Are some parents' interaction styles associated with richer grammatical input?

Evidence for tense marking in child-directed speech varies both across languages ( Guasti, 2002; Legate & Yang, 2007) and across speakers of a single language ( Hadley, Rispoli, Fitzgerald, & Bahnsen, 2011). The purpose of this study was to understand how parent interaction styles and register use overlap with the tense-marking properties of child-directed speech. This study investigated how parent interaction style, measured by utterance function, and parent register use when asking questions interacted with verb forms in child-directed input to identify interaction styles associated with the richest grammatical input.

Participants were 15 parent-toddler dyads. The communicative function of parent utterances and the form of their questions were coded from language samples of parent-child play when children were 21 months of age. Verbs were coded for linguistic form (e.g., imperative, modal, copula).

Directives and reduced questions were both negatively related to input informativeness (i.e., the proportion of unambiguous evidence for tense). Other-focused descriptives were positively related to input informativeness.

Predictable overlap existed between the characteristics of parents' interaction styles and register use and their input informativeness. An other-focused descriptive style most strongly related to richer evidence for the +Tense grammar of English.