Mother-child linguistic interactions and behavioral development: A multidimensional observational.

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Child development is a crucial field for understanding the origins and functions of processes related complex human behavior. However, in spite of the fact that development, although not due the passage of time per se, takes place along time, behavior analysis has paid little attention longitudinal studies of behavior development in infants and children (Bijou, 1989; Ribes, 1996). Behavior analytic efforts have rather been directed transversal experimental or applied studies, in which particular settings and behaviors have been selected out of the stream of development as a continuous and irreversible process (Gewirtz & Pelaez-Nogueras, 1991; Poulson & Kymissis, 1996; Rosales-Ruiz & Baer, 1996). In most developmental studies, language behavior has been normally considered a special area in its own right, apart of the rest of behavioral processes or phenomena involved in development. Other putative areas of development include affection, cognition, attention and perception, motor behavior, and social and moral behavior (Bijou, 1975; Farah & Kosslyn, 1982; Malcuitt, Pomerleau & Lamarre, 1988; Parke, 1989; Riegler & Baer, 1989; Zimmerman & Whitehurst, 1979). Behavior analytic research on language development has rather focused on two aspects: a) training-acquisition procedures related some of the responses classes proposed by Skinner (1957), such as manding and tacting (Partington, Sundberg, Newhouse, & Spengler, 1994; Ribes, Gomar-Ruiz, & Rivas, 1975; Simic & Bucher, 1980; Yamamoto & Mochizuki, 1988), and b) the identification and demonstration of reinforcement control over so-called generalized operant classes, such as imitation, grammatical or syntactic responses, instruction following, and verbal-non verbal correspondence (Deacon & Konarski, 1987; Garcfa, Guess, & Byrnes, 1973; Hart & Risley, 1980; Hester & Hendrickson, 1977; Ribes, 1986; Stokes, Osner, & Guevremont, 1987), all classes which are assumed underlie the emergence of new, non-directly trained linguistic responses. There are few studies focusing on the actual behavioral interactions of the child (as a language leamer) and the mother, a caregiver, or a trained teacher (Bijou, Umbreit, Guezzi & Chao, 1986; Moerk, 1983, 1990; Rondal, 1981; Snow, 1989), and only some of them have dealt with language acquisition and development from its beginnings. These studies show the decisive effect of the mother in promoting the acquisition and extension of speech in children. On the one hand, Rondal studied how the adaptations of maternal language child language in terms of prosody, phonology, lexicon, semantic content and pragmatic aspects of speech, facilitated the acquisition of speech by the child. On the other hand, Moerk (1983, 1990) analyzed how maternal speech and feedback temporally and structurally adapt themselves the child's speech, in such a way that it is possible identify systematic teaching strategies related the acquisition and extension of locutionary and syntactic features of speech by the child. Although these studies show the importance of the mother's behavior in the child's acquisition and development of language, they do not take into account the intermingling of language development with the overall development and socialization that necessarily take place as an effect of mother-child linguistic interactions. The articulation of development through language Wittgenstein (1953) advanced the notion that to imagine a language means imagine a form of (p.19). Language as a form of life is a notion that involves individual practices with objects and people as an integrated totality, the extent that language is present and articulates every kind of imaginable social activity. The human environment, in the form of culture and social relations, is built through language, and no human behavioral practice could be understood apart from language. …