TAYAH LEE

I will argue, with reference to Ochs and Schieffelin (2009) and Fernald and Morikawa (1993), that cultural values and expectations play a critical role in caregivers’ child directed speech. I will summarize the findings and analyze how they give insight to cultural values and their embodiment in child directed speech in the two articles successively. Child directed speech is communication geared towards children or infants. It often contains specialized words, exaggerated syllables, and high intonations; but are these elements regionally or culturally specified to western societies?

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Contrary to popular assumption, child directed speech does not consist of only the easily accessible stereotypes of high-pitches voices, simple sentences, and nonsensical noises. Authors Elinor Ochs and Bambi B. Schieffelin, in their article, “Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications” (2009), take on an ethnographic approach—by broadening mentality and considered a wide range of cultures and social classes—and research child directed speech in the cultures of the Anglo-American white middle-class, Kaluli, and Samoan people. Through their research they found typical Anglo-American white middle-class caregiver-child relationships are dyadic, meaning that the relationships contain the two elements of mother and child, both of which are considered active parts of conversation. The child is considered to be dependent on the adult community and incompetent in society. However, through the strategies of “self-lowering” or “child-raising,” where caregiver language is simplified or child expression is highly interpreted, respectively, the incompetency is masked and the competence gap reduced. (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2009, pp. 271-272). Typical Kaluli societies view children as helpless and incompetent, and caregivers do not consider them to be active parts of communication. The child is not spoken to until older. While the child is still young, the caregivers—often the mother—speak for the child rather than interpret any form of expression they may make. This often is performed for the sake of others, exemplifying the triadic or three-part communication format. (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2009, pp. 273-278). Samoan societies similarly perform triadic communication with their infants. Again, language is directed not to the child (until it is older and considered more mischievous and defiant), rather about the child. The identity of the caregiver ranges from the child’s mother to other children of the village, and the triadic communication serves to appeal to the highly stratified society and communication hierarchy. Those of lower ranking or status must act as middlemen in communicating for those of higher and lower ranking. (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2009, pp. 278-285).

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In this article, the authors show different cultures’ attitudes and treatment towards infants and their developing language; and through these, much can be learned about the different societies’ values exhibited through child directed speech. In the American white middle-class, the child is seen as a soon-to-be contributor of society; thus it is a cultural norm for caregivers and parents to emphasize facilitation of intelligence and independence. In order to encourage learning and understanding, the child directed speech is often simplified and accommodated towards the child’s assumed language capabilities (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2009). In contrast to this, the highly stratified Samoan community value respect, a central part of their culture. Because of this, the Samoan mothers view it their responsibility to develop higher language capabilities in their children. Rather than adjust for the abilities of the child, the child is expected to adjust to the standard of society. (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2009, p. 282). The Kaluli have similar expectations of their children. The article states:

Because the goals of language acquisition include the development of a competent and independent child who uses mature language, Kaluli use no baby-talk lexicon, for they said (when I asked about it) that to do so would result in a child sounding babyish, which was clearly undesirable and counterproductive. (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2009, p. 277).

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A more detailed study, published in 1993 by Anne Fernald and Hiromi Morikawa, exhibited the similarities and differences in the technicalities of child directed speech by American and Japanese mothers. The cross-sectional study observed the different types of speech, language, and language-structure used by mothers playing with their infants of either 6, 12, or 19 months of age. In the study, American mothers used noun labels, questions, and adult words more often than Japanese mothers, who used verbs, isolated nouns, onomatopoeia words, and “nonsense” sounds while playing with their infants. (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993).

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Again, the cultural values and expectations of the two societies greatly influence the child directed speech. As previously described with the article of Ochs and Schieffelin (2009), the American values of independence and intelligence are embodied through child directed speech that encourages learning of a child’s surroundings; thus explaining the mothers’ repeated use of nouns and adult words as opposed to baby-talk words—for example, the use of “dog” instead of “doggy” (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993). On the other hand, the Japanese mothers seemed more concerned with the child learning social routines, such as sharing toys or showing positive feelings, rather than learning about the object itself. They were also found to frequently use backchannel vocalizations, which are verbal and non-verbal communications that imply the listener’s understanding of the speaker. These elements reflect the Japanese value of maintaining omoiyari, which is “a Japanese concept referring to harmony in interactions” (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993, p. 653). This would explain the complementary findings that American babies have larger noun vocabularies than Japanese babies by 19 months (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993, p.651), while Japanese children are expected to understand social routines and expressions earlier than American children (Fernald & Morikawa, 1993, p.653).

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The two articles briefly summarized both describe how different cultures have different values which can be identified through the expectations of a child’s language development and embodied through child directed speech. The article by Ochs & Schieffelin (2009) has extensive details and support to their claims, including excerpts of manuscripts of first-hand experienced conversations. Through the extremely detailed examples of different societies—all three of which vary in terms of familiarity to the reader—and the firsthand experience in all of them, the article effectively conveys how greatly language expectations, acquisition, and socialization can vary across cultures. The second article, by Fernald and Morikawa, is also extremely detailed and extensive, and supports its claims and findings with studies, statistics, and research. However, readers should be careful of generalizing the findings of the study to all American mothers and all Japanese mothers, for the participants of the study were not randomly selected and therefore do not represent a general population. But the article is clear in stating its sample of participants, and it reminds the reader of its specified results in the conclusion.

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Building off the idea that these articles are specified to a certain group of people or a small sample of a population, it is important to remember that these findings display general trends. Again, these trends and findings are insightful; they can open doors into the deeper study of not only these societies but language development as well. However, the beauty of populations is that they are made up of unique personalities, and not all individuals will fit into a perfectly defined box.

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In conclusion, Ochs and Schieffelin’s study of American, Kaluli, and Samoan language development in children and Fernald and Morikawa’s study of child directed speech by American and Japanese mothers give great insight to different cultural values and their effect on child directed speech. The first-hand experience, extensive detail, and thorough research prove the trustworthiness of both articles. And although both display fascinating trends of the different cultures, it is important to remember and value the uniqueness of all individuals.

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References

Fernald, A., & Morikawa, H. (1993). Common Themes and Cultural Variations in Japanese and American Mothers’ Speech to Infants. Child Development, 64(3), 637–656. doi:10.2307/1131208

Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (2009). Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications. In A. Duranti (Ed.), Linguistic anthropology: a reader (pp. 263–301). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.