A comparative study of child-directed language across five cultures

This week, we’re featuring a comparative study of child-directed language across five cultures published in the Australian Journal of Linguistics by a research team, including Visiting Professor Rowena Garcia.

One truism of acquisition is that children are socialized into language and culture (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984). This means that children are treated differently to competent speakers of the linguistic community because they are still learning its linguistic and cultural conventions. How this notion of difference plays out in universal and culturally specific terms is less clear. We provide the first comparative study emerging from the Acquisition Sketch Project (Hellwig et al., 2023) to examine child-directed language in five different language families and cultures: Murrinhpatha (Southern Daly, non-Pama-Nyungan), Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan), Qaqet (Baining), Tagalog (Western Austronesian), and Inuktitut (Inuit-Yupik-Unangan). 

Given that our current knowledge on language acquisition is based mostly on English and other Indo-European languages, limiting theory development and testing, this study was also conducted with the aim of broadening language coverage in child language research. With the article’s open access publication, we hope that it reaches many researchers, particularly those in underrepresented areas, also with the hope that they can build on this work and can create acquisition sketches in understudied languages. 

This project supports CAMP’s research agenda on building Filipino-centric quality service, particularly on understanding typical/normal development among Filipinos.📚

Focusing on Tagalog-speaking caregivers, the study shows that they speak to children differently from the way they speak to adults, which may influence how children learn Tagalog. The findings highlight the use of nursery words, short expressions with exaggerated intonation, talk that centers on the here and now, the frequent use of questions and commands, and the repetitive use of words in different forms. These observations provide a foundation for future research on typical language development among Filipino children.