Caregiver language : a study of caregiver interaction and their impact on children's fluency

Abstract: This paper aims to examine caregiver responses to children's utterances and how the caregiver's responding speech varies during the child's three critical years of language development. The methodology of this paper is a longitudinal study that focuses on how the caregiver uses the language during the child's first three and most important language-wise years. The data comprised three video recordings downloaded from the CHILDES database. The process of analyzing the caregiver's language was then based on Lieven's (1978) semantic categories. These results demonstrated the importance of the caregiver in L1 development.