The effects of children's language comprehension level on adults child-directed talk

The present study attempted to test quasi-experimentally the hypothesis that children's language comprehension level is the major determinant of the modifications characteristic of child-directed talk (CDT). Language comprehension level was varied by selecting four-year-old, language-impaired children with two levels of comprehension. Data on 21 measures of structural and pragmatic aspects of CDT were obtained from videotapes of 20 half-hour, freeplay sessions in which each of ten adults talked individually with one child from each level. A t test for paired samples generated four significant differences (p less than 0.05). Language addressed to the high comprehending children contained (1) more frequent use of the semantic category state, (2) greater lexical diversity, (3) more frequent reference to nonpresent objects, persons, and events, and (4) less frequent nonverbal cueing. Variation in the children's comprehension strategies appears to provide a better explanation for these differences than variation in their comprehension of language structure. An alternate explanation of the results, the conversational model, proved of limited value in explaining structural CDT modifications.