Pirmosios kalbos įsisavinimas : gimtosios tarmės ir bendrinės kalbos konfliktas

Abstract

The case study presented in the paper is based on a longitudinal data of a Lithuanian family. A typical present-day linguistic situation was observed: between themselves both parents were speaking a dialect, but both of them used Standard Lithuanian when they addressed their child. The research focuses on the parental reactions to dialectal utterances of the child, and the results of data analysis show that the parents tended to correct and reformulate most of the dialectal utterances of the child. Though the child did not react to these corrections directly, in the data collected during a later period of her observation dialectal forms became scarce, and by 2;8 they had almost disappeared. The results of the analysis clearly demonstrate the importance of child-directed speech and provoke a discussion about parental communicative strategies. In our case, in almost a year’s time the girl lost the acquired phonetic and grammatical features that distinguished her dialect, which were replaced by Standard Lithuanian.