The Influence of Deviant Maternal Input on the Development of Language during the Preschool Years

"The Influence of Deviant Maternal Input on the Development of Language during the Preschool Years," by Naomi Schiff, JSHR, September, 1979 contained the following errors:

The title was incorrectly listed in the Table of Contents; and a portion of the Discussion section was omitted. This omission occurred within the second paragraph on page 600. The correct version is printed below:

Thus, the results of this study confirm Brown's findings that frequency of exposure does not determine the order of emergence of a grammatical form. In addition, they also show that mothers' inconsistency in using grammatical morphemes in required contexts does not affect the children's sequence of development of those forms. It appears that mothers' grammatically incomplete language need not have a detrimental effect on the earliest stages of language development.

That is not to say that linguistic input from mothers is unimportant. The deaf mothers' speech in this study contained basic information that 2 year old children need to learn language. They all used oral communication and systematically ordered and combined two and three word utterances relative to events in context. Although three mothers were less than 15% intelligible to five judges, they were understood by their children and conversed orally.

In other words the deaf mothers had enough oral language to encode the mental concepts of 2 year olds. Recent investigators have found that mothers' speech to children is grammatically simpler than speech to adults. It appears that it can be quite simple indeed. Furthermore, there is evidence that mothers not only simplify their syntax, but talk to children at their cognitive level. The same semantic relations used by children have also been found to predominate in mothers' speech to them (Snow, 1977). In other words, normal hearing mothers talk to their children about the here and now, what they see and do. The ability to code concrete information about the here and now is within the linguistic capability of many deaf speakers. The mothers in this study were apparently able to communicate adequate linguistic information concerning sensorimotor experience to their 2 year olds, even though they were only communicating in one, two and three word sentences.

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