How adults speak to children when children make speech errors

What is it about?

We looked at how adults perceive children's productions of the "s" and "sh" sounds (two sounds that are later acquired and which occur in lots of words of English), and how they respond to children when they make errors on these sounds. We created a computerized experiment that mimicked an adult-child interaction, and found that adults produce clearer tokens of "s" and "sh" to children after hearing productions by children that they rated as incorrect

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Why is it important?

Speech sound acquisition is a complex task. It involves lots of different skills, and occurs in a social context. We know relatively little about how the speech to children changes in different interactions, and across different pairs of adults and children. The findings in this paper suggest that the speech that parents produce to children might be very different depending on how accurately the child they are speaking to produces speech

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