Noun versus verb emphasis in Italian mother-to-child speech

Abstract

This paper examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech produced by 15 Italian middle-class mothers to determine which specific patterns characterize linguistic input to children at 1;4 and 1;8. Since Italian is a pro-drop language, we expect that adult-to-child speech will show a bias towards a more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns. We expect that verbs will more likely occupy the sentence-initial position, and have more morphological inflections relative to nouns. Mother-to-child speech was coded for type and token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs. The results confirm our predictions. Namely, Italian-speaking mothers produced verb types and tokens more frequently than noun types and tokens, they placed verbs more frequently than nouns in salient utterance position, and they morphologically marked verb stems more than noun stems.

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