The Interruption of Young Children's Responses by Older Siblings

Abstract

A group of language-delayed children, a group of older children with normal language development, and a group of younger children with normal language development served as subjects in this study. Questions were asked after a story was read to a younger child in the presence of an older sibling. The older sibling's interruptions of the question-answer dialogue was scored by frequency, type of interruption, and difficulty level of the questions being interrupted. Older siblings interrupted the question-answer interactions of the language-delayed children with a frequency that was similar to that observed in siblings of younger normal children but the interruptions of the language-delayed children were qualitatively different. Older siblings tended to directly answer questions addressed to language-delayed children rather than to provide prompts or rephrasings of the question as they did for young normal children. Siblings of both the language-delayed and the young normal children interrupted more frequently as the questions increased in difficulty.