ABSTRACT
The findings of the studies discussed thus far should also prompt the hypothesis that any phonological modifications made by adults when speaking to children should decline rapidly to levels and styles commensurate with normal adult-adult speech, as the children’s linguistic abilities mature. There are a number of issues to be considered when evaluating the potential contribution of studies of parental phonology to our understanding of child language acquisition. Thus, it is probable that phonologically clarified elements alternate with less canonical versions of words to acquaint children with the acceptable variability in pronunciation of lexical units. Parent-child speech is typically characterized by a rather small type-token ratio and a high degree of lexical redundancy. Additionally, the finding that function word articulation was improved in speech to children just beginning to acquire syntactic knowledge, but not to children incapable of producing more than single word utterances, is supportive of such a view of parent-child speech.
