ABSTRACT
The question of how adults’ speech to children affects the process of language acquisition has attracted researchers’ attention since the late 1960s, when the first studies characterizing the nature of input to young language learners were undertaken. An edited volume entitled Talking to Children, published in 1977, brought together much of that early work, including a number of chapters devoted to the topic of baby talk, anthropological linguists’ descriptions of the special lexical and grammatical forms used with young children. Thus, Talking to Children (edited by Snow & Ferguson, 1977) in a sense constituted a bridge between an old tradition of research into “sociolinguistic registers” including baby talk and new work that analyzed similar data in new ways. The newer work was carried out within a theoretical context defined by freshly formulated questions about language acquisition that drew attention to the nature of linguistic input to language learners as one factor influencing language development. The body of research on input to young children, and on related topics such as input to second language learners, teacher talk in preschool classroom settings, adjustments in talk to children with various disabilities, and social and cultural differences in the nature of talk addressed to children,
expanded quickly. By the early 1990s, a second edited volume was published, entitled Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition (edited by Gallaway & Richards, 1994) devoted to providing an overview of the full array of research findings concerning input. In contrast to Talking to Children, which was a collection of original research reports, Input and Interaction consisted of extensive reviews of literature, reflecting the enormous growth of interest in these topics. The forward to Input and Interaction describes it explicitly as follows:
[It’s] an up-to-date statement of the facts and controversies surrounding “Baby Talk,” its nature and likely effects. With contributions from leading linguists and psychologists, it explores language acquisition in different cultures and family contexts, in typical and atypical learners, and in second and foreign language learners. It is designed as a sequel to the now famous Talking to children.
