followup on "motherese"

[Mark A. Mandel]

In last month's discussion '"ese" suffix insulting/racist?', Beverly and
Larry mentioned "motherese". Larry referred to the OED's first cite for
it, which is

1975 E. NEWPORT in Word (1976) 27 462 (title) Motherese: adjustments to
child listeners and its consequence for language learning.

At the moment I am working from a temporary location in Dr. Lila
Gleitman's office while the air conditioning in my own office, across
the hall, is off-line for major repairs. And on her shelf is a bound
copy of Newport's 1975 dissertation, "Motherese: The Speech of Mothers
to Young Children" (Psychology, UPenn), with Dr. Gleitman's signature as
a supervisor of dissertation (along with Henry Gleitman).

Well, I couldn't resist, could I? The introductory sections (pp. 1-13)
have no citation for the word, but I did find it twice in the
Bibliography, both in previous titles by Newport:


Newport, E. L.  Motherese: a study of how mothers speak to young
children.  Spencer Foundation grant proposal, 1972.

Newport, E. L.  Motherese and its relation to the child's acquisition of
language.  Paper presented at Conference on Language Input and
Acquisition, Boston, Sept., 1974.


Depending on whether one insists on seeing copies of those (Disclaimer:
I am not a lexie), which seems easier for the paper than the proposal,
it looks as if we can antedate by 1-3 years.

I'm bcc-ing this to Elissa, who was AAMOF the outside committee member
on my own dissertation
(http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/bibweb/LiDat.acgi?ID=5099), for any
comments she may wish to make.

-- Mark A. Mandel