Semantic roles and residual grammatical categories in mother and child speech: who tunes into whom?

Abstract

Mother and child speech in two half-hour free play conversations of six pairs were analysed for 15 semantic roles such as AGENT and ACTION, and five additional syntactic categories such as negation. Children were taped at the beginning of word combinations (1; 7–2; 0) and again 3 to 6 months later. Mothers and children were similar to one another in the relative frequency with which they used the different semantic and syntactic categories. However, the mothers' use was stable, including a larger number of categories than the children and showing few shifts in relative frequency. Insofar as changes took place over time, it was the children who changed to become more like their mothers, both in the semantic roles present and in their relative frequency of use. These findings are interpreted as evidence against a Fine-Tuning Hypothesis to explain the content of mothers' speech to children. The role of discourse topic restrictions in limiting the distribution of semantic roles is discussed.