Kust see laps need laulud võtab ehk:
Where does the child get those songs:

Linguistic input and output under the microscope

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the qualitative and functional peculiarities of caregiver speech and child speech, the importance of the way in which children are spoken to, and whether input language has an important role in speech development. Also, an overview is provided of the nature and essential features of input language, presenting the similarities and differences between input and output and describing the ways in which different factors affect the way in which children are interacted with, including child-directed speech. As children acquire language in a speech community, with different social situations and with interlocutors whose language exhibits varying degrees of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic competence, child-directed speech is dynamic and changes as the child matures. The form of child-directed speech is considered to play an important role in children’s language development, and a number of linguistic features that appear during certain time periods in child-directed speech are also reflected in the child’s own speech. However, there are also linguistic features that, while present in adult speech, do not appear at all in child speech. Caregiver speech is often taken to mean only the speech of a mother to her child, but in fact the term denotes any speech that a child hears, whether the speaker is the mother or someone else close to the child and whether or not the speech is directed at the child. Broadly speaking, the process of language acquisition has two participants, one of whom – the child – takes in what is offered. Over time the child, having lived under the influence of linguistic input, also begins to offer something, which we term linguistic output. There are a number of articles (e.g. Ninio 2011, Behrens 2006, 2009, Lieven 2010) devoted to the study of the interaction between child speech and child-directed speech, wherein, in order to emphasize the distinctive features of both, they are compared to the notion of “normal language”, thus implying that both child speech and child-directed speech are perceived as being quite different from ordinary language use. The primary question is whether children might miss out on something important when hearing a simplified form of language, as they have to be able to acquire complex levels of language and apply them in different social situations. Since caregiver speech is a language form that is adapted to be more accessible to the child, how does the child, relying on this simplified form, learn to produce more complex phonological sequences, ways of combining words and expressions, etc., considering that at the same time, the child must also learn to properly segment words and expressions from the flow of input speech and to connect the phonological forms of words to their meanings? The relationship between linguistic input and output remains unclear to researchers of child and caregiver speech, as well as to developmental psychologists 139 who have studied it in depth (see Argus, Kõrgesaar 2014, Ninio 2011, Lieven 2010). It is logical to think that if we give a child linguistic input, we obtain linguistic output from the child as a result, but this is a fairly primitive train of thought, since we are dealing with people rather than machines. Eric Wanner and Lila Gleitman (1982: 311) claim that while caregiver speech does have clear distinctive features, it is not clear that these features actually support the child’s language acquisition process. According to Melissa Bowermann (1987: 110), it is not necessary for a child’s language environment to be anything special and forced in order for the child to acquire the language. The article describes a number of factors that influence linguistic input. The most important of these are cultural factors that determine whether or not the child is spoken to at all and, if so, by whom (parents, siblings, other members of the community) and when (e.g. before birth, beginning from birth, from when the child begins to say his or her first words or to form two-word sentences). The cultural background also determines whether or not child-directed speech is typical caregiver speech (simplified and adapted to the child’s own capabilities) and which types of conversational strategies are used (e.g. the word elema among the Kaluli, adults speaking in place of children in Western Samoa, continual and intensive active “development” of the child, or excessive use of directives). Thus it can be observed that the absence of numerous linguistic features from child speech can be explained by pragmatics – the child’s goals in communicating with adults are different from the adult’s goals, and therefore require the use of different linguistic means. Whereas adults try to teach children and occupy their day (using frequent repetition, conversation-starting questions, requests, commands/ prohibitions, etc), the child’s goal is to obtain information (information-seeking questions) and have his or her needs and desires satisfied (direct commands). The same applies on the level of lexis: there are certain types of expressions (e.g. onomatopoetic words, imitatives, diminutives) whose frequency in child-directed speech declines as the child grows, and the same tendency is reflected in the child’s own speech as well. However, child speech remains relatively noun-centric, and here it is not always possible to draw parallels with adult speech.

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