Brown & Hanlon revisited: mothers' sensitivity to ungrammatical forms

Abstract

Brown & Hanlon (1970) reported that parents' explicit approval or disapproval of their child's utterances was not contingent on the well-formedness of that utterance. Rather, parents seemed attuned to the semantic value of their child's speech. Using 40 mother–child dyads, 10 from each of four age groups, 2–5 years, we replicated these results. We expanded upon this earlier work, however, to suggest that parents are not totally indifferent to the grammatical form of their child's utterances. Focusing on repetitions, we found that mothers are more inclined to repeat ungrammatical than grammatical sentences generated by 2- year-old subjects. This indicates that the language learning environment does present subtle cues that distinguish between well-formed and ill-formed sentences. Whether the child is capable of capitalizing on these cues remains unanswered.