Non-arbitrariness in Swedish parent-child interactions

• The purpose of this paper is to study the frequency and use of onomatopoeic and sound symbolic words, reduplications and emotional interjections in Swedish by analyzing the interactions between adults and small children in a longitudinal corpus. The study looks for correlations between the variables age at recording, type of non-arbitrary word, word frequency, and type of speech – IDS or child speech. The corpus used is the Lacerda corpus, which consists of recordings and transcriptions of three Swedish speaking children and their caregivers recorded at six occasions between approximately 1 and 2;8 years. Onomatopoeic, sound symbolic expressions, reduplications and emotional interjections in the speech of the children and the adults were analyzed. The analysis shows that more onomatopoeic words and reduplications are produced in the early ages than in the later ages of the children, and that the caregivers produce more non-arbitrary words and expressions than the children do. Most importantly it shows that there is an interaction between the adult and the child since the children’s productions follow the adult’s productions, at every recording session.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

onomatopoeia

sound symbolism

infant directed speech

interaction

longitudinal

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)