ABSTRACT
As a graduate student at Stanford University in 1974, I had recently published a paper (Andersen & Johnson, 1973) showing how an 8-year-old appropriately modified her speech to reflect both the age of the addressee and the nature of the task (e.g., telling a story vs. explaining a game vs. free play), and I was about to embark on a doctoral thesis examining in more detail young children’s knowledge of the form and functions of Babytalk, or caregiver’s speech. Then I met a scholar from Boston who was visiting for the year at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. I soon learned that the scholar, Jean Berko Gleason, was at least one step ahead of us in this line of inquiry; she had already published the results of a naturalistic study that examined stylistic variation in the speech of toddlers, preschoolers, and first or second graders in five families (1973) and was planning a series of more controlled studies that would investigate different aspects of children’s communicative competence, focusing especially on their acquisition of social/communicative routines (see, e.g., Berko Gleason & Perlmann, 1982; Berko Gleason, Perlmann, & Greif, 1984; Berko Gleason & Weintraub, 1976; Greif & Berko Gleason, 1980).
