll put butter on it.
Abe: I need butter on it.
Eve Clark, who has extensively studied these kinds of reformulations by adult speakers, argues that they help children in two ways. First, they present children with a conventional version of what they seem to intend, and second, they provide an added check on child productions against any forms children have stored in memory (Clark, 2020). When children receive a reformulation of their own speech they are more likely to produce the correct form later on in their development, compared to when caregivers do not provide such feedback or simply move on in conversation (Saxton, 2000; Strapp and Frederico, 2000). The way adults respond to errors might not typically be in the form of explicit instruction (‘say it this way’) but reformulations do contrast the children’s utterance and the adult utterance and so highlight the source of the error (negative feedback), while the adult’s offer presents a conventional version of the child’s utterance (positive feedback).
Watch Dr Saloni Krishnan help a family find out how subtly correcting words when repeating them back to children can help their speech in future. Open the link in a new tab or window.
Video 1 How does reformulating utterances make a difference? [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]
Thoughts on Video 1
Reformulating is when adults repeat what a child says back to them, in a sentence and using the correct words, no matter what mistakes they may have made. Over time, the more they hear the correct words, the more likely they will be to get it right in future and be able to build more complex sentences.
Toddlers’ brains are often using far more of their energy than adult brains do – often up to 40 per cent. They are constantly making neural connections and reorganising connections between their brain cells. They are building superhighways between important parts of their brains like Broca’s area (which is responsible for making speech sounds) and Wernicke’s area (which is responsible for helping us to understand words).
The more they hear words being said correctly, the more they’ll link these word sounds with the words they’re making, as the link between these two areas of the brain is strengthened.