Mothers' and Non-Mothers' Semantic Adaptation to Deviant Speech

This study examined whether a group of mothers of children with deviant speech, and a group of non-mothers, could adapt their comprehension strategies to decode command sentences spoken by a child known to generate patterned deviant utterances. While subjects made significant improvement in their comprehension performance (adaptation), a significant difference between groups was not observed. Perceptual adaptation to variant linguistic codes may be so basic to decoding performance that maternal experience with child speech would not provide mothers with a decoding advantage over native speakers engaged in everyday adaptive communication.