Nurturant Talk to Children

The speech addressed to children, usually called Baby Talk, is not homogeneous. As Brown suggested, one dimension, "Communicative Clarity," controls the variables that contribute to simplifying the task of communicating to the child. The second dimension, "Affection/Nurturance," controls the variables that express a particular kind of social relationship between adult and child. The speech of mothers (and sometimes fathers) to 21 children aged four to nine years was recorded in two situations in a hospital: first in a waiting room and then in the recovery room following minor elective surgery. There were considerably more nurturant and supportive utterances in the post- compared to the pre-operative setting. Mothers spoke more slowly, used more affectionate terms. Fathers' speech followed the mothers' pattern. Parents of both sexes were more nurturant to their daughters during the pre-operative period, indicating that the post-operative setting was compelling enough to obviate individual differences. A cluster of variables describes the nurturant speech style: affectionate terms, prompted questions, disguised imperatives, use of hospital terms and low frequency of questions.