Child-directed Speech in Qaqet: A Language of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea book cover
Language · 2022 · en

Child-directed Speech in Qaqet: A Language of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea

by Henrike Frye

About this book

Henrike Frye studies how Qaqet speakers address children, comparing those interactions with speech directed towards adults. Based on research in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea, the monograph connects patterns of language use with the social settings in which children encounter speech.

The analysis considers utterance length, disfluency, prosody, attention, corrective input and specialised vocabulary. A pear-story corpus and interviews provide material for comparing speakers and situations. Chapters also introduce the language environment and explain the study’s methods and limitations. Developed from a 2019 doctoral thesis, this 2022 edition includes an interview appendix, tables and references.