ABSTRACT
Research that aims to examine mother's speech in different social groups and its effects on children's language development has to draw from at least two research traditions. The full research design of the investigation of Hungarian mother-child dyads included the analysis of grammatical characteristics of maternal speech as well as that of discourse and conversational features. Grammatical analysis of mother's speech was based on the categories proposed by Furrow with some modifications due to the typological differences between English and Hungarian. Significant changes occurred in the speech of mothers as a function of children's age and growing language abilities. Maternal variables in which significant intergroup differences were found seem quite heterogeneous at first sight. Slobin argued that children are known to prefer analytical forms, and there is empirical evidence that those features of maternal input that match the processing biases of children are the first candidates to have some effects on children's language development.
