Interrogatives in Russian and Lithuanian child-directed speech : do we communicate with our children in the same way?

Abstract

Children learn to speak and ‘enter’ language in different ways: partly by themselves in non-Western cultures (Foley 1997; Lieven 1994, 1997; Ochs & Shieffelin 1984; Tomasello 2003), and partly through the guidance of adults. In European culture, the role of the adult in the acquisition of communicative competence by children is vital. Despite the fact that the mother's communicative/conversational behavior is a crucial factor for the communicative development of her child, this behavior differs considerably depending on the culture, individual conversational style, and other factors. The existence of such factors has been demonstrated by cross-cultural studies of mother-child interactions in Estonian, Finnish, and Swedish (Tulviste 2002). Therefore, these differences deserve to be studied in the light of the language-specific component of maternal conversational style. Language through communication can be described as one of the most effective ways of learning languages. In the case of a native language, adults take the role of a teacher, and a great number of their phrases can be recognized as intuitive attempts to stimulate the acquisition of linguistic and conversational skills, or the development of language-system or dialogue competence.