Crib talk or crib speech is pre-sleep monologue made by young children while in bed. This starts somewhere around one-and-a-half years and usually ends by about two-and-a-half years of age, though children can continue longer. It consists of conversational discourse with turn-taking often containing semantically and syntactically coherent question-answer sequences. It may contain word play and bits of song and nursery rhyme.
Contents
- Types
- Enactment sequences
- Proto narrative
- Problem focused
- Function
- Problems
- Studies
- Examples
- Anthony
- Emily
- In the Dark
- References
Crib talk has been found in deaf children in their early sign language. It also occurs in autistic children.
Types
Crib talk has been divided into three somewhat overlapping varieties.
Enactment sequences
This occurs most commonly in early monologues and is done in a low tone. It concerns using language to bring about action and occurs when playing with toys and dolls as “friends” with language embedded in ongoing play. Whilst like conversational speech, it can occur in long uninterrupted sequences in which the child describes what they are doing.
Proto-narrative
In this a child creates a story about events that have happened or imaginary events in temporal-causal sequences that can be as short as five words or as long as 150. They may include the reciting of stories that have been read to them. They occur throughout the period in which a child engages in crib talk.
Problem focused
These concern what happened in the past, what will happen in the future and how events are organized. They incorporate descriptions used by others to enable prediction.
Function
Such monologues have been argued to play a key role in providing a practice space for developing complex connected discourse, aiding a child to use language as a tool to categorize, explain and know the world, and to “clarify what may originally have been problematic or troublesome”.
Such talk is more complex than that done by children in interactions with others, and this has been suggested to be due to the freedom to control what they say and so not have their cognitive abilities stretched by having to work out how to respond to what someone has just said.
While similar to private speech which usually starts after 3 and ends about 7, crib talk lacks its self-regulatory instructions.
Problems
Crib talk is difficult to transcribe because such young children typically have poor pronunciation, and because there may be little context to infer the likely meaning of a child’s words, even with the help of a parent. This has limited the number of children studied and the length of time over which the development of crib talk monologues have been researched.
The children studied are also atypical in that they are the offspring of researchers or their close colleagues, and so are from highly educated backgrounds. The child studied by Katherine Nelson, for example, was highly precocious in her language abilities, which raises questions about the generality of findings on that one child.
Studies
Crib talk was first studied by Ruth Hirsch Weir on her son Anthony and published in 1962. Two other studies have been carried out by Stan Kuczaj on 14 children between 15–30 months - published in 1983 - and Katherine Nelson on Emily in 1989.
Examples
(As spelled in transcripts)
Anthony
Anthony is here between 28 and 30 months playing at grammatical transformations and combinations.
Emily
"In the Dark"
George Miller has noted that the last two verses of A. A. Milne's poem "In the Dark" in Now We Are Six echoes the verbal play of crib talk.