User:Carolinaa.om/Utterance

In oral/spoken language, utterances have several characteristics such as paralinguistic features, which are aspects of speech such as facial expression, gesture, and posture. Prosodic features include stress, intonation, and tone of voice, as well as ellipsis, which are words that the listener inserts in spoken language to fill gaps. Moreover, other aspects of utterances found in spoken languages are non-fluency features including: voiced/un-voiced pauses (i.e. "umm"), tag questions, and false starts, or when someone begins uttering again to correct themselves. Other features include: fillers (i.e. "and stuff"), accents/dialects, deictic expressions (utterances such as "over there!" that need further explanation to be understood), simple conjunctions (i.e. "and," "but," etc.), and colloquial lexis (everyday informal words).

An utterance found in spoken or written language, as in a script, has several characteristics. These include paralinguistic features, which are forms of communication that do not involve words but are added around utterances to give meaning. Examples of paralinguistic features include facial expressions, laughter, eye contact, and gestures. Prosodic features refer to the sound of someone's voice as they speak: pitch, intonation and stress. Ellipsis can be used in either written or spoken language; for instance, when an utterance is conveyed and the speaker omits words because they are already understood in the situation. For example: A: Juice? B: Please. A: Room temperature? B: Cold.

Non-fluency features also occur when producing utterances. As people think about what to say during conversations, there are errors and corrections in speech. For example, voiced/un-voiced pauses which are "umm," "erm," etc. in voiced pauses and in transcripts un-voiced pauses are denoted as (.) or (1) relating to the amount of time of the pause (what does this sentence mean??). Tag questions are also a part of non-fluency features; these are used by the speaker to check if the listener understands what the speaker is saying. An example is "Do you know what I mean?" False alerts occur when the speaker is voicing an utterance but stops and starts again, usually to correct themselves.

The development of utterances in children is facilitated by parents, adults, or any other guardian the child has growing up. Studies have indicated that this development is affected by the parent, adult, or guardian's socioeconomic status (SES). It has been shown that children whose parents received more education and have higher SES have larger vocabularies and learn new words more quickly during early childhood while children with less educated parents and lower SES have a smaller vocabulary and a slower growth in their vocabulary skills (Arriaga, Fenson, Cronan & Pethick, 1998; Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, Laursen & Tardif, 2002; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991; Lawrence & Shipley, 1996; Ninio, 1980).[4] This correlation is due to the fact that more educated parents use more lexises when speaking to their children as opposed to parents who are less educated (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003 a; Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Waterfall, Vevea & Hedges, in press).[4] Hoff's 2003 analysis supports this correlation and shows that the mean length of utterance and vocabulary of mothers who talk to their children is related to their SES status and thus child vocabulary development. For instance, high-SES mothers use longer utterances and a wider variety of words when talking to their children. These mothers also spend more time talking to their children while low-SES mothers use shorter utterances and a smaller vocabulary. As a result, children with parents who are more educated have larger vocabularies (Hoff, 2003).[4]

In child-directed speech, utterances have several additional features. For example, the phonology in child-directed speech is different: Utterances are spoken more slowly, with longer pauses in between utterances, higher pitches, etc. The lexis and semantics differ, and a speaker uses words suited for children, "doggie" instead of "dog," for example. The grammar is simpler, repetitive, with less use of verbs and adjectives. There is a greater use of one word utterances and the pragmatics uses supportive language like expansions and re-casting.[5]