Do Questions Get Infants Talking? Infant Vocal Responses to Questions and Declaratives in Maternal Speech
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Date
2017
Authors
Reimchen, Melissa
Soderstrom, Melanie
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Wiley
Abstract
Maternal questions play a crucial role in early language acquisition
by virtue of their special grammatical, prosodic and lexical
forms, and their abundance in the input. Infants are able to discriminate
questions from other sentence types and produce rising
intonations in their own requests. This study examined whether
caregiver questions were related to the quantity of infant vocalizations.
Thirty-six infants aged 10 and 14 months participated in a
laboratory play session with their mothers. In separate blocks,
mothers were instructed to ask questions and to refrain from asking
questions. Both block-level and utterance-level analyses found
no evidence that maternal questions affected the amount of
infant-response vocalizations. Mothers of 14-month-olds (but not
10-month-olds) tended to repeat questions.
Description
Keywords
maternal questions, infant vocal behaviour, turn-taking
Citation
Reimchen, M., & Soderstrom, M. (2017). Do Questions Get Infants Talking? Infant Vocal Responses to Questions and Declaratives in Maternal Speech. Infant and Child Development, 26(3), 1-16.