Marmara Elt/EFL Resources

The role of input in the child’s acquisition of  language is undeniably crucial.Whatever one’s position on the innateness of language,the speech that young children hear is primarily the speech heard in the home,and much of that speech is parental speech or the speech of older siblings.Linguists once claimed that most adult speech is basically semigrammatical,that children are exposed to a chaotic sample of language,and only their innate capacities can account for their successful acquistion of language.McNeill,for example,wrote: “The speech of adults from which discovers the locally appropriate manifestation of the linguistic universals is a completely random sample,in no way contrived to instruct the child on grammar” (1966:73).However,Labov’s (1970) studies showed that the presumed ungrammaticality of everyday speech appears to be a myth.Bellugi and Brown (1964) found that the speech addressed to children was carefully grammatical and lacked the usual hesitations and false starts common in adult-to-adult speech.Landes’s (1975) summary of a wide range of research on parental input supported their conclusions.Later studies of parents’ speech in the home (Hladik & Edwards 1984; Moerk 1985) confirmed earlier evidence demonstrating the selectivity of parental linguistic input to their children.

At the same time, it will be remembered that children react very consistently to the deep structure and the communicative function of language,and they do not react overtly to expansions and grammatical corrections.Such input is largely ignored unless there is some truth or falsity that the child can attend to.The importance of issue lies in the fact that it is clear from more recent research that adult and peer input to the child is far more important than nativists earlier believed.Adult input seems to shape the child’s acquisition, and the interaction patterns between child and parent change according to the increasing language skill of the child.Nurture and environment in this case are tremendously important,although it remains to be seen just how important parental input is as a proportion of total input.

Reference
# Brown,H.Douglas Principles of language learning and teaching/H.Douglas Brown.-4th ed. p.53
## Landes,James.1975 Speech addressed to children.Issues and characteristics of parental input.Language Learning 25:355-379
### Labov,William,1970.The study of language in its social context.Stadium Generale 23:80-87.

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