Parental reactions to the morphologically correct and incorrect utterances of children

Abstract

The acquisition of the first language is a long and complicated process. Besides incorrect pronunciation, one can observe various morphonological, grammatical, and lexical errors in the speech of young children. The goal of the present research was to analyse the parental reactions both to the correct and incorrect utterances of children and to discuss the dependence of parental reactions on the errors of the child’s speech. The analysis is based on longitudinal data from the conversations between a Lithuanian girl (from the age of twenty months to thirty-two months) and her mother. The results of the study indicate that parents rather tend to react to the form than to the content of the incorrect utterances of children. On the other hand, the responses to the correct utterances are related more often to the content.

Keywords

• child language
• language acquisition
• longitudinal corpus
• conversation analysis
• psycholinguistics
• Lithuanian