Interrogative repetitions in Russian and Lithuanian child-directed speech.

The paper focuses on a pragmatic and structural analysis of interrogative repetitions that seem to be typically frequent in child-directed speech (CDS). The cross-linguistic analysis was based on longitudinal corpus data of two Indo-European languages, Russian and Lithuanian, which are recognized as being morphologically rich and highly inflected. Despite numerous studies in language acquisition, CDS still lacks any complex analysis in both of these languages. For this study, redundancy, a typical characteristic of CDS, was particularly taken into account. Following the results of our previous studies, we presumed that caregivers’ frequent repetition of children’s utterances might generally serve as a basis for so-called redundancy of CDS. Our results highlighted numerous communicative similarities between the Russian and Lithuanian CDS; particularly, the pragmatics and structural diversity of the repetitions should be mentioned. Moreover, similarities still remain in a dynamic perspective. The majority of repetitions function as conversational ones. Despite different ages and social and kinship status, Russian and Lithuanian caregivers intuitively use conversational repetitions for elaborating a conversation and thus stimulating children’s communicative development. Among all structural types of repetitions, expansions and reformulations seem to be the most frequent, i. e., both Russian and Lithuanian-speaking caregivers prefer modification of the children’s previous utterances to pure or focus-repetitions. Also, they seem to be similarly sensitive to children’s grammatically correct vs. erroneous utterances. Specifically, they tend to expand children’s grammatically correct utterances and to reformulate the erroneous ones (however, metadiscursive direct corrections were similarly rare in both the corpora). The results of the study confirmed a prediction about the frequency of repetitions in CDS. However, we still assume that this kind of redundancy should be recognized as a natural and even a necessary element of CDS, especially at the early stages of language acquisition. Repetitive redundancy might be closely related to a didactic communicative function and thus it might stimulate both children dialogue and system-language skills. The frequency and distribution of structural and pragmatic types of caregivers’ repetitions seem to be dependent on the child’s biological and linguistic age. At the age of 3;0 (when, following A. N. Gvozdev, a basis of a native language is already acquired), truly redundant elements leave the dialogue. Expansions, reformulations, and corrections are found much rarer when compared to the early period. These dynamic changes reflect a so-called fine-tuning, i.e., caregivers’ ability to intuitively modify their CDS according to the process of children’s language development and its individual characteristics. To sum up, our results point to the importance of pragmatic and structural differences in child-directed repetitions. Redundancy based on the huge variety of pragmatic and structural (sub-)types of caregivers’ repetitive reactions to children’s speech plays a great role in the acquisition and further development of both system-language and proper dialogue competence