Word-order adaptation and lexical repetition in speech to young children: With focus on Korean mothers’ production of nouns

The relative ease of children’s learning of nouns vs. verbs can be explained by the characteristics of linguistic input. In Korean, syntactic structures contain parameters adversarial for learning nouns such as the SOV word-order, in which noun appears utterance-medially, and frequent elision of noun. Nevertheless, Korean children readily learn nouns and even show a noun-bias in production. We investigate two strategies Korean mothers adopt to aid children’s noun learning: adapting the default word-order to place nouns in the utterance-final position, and presenting the nouns in repetition. In Study 1, we examined the distribution of nouns in Korean and English child-directed speech (CDS) and found that Korean mothers scramble the word-order to [(S)VO] or repeat the noun at the end of the utterance [(S)OV, O], which we term tag-repetition, especially when the children were younger. These patterns were rarely found in English-speaking mothers’ speech. They also presented nouns in isolation with a higher rate than English, particularly to youngest children. To test whether the Korean mothers’ adaptation of word-order and repetition is specific to CDS, we compared the rate of word-order adaptation and lexical repetition of nouns in Korean CDS and adult-directed speech (ADS). The results showed that in spontaneous speech, Korean mothers place nouns on the edges and employed tag repetition more frequently in CDS than in ADS. The findings suggest that mothers might have a tacit knowledge of the importance of utterance-final position and syntactic constraints, and adapt their language to address the language-specific constraints in the input.