Analysis Of Child-Directed-Speech In Early Stage Of Language Acquisition

As the main speech input in the early stage of child language acquisition, Child-Directed-Speech (CDS) has been a controversial topic for a long time. Halliday has already examined the child's output system and found that the language children use contains functions which do not appear at birth.This paper hypothesized that all functions of language may be present in the CDS and surmised that the CDS mother used are different from others both in quantity and content, under the framework of the Chomsky's universal grammar, the critical period hypothesis and the motherese hypothesis.With quantitative method, the caregiver's utterances were analyzed in terms of the functions proposed by Halliday, namely, the instrumental function, the regulatory function, the interactional function, the heuristic function, the personal function, the imaginative function, and the informative function.The data analysis points to differences between the kinds and relative amount of functions that the various family members (mainly the mother and the father) use with the child. In general, mother uses more interactional function language with the child than father does, while father uses more regulatory function language with the child than mother does. The average ratios (the ratio of the number of parental utterances and the number of children utterances) of mother is higher compared to the father's suggests that she is able to engage the child in language interchanges in which the child receives more language and perhaps the mother's language is more important to the child's language development.The results of the analysis partially support the initial hypotheses: the CDS used by the mother turned out to be quantifiably different form that of other family members. Notably, the mother's CDS differs from others because it contains more of the interactional function. Specifically, the mother's language was observed to generate more output from the subject though the CDS to the child in fact did not contain all of the possible functions of language according to the analysis performed on the corpus. Instead, there are three functions not found in the data: the instrumental, personal, and imaginative functions. Thus, the CDS appears to be most effective in fostering language acquisition when it contains the interactive, heuristic and regulatory functions in relatively equal balance.As the research is only done with a single case, further study is needed to generalize the result. Moreover, the subject in question is a child learning Chinese, it is suggested that further research should include replicating this study using English-speaking infants.