This volume of 12 individual essays is an important step forward in
the literature on child language development. As the title hints, the
book follows Talking to children (Snow &
Ferguson 1977). Both volumes focus on input and language acquisition.
Talking to children demonstrated the importance of phenomenon of
baby talk and dealt with the nature of speech addressed to young children
and different parental conversational styles. The title Talking to
adults gives an impression that this time, more attention will be
paid to speech used by children to adults, but that is not what it
seems to be. Rather, the contributors here focus on how children
participate in discourse with participating structures more complex
than dyads – that is, when the audience is “larger”
than just the child's own mother, and when simplified registers
are not necessarily used. The pioneering Talking to children,
in contrast, was concerned mainly with dyadic interaction with a
primary caretaker. The papers in Talking to adults aim to show
that child's participation in such multiparty talk seems to
contribute greatly to the pragmatic development of children. The 12
chapters give an overview of empirical research concerning the
acquisition of various discursive skills: explanations and narratives,
control talk, affect, humor, telling a joke, telling lies, and
bilingualism.