motherese and child language acquisition
...is pre-supposes that the mother has a co-operative child. The styles of individual children may enable/hinder linguistic interaction. But what of all the other factors of motherese? There seems to be no correlation between, say, the syntactic modifications of an adult and syntactic development in a child, other than the fact that the child develops and such modifications are made anyway. Perhaps this is enough in itself. Motherese is a linguistic register based on simplification, especially at the syntactic level. However, It is not comparable to other simplified registers, e.g. how one would talk to an adult who did not speak English very well. "Foreigner talk" is similar in some ways to motherese: for example, exaggerated intonation, shorter Mean Utterance Length and special vocabulary ("bang-bang" for "gun"), but there are features of "Foreigner talk" that do not appear in motherese. For example, using "no" ...