Exploring longitudinal changes in the pragmatic functions of child-directed speech in an Argentinian sample

This study investigates how the pragmatic functions of child-directed speech (CDS) change as children grow older within a socioeconomically diverse group of Argentinean families. Forty children, with a mean age of 13.6 (3.82) months at the beginning of the study, were selected from a longitudinal corpus of at-home audio recordings. Twenty children were from families in higher socioeconomic circumstances (SEC), while the other 20 were from families in lower SEC. Intelligible utterances directed to the target child were categorized into action requests, verbal response requests, comments, and linguistic rituals. Poisson regression models revealed a decrease in action requests rates over time, as well as an increase in total verbal responses and in the total and the rate of comments. SEC was found to be a significant predictor of the total amount of comments and verbal response requests but not of action requests. These findings highlight the adaptive nature of adult speech as children develop.