SES effects on the use of variation sets in child-directed speech

Abstract

Socio-economic status (SES) impacts the amount and type of input children hear in ways that have developmental consequences. Here, we examine the effect of SES on the use of variation sets (successive utterances with partial self-repetitions) in child-directed speech (CDS). Variation sets have been found to facilitate language learning, but have been studied only in higher-SES groups. Here, we examine their use in naturalistic speech in two languages (Hebrew and English) for both low-and high-SES caregivers. We find that variation sets are more frequent in the input of high-SES caregivers in both languages, indicating that SES also impacts structural properties of CDS.