Why Routines Are Different: Toward a Multiple-Factors Model of the Relation between Input and Language Acquisition

Abstract

The culture of the caregiver is a major factor in the availability of games and routines for utilization in caregiver-child or caregiver-infant interaction. Perhaps the most robust finding in the large literature on the role of input in language acquisition in the western, American-European mainstream culture is the facilitative effect of semantically contingent responses to child utterances on language acquisition. The developmental psycholinguistics research tradition has generated two major hypotheses concerning features in the speech addressed to children that facilitate language development: fine-tuning of the syntactic and semantic complexity of input speech to the child’s level, and semantic contingency of adult utterances to the child’s previous utterances or focus of attention. Recognition of the reality of individual differences in children’s styles and strategies for language acquisition is prerequisite to drawing sensible conclusions about the existence of fine-tuning or of facilitatory effects of input speech.

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