The context matters: The use of communicative intentions by mothers to their children during playtime and mealtime.

This study examined the use of various communicative intentions (CIs) of mothers directed to their children in two contexts: playtime and mealtime at two linguistic stages: preverbal and single-word. The study revealed that statements were most prevalent during mealtime, while both statements and directives were prevalent during playtime. Particularly, directives were more frequent during playtime than during mealtime. Moreover, the number of CIs directed to children in the preverbal stage was higher than children in the single-word stage. These findings emphasize the role of context and culture on the mother-child language use in general and CIs in particular.

Content words in Hebrew child-directed speech.

The goal of the study was to examine whether the 'noun-bias' phenomenon, which exists in the lexicon of Hebrew-speaking children, also exists in Hebrew child-directed speech (CDS) as well as in Hebrew adult-directed speech (ADS). In addition, we aimed to describe the use of the different classes of content words in the speech of Hebrew-speaking parents to their children at different ages compared to the speech of parents to adults (ADS). Thirty infants (age range 8:5-33 months) were divided into three stages according to age: pre-lexical, single-word, and early grammar. The ADS corpus included 18 Hebrew-speaking parents of children at the same three stages of language development as in the CDS corpus. The CDS corpus was collected from parent-child dyads during naturalistic activities at home: mealtime, bathing, and play. The ADS corpus was collected from parent-experimenter interactions including the parent watching a video and then being interviewed by the experimenter. 200 utterances of each sample were transcribed, coded for types and tokens and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results show that in CDS, when speaking to infants of all ages, parents' use of types and tokens of verbs and nouns was similar and significantly higher than their use of adjectives or adverbs. In ADS, however, verbs were the main lexical category used by Hebrew-speaking parents in both types and tokens. It seems that both the properties of the input language (e.g. the pro-drop parameter) and the interactional styles of the caregivers are important factors that may influence the high presence of verbs in Hebrew-speaking parents' ADS and CDS. The negative correlation between the widespread use of verbs in the speech of parents to their infants and the 'noun-bias' phenomenon in the Hebrew-child lexicon will be discussed in detail.