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ACQUISITION Motherese: it’s a kind of verbal behaviour on the part of parents or people who have a close contact with children(=caretakers’ speech). They adjust their speech, it’s a special type of lg meant for young children. Motherese is usually highly grammatical but sentences are shorter, simpler(few subordinate clauses), limited grammar and range of vocab, high rate of tutorial/display questions, high level of redundancy(plenty of repetitions), significant adjustments in pronunciation(more careful, you separate words, higher pitch, exaggerated intonation) Functions of motherese: - aid to communication(most important) - lg teaching aid - socialization function:(mothers rarely pay attention to correctness of their children utterances, but they pay attention to social acceptance of what they say. They insist on child’s saying’thank u’, ‘hello’. Mothers adjust their speech to the level of understanding of a child non-consciously) EFFECTS OF MOTHERESE: - route of acquisition – it’s assumed that the route is not affected, remains stable(impossible to carry out experiments) - rate of acquisition – m. influences it. The wider variety of speech, the faster rate of acq. Mothers who use a lot of questions in their motherese and make frequent pauses to sustain the interaction have better results, the rate is faster. - no correlation between motherese and success of acquisition FOREIGN LG ACQUISITION A native speaker and non-native speaker of a lg – foreigner talk. It means acquiring lg in a natural setting, by contact with native speakers. Foreigner talk – the way in which a native speaker talks to a non-native s. of a lg. S/he makes adjustments while speaking. Both input and interaction undergo certain adjustments in foreigner talk. A native sp.modifies input(the lg produces while talking to non-native sp.) and the structure of interaction. In many aspects foreigner talk will resemble motherese but there are also many differences. It is far more common for a native speaker to use incorrect lg(as for motherese it is always correct though it may be simplified). Input in foreigner talk – input modifications may occur at any level: 1. pronunciation – the adjustments can be divided into a)standard – slowing down, careful articulation, heavier stress, increased volume on key words b)non-standard – exaggerated intonation, fewer reduced vowels, addition of vowels to final consonants 2.vocabulary a)standard – limited vocab, difficult items replaced with more frequent words, repetition of words, paraphrasing, using gestures, replacing pronouns with nouns b)non-standard – using foreign or foreign sounding words 3.grammar a)standard – shorter sentences, fewer contracted forms, fewer subordinate clauses, fewer’wh-’ questions, more’yes/no’ questions, more tag questions, more frequent references to present, topics moved to the beginning of a sentence for emphasis b)non-st. – omitting certain verb inflections and auxiliaries, imitating partially non-native speaker’s utterances