Content words in Hebrew child-directed speech

Infant-directed speech as a simplified but not simple register: a longitudinal study of lexical and syntactic features

“…Another feature of the maternal lexicon is concreteness, which confirms IDS as highly contextualised speech, recalling the 'closeness to context' view (D'Odorico & Franco, 1985;Franco & D'Odorico, 1987, 1988. In IDS, concrete nouns are more recurrent than abstract nouns that, in turn, are used less frequently than personal names; in contrast, in ADS, abstract nouns are more frequent in both types and tokens compared to personal nouns (Adi-Bensaid et al, 2015).…”

“…The presence of perceptually salient nonsense sounds is frequent, especially in the early stages of infant development, as shown in the study by Adi-Bensaid et al (2015). Specifically, the authors underlined that Hebrew mothers commonly used onomatopoeias instead of or in parallel to the object names to address infants with a mean age of 12 months.…”

“…This finding seems to explain the higher occurrence of the present tense than the past tense, which is typical of IDS. Moreover, references to the present time are also noticeable in the types of verbs that characterise IDS, which generally have an active rather than a stative connotation (Adi-Bensaid et al, 2015). Verbs in IDS tend to express an actual intention, command, warning, duty, or permission, such as to go, to take, to eat, to look, to put, to see, to come, to finish, or to say (Adi-Bensaid et al, 2015;Broen, 1972;Ravid, 2010).…”

“…Consistently, across different languages, studies on maternal vocabulary composition found a high use of nouns and topics about body parts and bodily functions, names of animals, and nursery games in IDS (Berko-Gleason & Bernstein-Ratner, 2013;Ferguson, 1964;Owens, 2008) due to joint and co-occurring activities during the interactions (D'Odorico & Franco, 1985). Maternal speech to infants is also characterised by the wide use of personal names such as mommy, daddy, the child's name, and the names of other kin or familiar people (Adi-Bensaid et al, 2015;Ferguson, 1964). As far as verbs, adverbs, and adjectives are concerned, the concreteness of IDS is also reflected in references to 'here and now'.…”

“…Compared to adult-directed speech (ADS), this special register is characterised by a "general semantic simplicity because mothers speak to infants referring to those aspects of the world which the child can readily interpret" (Furrow, Nelson, & Benedict, 1979, p. 437). This is reflected in a general simplification that can be found in specific features such as fewer utterances, lexical and syntactic simplification, specific pragmatic functions, and emphasised prosody (Adi-Bensaid, Ben-David, & Tubul-Lavy, 2015;Bohannon & Marquis, 1977;Bornstein et al, 1992;Fernald & Simon, 1984;Spinelli, Fasolo, & Mesman, 2017).…”