ABSTRACT
Child-directed language has been the subject of much research since the 1970s. Although recent cross-linguistic studies show the need for caution in assuming the universality of motherese in parent-child interactions (Heath, 1983; Ratner & Pye, 1984; Schieffelin, 1990), a number of common characteristics are reported in studies of child-directed speech in English and many other spoken languages (see Gallaway & Richards, 1994; Snow, 1977, for an overview). Moreover, researchers have found that child-directed speech is highly attractive to infants and that it contains clues to segmentation that might be of use to the early language learner. For instance, even very young infants have shown a preference for child-directed prosody (Cooper & Aslin, 1990; Fernald, 1985). Clause boundaries are also more reliably marked in child-directed than in adult-directed speech (e.g., Garnica, 1977), and infants seem to prefer to listen to speech in which pauses coincide with clause boundaries than speech in which they do not (Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler-Nelson, Jusczyk, Wright, & Druss, 1987; Kemler-Nelson, Hirsh-Pasek, Jusczyk, & Wright-Cassidy, 1989).
