Activities and Child-Directed-Speech
A Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48162/rev.57.030Keywords:
activity, child-directed speech, psycholinguistics, language developmentAbstract
Child-directed speech (CDS) has been widely studied due to its close relationship with children's language development, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. However, CDS does not occur in isolation within households, but rather within the context of shared activities that shape how adults interact with children. This paper aims to review the differences reported in the literature regarding how activities influence child-directed speech. To this end, a literature search was conducted in three databases and complemented by a manual search. Studies published in scientific journals and theses were included if they compared features of CDS across two or more activities, or within the same activity. The results of 42 studies were systematized and organized into four categories: amount of speech, lexical level, syntactic level, and interactive level. Although all these levels were shown to be sensitive to the type of activity, the review also identified limitations in generalizing findings and potential gaps in the literature. In doing so, this work seeks to inform future research directions and intervention projects.
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