Although much attention has been devoted to lexical, grammatical, and semantic aspects of child-directed speech, less is known about its pragmatics. This paper describes a longitudinal study of the communicative intents used by parents in interaction with their 14-, 20-, and 32-month-olds (n = 52). With 14-month-olds, parents used a small core set of communicative intents. This set grew in size and sophistication with increasing child age. Comparison with children's intents showed that some commonly used parental communicative intents were rare in children's language at all three ages. As children grew older, parental use of directive intents declined and child-centered acts increased. These findings suggest that child-directed parental speech is simplified pragmatically as well as grammatically and semantically.
