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Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 35–52

Chapter 3
Maternal input at 1;6

A comparison of two mothers from different SES backgrounds

| Tel Aviv University, Israel
| Tel Aviv University, Israel

A body of research points to disadvantaged language and literacy skills in children from poorer, less educated backgrounds compared with those raised in more favorable circumstances. The current chapter reports a double case study comparing the child-directed speech of two Hebrew-speaking mothers of toddlers aged 1;6, one from mid-high and another from low socio-economic (SES) background. Findings indicate that the linguistic input to the child from low-SES background was scarcer, less dense and less diverse based on all measures used. She was provided with less linguistic scaffolding, and fewer elaborations and commentary on her spoken production than her peer from high SES. Results are related to the literature on developmental challenges faced by children from low SES backgrounds.

Keywords: socio-economic background (SES), linguistic input, maternal speech, Hebrew, case study, early language learning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Language and literacy in children from different SES backgrounds
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Data collection of the low SES corpus
    • 2.3The high-SES corpus
    • 2.4Transcription and coding of the low SES corpus
    • 2.5Analyses of the corpora
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Quantity of input
    • 3.2Input characteristics
      • 3.2.1Syntax
      • 3.2.2Repetitions
      • 3.2.3Lexicon
      • 3.2.4Verbs
      • 3.2.5Prepositions
      • 3.2.6Questions
      • 3.2.7Speech acts
      • 3.2.8Errors
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgment
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.03rav
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