Semantics-specificity of child directed speech across activities in socio-economically diverse households

Abstract

Several naturalistic studies have recently started to devote attention to the at-home everyday activities in which children are embedded and that likely shape their word development trajectories. As suggested by Nelson (1989, 1996) the social, spatial, temporal and linguistic dimensions of the activities provide multiple cues that constitute a context for childrens language experience. Though these dimensions, affecting the ebb and flow of childrens everyday life, vary in different socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds (Bradley & Corwin, 2002), studies have not considered SES differences in the extent in which child directed speech (CDS) is semantically structured around the activities of everyday life. Here we assessed semantic specificity of CDS across different type of activities in a socio-economically diverse sample of Argentinian children.