The Cultural Construction of Semantic Contingency in Mother-Child Speech  

Oleh:

Harkness, Sara

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 10 no. 1 (1988), page 53-67.
Fulltext: 10_01_Harkness.pdf (916.53KB)

Isi artikel

The concept of “semantic contingency” has been suggested as an important feature of maternal speech, which promotes normal language development in young children. Cross-cultural comparisons of mothers’ speech styles, however, have suggested a paradox in the apparent lack of this feature in the speech of mothers in many other cultures. This paper applies the theoretical framework of the “developmental niche” to a consideration of how mother-child speech is culturally regulated within a context of settings, social roles, speech functions and intentions. The daily lives of language-learning children and discourse between three mothers and their two-year-old children are examined with particular reference to the functions of nurturance and socialization for responsibility in maternal speech. Within these contexts, it is argued that maternal speech is semantically contingent in the sense that both partners in the conversation are jointly focused on a shared topic of concern. It is suggested that a fuller understanding of relations between language input and acquisition can be achieved through analysis of the cultural dimensions of motherxhild interaction.

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