(Are) you coming? Parent Question Types to their Children in the Earliest Stages of Grammatical Development

In previous studies, parents’ use of yes/no questions has been shown to facilitate children’s grammatical development. However, parents’ language input and its relationship to children’s grammatical development is not well understood. By describing properties of parents’ grammatical input, it may be possible to understand what type of data is most facilitative. Differences in parents’ questions may be related to a tendency to use a more formal register (e.g., are you coming? ) or a more casual, reduced style of speaking to their young children (e.g., you coming? ) (Fitzgerald, 2010). Importantly, this reduced style is still grammatical, but may not be as beneficial for children’s acquisition of grammar. The purpose of this study was to describe the different types of questions that parents ask their children at 21-months of age. Twenty parents and their children participated in free play interactions. Language samples were collected, transcribed, and coded using the Systematical Analysis of Language Transcripts software (SALT; Miller & Chapman, 2000). A question coding system was developed to identify all parent questions that contained a verb. Verb forms were also coded to describe if overt or ambiguous evidence for tense was provided in the questions (Legate & Yang, 2007). By using these two coding systems in combination, the grammatical properties of parent questions could be described. Results showed that 99% of the parent questions were grammatical. Of the grammatical questions, 27% of the questions were yes/no with subject-auxiliary inversion and 12% were yes/no with omissions. Differences in the rate of omission were examined as a function of grammatical subject type. The potential effect of parents’ use of the more formal register and the reduced question style for children’s grammatical development are discussed. Parent Question Types 3 Introduction The study of language input and its relationship to child language development is an area that has and is currently being studied, but not completely understood. There are many differences in properties of caregivers’ input to young children (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Waterfall, Vevea, & Hedges, 2007). Studies have been relatively successful at describing the relationships between parent input and children’s vocabulary development (Hoff & Naigles, 2002). In contrast, the relationships between parent input and children’s grammatical development is less well understood. Although differences in parent input may help to explain the variation of children’s rates of grammatical development, it has been challenging to identify precisely what grammatical properties of parent input should be measured. Differences in parents’ grammatical input may be related to the unstated purpose of the interaction, such as eliciting a conversation or directing behavior (cf. Hoff, 2006). Other differences in parent input may be related to their tendency to use a more formal, fully-grammatical register or informal, casual register in their interactions with their young children (Fitzgerald, 2010). The variation in formal versus informal registers will be of primary interest to this study as it plays out in the type of language input parents use when talking with their young children. By describing different styles of input parents are providing to their children, it can be made more apparent just what type of data is being made available to children that may or may not facilitate grammatical development. This literature review of the relationship between input and language development is divided into three sections. First, evidence for the relationship between input and language development will be reviewed (Hoff, 2006; Hoff & Naigles, 2002; Valian, 1999; Vasilyeva, Waterfall, & Huttenlocher, 2008). The second section will focus on the literature showing that parent questions may facilitate children’s grammatical development (Furrow, Nelson, & Benedict, 1978; Glietman, Newport, & Gleitman 1984; Newport, Gleitman, & Gletiman, 1977; Richards, 1990). In the third section, considerations for modifying input to accelerate grammatical development will be addressed (Fey & Loeb, 2002). Of Parent Question Types 4 particular interest to the current study will be the characterization of parent input with regard to the relative proportion of questions in the parent input, and the form of those questions that may provide relevant data for children learning grammar. Input Contributes to Language Development The relationship between parental input and child language development was described in the literature by Hoff and Naigles (2002). They examined the social pragmatic aspects of conversation and also the data provided in the input. The data providing features included total number of utterances produced, the total number of words, the number of word types, and mean length of utterance (MLU). The outcome variable was vocabulary development. The social contribution was not found to predict vocabulary development very well on its own. Rather, the social aspect was characterized as what provides the interactions that allow children to obtain the data in the input needed to learn vocabulary. The authors concluded that children use the data then, along with their own computational mechanisms to develop language. In an earlier review, Valian (1999) presented a less optimistic view of the success of input studies in accounting for children’s grammatical development. She noted that most input studies start with 2 year-olds with an MLU of 1.50 at Time 1. Time 2 is anywhere from 2 to 9 months later. Investigators measure a variety of characteristics of the child’s and parent’s speech at both times. Valian (1999) concluded that there are no features of parent’s speech that can predict language development between Time 1 and Time 2, and that most studies’ results happen by chance since correlations have not been significant or replicable across studies. Valian (1999) specifically noted that correlations between parental questions and children’s development of auxiliaries have no legitimate explanation. The author concluded by stating that there is no evidence that any syntactic input variables affect child language measures directly. However, the author stated input has some effect on Parent Question Types 5 language development because the learner is able to analyze the input, but it has not yet been discovered how to examine the interaction between the learner and input. Vasilyeva et al. (2008) investigated the differences in syntactic development of children with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Participants included 45 children who were divided into three groups according to the educational level of the primary caregiver. Group 1 had caregivers with a high school diploma, Group 2 had parents with a four year college degree, and Group 3 had parents with postgraduate degrees. The children were sampled between 22 and 42 months and had 6 visits in which 90 min of child-caregiver interaction were recorded. A set of production measures was used to examine the variability in children’s syntax and changes over time. Child utterances were coded as simple if they contained a single verb phrase and complex if they had more than one verb phrase. The proportion of children producing simple sentences did not differ across parent education groups. Also, the number of grammatically complete simple sentences did not vary among groups. Children producing complex sentences earlier, on the other hand, were mostly from the two higher educated groups. Children among the higher education groups not only produced complex sentences earlier, but also had a higher frequency and more diverse types of sentences. The number of grammatically complete complex sentences did not vary among educational groups. The authors concluded that although there was variation among frequency and diversity of sentences in the educational groups, as long as children received a certain amount of input, they will master obligatory elements of sentences and the other variations may or may not be advantageous for grammatical development. Hoff (2006) further described the relationship between input and the acquisition of language in her review of the literature. There are differences in the environmental support that children receive, which help to explain differences in language development. Differences in parent language variability was said to be correlated with variability in child language development. For example, maternal responsiveness to their children’s behaviors and expansions of children’s utterances have been shown Parent Question Types 6 to be a positive predictor of language development (Newport, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1977). In addition, conversation eliciting questions have been shown to positively predict children’s grammatical development (Hoff Ginsberg, 1985, 1986). Specifically, the age at which the child begins to use auxiliary verbs depends on the frequency of the mother’s use of question forms which make the auxiliary salient for the child (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998). Based on her review of the literature, Hoff (2006) concluded that the acquisition of human language depends on these communicative interactions where the input is provided, along with innate mental processes that the child brings to learn language. The relationship between questions and language development The debate over properties of maternal speech that contribute to children’s language development dates back 30 years (Valian, 1999). The effects of different maternal speech styles were studied by Newport et al. (1977). These authors proposed that learning language is a result of narrowly specified environmental features, along with dispositions that the child notices in the environment and is prepared to learn. This is also Hoff’s description of language development (Hoff, 2006; Hoff & Naigles 2002). The child has some mechanism that supports language learning, and is b