Abstract:Studies of the role of child-directed speech in language acquisition have often ignored variation in the amount of speech children hear. The present paper argues that there is no empirical justificati...Studies of the role of child-directed speech in language acquisition have often ignored variation in the amount of speech children hear. The present paper argues that there is no empirical justification for doing so and demonstrates that the resultant descriptions of child- directed speech look quite different depending on how variation in total output is handled. There is real variation in how much talk children hear, and many previous studies of the effects of input have thus failed to consider a potentially important variable. Future research should be aimed at untangling the influence on language development of the total amount of speech children hear and of the relative frequencies of properties of that speech.Read More