Lexically restricted utterances in Russian, German, and English child-directed speech

Sabine Stoll; Kirsten Abbot-Smith; Elena Lieven

doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2008.01004.x

Lexically restricted utterances in Russian, German, and English child-directed speech

Sabine Stoll, Kirsten Abbot-Smith, Elena Lieven

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This study investigates the child-directed speech (CDS) of four Russian-, six German, and six English-speaking mothers to their 2-year-old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word-order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the three corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages. Copyright © 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	75-103
Number of pages	28
Journal	Cognitive Science
Volume	33
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2008.01004.x
Publication status	Published - Jan 2009

Keywords

Child-directed speech
English
German
Language learning
Learning strings
Lexical restrictedness
Lexical strings
Russian

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10.1111/j.1551-6709.2008.01004.x

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121670285/PDFSTART

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KW - German

KW - Language learning

KW - Learning strings

KW - Lexical restrictedness

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Lexically restricted utterances in Russian, German, and English child-directed speech

Abstract

Keywords

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