Küsimused eesti lapsele suunatud kõnes leedu ja vene keele taustal

It has been established from previous studies that Estonian child-directed speech includes fewer questions than in Russian and Lithuanian and adults’ interaction with children is based on declarative and command sentences, which aligns Estonian child-directed speech more closely to Germanic and Romance languages than to the geographically closer Baltic and Slavic languages. The aim of the present article is to find out whether Estonian child-directed speech is indeed as poor in questions as it appeared by initial research. Analysing the Estonian data from previous research, it appeared that Estonian adults do not use questions only in reaction to child speech but also to reformulate, specify and repair their own utterances. For that reason the original classification of questions used in this research has been refined. To the previous classification that only took into account questions that the parent posed in immediate reaction to the child’s speech, a new category has been added in order to consider the questions that parents pose in reaction to their own prior utterances. The Estonian-Russian-Lithuanian joint study was based on speech data from one Estonian, one Russian and one Lithuanian child-parent couple. About 12 hours of audio material for each language was observed, all three children were recorded at age 1;8–2;8. First, for a control study, 15 recordings of one-hour spontaneous speech of children aged 1;7–2;8 were analysed. Then, the results were verified by a wide selection method and speech data from another four children was included, in order to exclude the possibility that the small number of questions characterizes the phrasing of a specific mother rather than that of Estonian child-directed speech in general. The results of the study show that although the new classification of questions allowed the identification of one-fifth more questions, Estonian child-directed speech compared to Russian and Lithuanian child-directed speech remains relatively poor in questions and according to its conversation strategy is more similar to Germanic and Romance languages. However, it can be said that according to the position, function, pragmatic role and structure, the results concerning the overall distribution of questions in Estonian child-directed speech are similar to Russian and Lithuanian results.