Second Language Acquisition and Second ... - Stephen Krashen

Caretaker Speech and Language Acquisition
A great deal of current literature confirms that the speech directed to children
acquiring first languages is different from adult native speaker-native speaker
speech. It is known to be composed of shorter sentences, it is more intelligible,
contains utterances that are more well formed, with less subordination, has a more
restricted vocabulary, and refers to a more restricted range of topics (i.e. the "here
and now"), among other features. Of course, "the finding that mother-ese exists
cannot by itself show that it influences language growth" (Newport, Gleitman, and
Gleitman, 1977; p. 112). If caretaker speech does help, or "catalyze" language
acquisition, it may do so by supplying crucial input, what the child needs at that
moment, without the distraction of excess noise, or language the child does not
understand. The following section expands on this point in more detail. I present
first three "facts" about child language acquisition and caretaker speech, followed
by a personal interpretation as to how and why caretaker speech might be effective.
Following this, we explore the question of whether the simple codes the second
language performer might encounter work the same way.
Here are the three "facts". First, it is by now a well-established finding that
structures are acquired in a relatively predictable order for children acquiring a
given language (for English, see Brown, 1973; Klima and Bellugi, 1966; and the
excellent review in Clark and Clark, 1977). This is not to say that order of
acquisition is absolutely invariant, that children will acquire all grammatical
structures in a strict linear order; rather, there are clear tendencies and one can talk
about an "average" order of acquisition.
Another finding relevant to our discussion deals with the relationships between the
complexity of structure in parental input and the child's current linguistic level.
While caretaker speech is typically simpler than native speaker-native speaker
speech, it is not "finely tuned" to the child's growing competence. According to
studies by Newport et al. (1977) and Cross (1977), the syntactic complexity of
caretaker speech does not grow in exact proportion to the child's competence.
Caretaker speech, however, may be "roughly tuned" to the child's level: we see
positive, but not always significant,
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