Socio-cultural differences and the adjustment of mothers' speech to their children's cognitive and language comprehension skills

Abstract

This study compares the ways in which mothers with two different levels of education adjust to their 3-to-5 year-old children's cognitive and language comprehension skills when engaged in different tasks, such as doing jigsaw puzzles, seriation and laying a table. The children were divided into groups with a low and a high level of development, as measured by Raven's Matrices and the Reynell Language Comprehension Scale. Using Wertsch's model [Wertsch J. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of the mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press] as our basis, we analysed the cognitive demands contained in the mothers' speech (abbreviation and referential perspective). The results indicated that mothers of both educational levels adjusted their speech to their children's level of development. However, more educated mothers were more demanding and challenging with both low- and high-skilled children, using more abbreviated directives and a higher level of referential expressions. There were small differences between the task effects on the groups.