Are there socioeconomic differences in the lexical diversity and syntactic complexity of child directed utterances with different pragmatic functions?

Abstract

Early linguistic environment has shown an impact on children’s later language development, particularly, child directed speech has been associated with providing children with linguistic input from which to look for regularities and patterns, and boosting children to produce utterances beyond their current competence. This article aims to examine linguistic and interactive features of the speech addressed to Argentinean toddlers (mean age 19.9 month) living under different socioeconomic circumstances. We focused on the lexical diversity (VOCD) and syntactic complexity (MLU) that characterize utterances that fulfil different pragmatic functions (comments, requests for verbal and non-verbal response) addressed to children living under vulnerated and non-vulnerated socioeconomic circumstances. Results showed differences regarding lexical diversity between groups of households for requests for non-verbal response, while regarding syntactic complexity differences between groups were found in both requests for non-verbal response and for verbal response.