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Maternal responses to word approximations in Japanese children's transition to language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2001

KIYOSHI OTOMO
Affiliation:
Research Institute for the Education of Exceptional Children, Tokyo Gakugei University, Japan

Abstract

Verbal/vocal interactions of three Japanese mother–child dyads were examined when the children were 1;0, 1;2 to 1;3, 1;6 to 1;7, and 1;8 to 1;9 to determine whether mothers provide information which may facilitate the elaboration of child lexical forms during the transition from the prelinguistic to the linguistic period. Mothers were likely to reproduce only the child's word-like utterances, both well- and ill-formed. This provided an opportunity for the child's ill-formed word-like utterance to be contrasted with an immediate maternal response. This finding, along with results showing within-child variability of lexical forms, suggested that maternal contrastive replies 1) signal errors to the child (cf. Saxton, 1997), and 2) may promote the child's selection and stabilization of production alternatives which are more accurate. Maternal reproductive responding presumably originated in their tendency to seek content-oriented communication, as was reflected in mother's growing inclination to continue verbal interactions following the child's non-word-like vocalizations.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I wish to express appreciation to D. Kimbrough Oller for comments on the initial version of data analysis, and to Carol Stoel-Gammon and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and suggestions regarding the manuscript. I also thank Keiko Nakamura for helpful comments. Preliminary results were presented at the Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, Tokyo, Japan, 11 September 1996.