Mother-child Conversations Research Articles

Mother–Child Conversations About Pictures and Objects: Referring to Categories and Individuals

The distinction between individuals (e.g., Rin‐Tin‐Tin) and categories (e.g., dogs) is fundamental in human thought. Two studies examined factors that influence when 2‐ to 3‐year‐old children and adults focus on individuals versus categories. Mother–child dyads were presented with pictures and toys (e.g., a picture of a boat or a toy boat). Conversations were coded for references to generic categories (“Dogs are furry”), ostensive labels (“This is a dog”), or specific individuals (“Lassie”). Overall, pictures generated more talk about categories; objects generated more talk about individuals. However, when objects could not be manipulated, speakers expressed relatively more category references. These results suggest that representations (in the form of pictures or objects‐on‐display) encourage young children and parents alike to think about categories.

As Stories Become Familiar: Mother-Child Conversations During Shared Reading

The interactions of 24-, 30-, and 36-month-old children and their mothers reading two initially unfamiliar books were observed three times over a 2-week period. Coding characterized both the content and the role of their utterances as they discussed the stories. Utterance content depended on child age but changed little with increasing story familiarity. Focus on narrative intangibles such as characters' feelings and explanations of actions increased from 24 to 30 months, and the number of children who asked questions about these intangibles also increased with age. In contrast, utterance role depended primarily on story familiarity and varied only slightly with child age. The implications of these findings for the child's emerging narrative competence are discussed.

Talking and reading science: Longitudinal data on sex differences in mother–child conversations in low-income families

This longitudinal study investigated sex and age differences and the short- and long-term effects of low-income mothers' talk to their children. Twenty-four girls and twenty-four boys were audiotaped playing with magnets with their mothers at the ages of 5 and 9 years. When children were in sixth grade, they completed a test of reading comprehension. Mothers' science-related talk and their social pretend-play talk at ages 5 and 9 were examined as predictors of children's sixth grade reading comprehension with a science and a narrative text. Mothers were found to use a higher proportion of both science process and social pretend play talk with boys than girls, and with older than with younger children. After controlling for children's mean length of utterance at age 3, maternal education, and children's proportion of science process talk at ages 5 and 9, mothers' proportion of science talk when children were 9 years old predicted children's reading comprehension for science text 2 years later when children were in the sixth grade. Results suggest the long-term impact of parent–child interaction on literacy outcomes, and also note the existence of sex differences in opportunities to learn about science at home.

Shared or conflicting working models? Relationships in postdivorce families seen through the eyes of mothers and their preschool children

Marvin and Stewart and Byng-Hall proposed that effective family collaboration requires family members to construct "shared family working models," and that the renegotiation of these working models during family transitions is facilitated by family members' "interactional awareness" (ability to be perceptive observers of family relationships). We apply these constructs to data collected from 71 mothers and their 4.5- to 5.0-year-old preschool children, 2 years after parental divorce. Maternal representations of the father as coparent and ex-spouse, and of father- and mother-child relationships were assessed via two interviews. A family story completion task captured child representations of mother-child and father-child, coparental and ex-spousal interactions. Maternal accounts of mother-child conversations illustrated the negotiation of shared working models. Primarily qualitative analyses contrasting maternal and child perspectives are presented in the first section. Then we use regression analyses to predict children's story themes from maternal representations of flexible, sensitive, and effective discipline-related interactions; maternal depressive symptoms; and perception of the child's father. Finally, we identify gender differences in children's enactments of divorce-related and child-empathy themes. We conclude by considering how our findings could be used to assist post-divorce families in constructing shared rather than conflicting working models of family relations.

Intimacy, Imitation and Language Learning: Spanish Diminutives in Mother-Child Conversation

This paper explores how Spanish-speaking Peruvian mothers and their children use diminutives in everyday conversations, seeking to characterize the discourse forms and functions of diminutive imitation and to explore potential differences across speaker groups. More generally, we investigate how and why the use of diminutives may play an important role in facilitating conversational interaction and language learning. Findings illustrate the importance of examining languagelearning processes among non-English-speaking populations, as well as the role of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural analysis in understanding interactional and language socialization processes.

Talking About Past Emotions: Conversations Between Peruvian Mothers and Their Preschool Children

In this study, we examined gender and age variations in the use of emotion words during mother–child conversations about experiences. Thirty-two middle-class, Spanish-speaking, Peruvian mothers and their 3- and 5-year-old children participated in this study. Conversations were audiotaped, transcribed, and coded for number, types of emotions discussed, and conversational contexts in which the emotion word was embedded. Age differences were found only in children's use of emotion words. Gender differences were found only in mothers' use of emotion words. Findings are discussed in relation to socialization practices of emotional expression and gender in middle-class Peruvian society. Our results support and provide a developmental perspective on findings obtained in studies of adult emotional expression across various cultures.

VI. GENERAL DISCUSSION

VI. GENERAL DISCUSSION

Speech overlap in Japanese mother–child conversations

This study aimed to clarify the development of conversational style in Japanese mother-child interactions. We focused on the frequency of speech overlap as an index of Japanese conversational style, with particular attention to ne, a particle produced by the speaker, and to backchannels, such as 'uh-huh', produced by the listener that support sympathetic conversation. The results of longitudinal observations of two Japanese mother-child dyads from approximately 0;11 to 3;3 suggest that an adultlike conversational style with frequent overlaps emerges in Japanese child-directed speech around the two-word utterance period, and a child's development of ne use is closely related to this shift.

Mother-Child Conversation Styles and Children's Laboratory Memory for Narrative and Nonnarrative Materials

The study reported here was designed to examine influences of mothers' early conversational styles on children's episodic memory for events experienced outside of the mother-child relationship. Fifty-three 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children participated in picture-book interaction tasks with their mothers and with an unfamiliar investigator. Conversational messages were coded for their narrative and paradigmatic content. The children were also administered cued- and free-recall laboratory tasks for object names, object locations, animal facts, and story narratives. Reliable correlations were found between mothers' and children's levels of narrative talk in the mother-child picture-book task and between children's levels of narrative talk with mother and with an unfamiliar investigator. Recall analyses showed that the younger children's levels of narrative talk during picture-book tasks with mothers were positively related to the children's laboratory recall for story materials, unrelated to laboratory recall of object names and animal facts, and negatively related to laboratory recall for the spatial locations of objects. Connections between conversation styles and recall proficiency were less apparent and not reliable for the 5- and 6-year-old children in the sample. Differences between these age effects and those found in research on children's autobiographical memory are discussed.

Talking about the past

This study investigates maternal interactive strategies and types of information discussed in mother child conversation about the past, with special focus on mothers' eliciation styles across time. The relationship between the mother's interactive strategies and children's narrative skills concurrently and later in development was also examined. Sixteen children, 8 boys and 8 girls, and their mothers living in Taipei, Taiwan were interviewed when the children were 3;6, 3;9, 4;0, and 4;3. The child was asked to tell joint personal anecdotes with the mother at each visit. Over time there is no systematic change in maternal interactive strategies and amount of narrative information elictied by the mothers. Maternal approval to the child's talk, elaborative requests, and provision of information are correlated with children's narrative ability. These results may suggest implications for classroom instruction in the US and provide guidelines for parents and preschool teachers in Taiwan. (Narrative, Mother-child Interaction, Chinese Children, Chinese Mothers, Scaffolding)

Talking about Past Events in Conversation: An Analysis of Mandarin Mother-Child and Adult-Adult Discourse

This study explored three-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's abilities to talk about past events, focusing on how past reference was maintained in mother-child conversation. For comparison, adult-adult conversation was also examined. The analysis showed that while the children relied heavily on maternal scaffolding when referring to the past, the children's emerging abilities to express temporal relations also shaped the mothers' speech in conversation. It was also found that in the children's still-primitive narratives, temporality was marked mostly for local considerations rather than for an attempt to organize global structures of discourse. In contrast, in the adult-adult discourse, the analysis demonstrated how temporal and aspectual markers contributed to a greater temporal complexity.

Spanish diminutives in mother–child conversations

The present study examined gender and age patterns of diminutive use in conversations between 32 Spanish-speaking Peruvian mothers and their three- and five-year-old children. Results confirm previous findings concerning both parents' greater use of diminutives with younger children and children's early acquisition of this complex aspect of morphology. However, findings do not support previous studies on gender differences in parental use of diminutives with young children. Results also revealed that mothers' and children's imitations of their interlocutors' diminutized words promoted their interlocutors' overall diminutive use. This finding highlights the acute sensitivity of both speakers to each others' language and the potential role of imitation in older children's language development.

Mother-child conversation and children's understanding of biological and nonbiological changes in size.

This article explores the ways that mothers and children from primarily middle-income European American backgrounds reason about events in which biological and nonbiological objects change in size. In Study 1, mother-child conversations were examined to investigate the events mothers described as growth, as well as the ways mothers explained events occurring in different domains. Findings indicate that although mothers primarily discussed events in domain-specific ways, they exhibited some domain blurring in their talk to children. In Study 2, 3-year-old children (M = 3 years, 2 months) and 5-year-old children (M = 5 years) provided descriptions and explanations of the same events. Results suggest that preschool children have begun to develop domain-specific understandings. Results are discussed in light of the role that social interaction plays in children's conceptual development.

Normative Scripts for Object Labeling during a Play Activity: Mother-Child and Sibling Conversations in Mexican-Descent Families

This study compared patterns of mother and sibling object labeling as potential word learning resources for young children. Maternal labeling was also compared based on mothers’education level and target children’s age and gender. Target children (2- to 3-year-olds) from 40 Mexican-descent families engaged in a videotaped play activity with their mothers and siblings (4- to 6-year-olds). Mothers provided names for objects (referential labeling) as often as they mentioned objects as part of the ongoing activity (labeling in action). Siblings focused on referential labeling proportionately more than did mothers and did so as a demonstration of their knowledge of object labels, whereas mothers used this labeling style as a collaborative discussion. There were no differences in mothers’ labeling styles based on education level; however, there were interesting variations based on target child age and gender. Results suggest that there are diverse conversational motivations and normative scripts for object labeling within mother-child and sibling conversations.

How Children Use Input to Acquire a Lexicon

The contributions of social processes and computational processes to early lexical development were evaluated. A re-analysis and review of previous research cast doubt on the sufficiency of social approaches to word learning. An empirical investigation of the relation of social-pragmatic and data-providing features of input to the productive vocabulary of sixty-three 2-year-old children revealed benefits of data provided in mother-child conversation, but no effects of social aspects of those conversations. The findings further revealed that the properties of data that benefit lexical development in 2-year-olds are quantity, lexical richness, and syntactic complexity. The nature of the computational mechanisms implied by these findings is discussed. An integrated account of the roles of social and computational processes to lexical development is proposed.

A case study of child sexual false allegation

Purpose: The objectives of the case study reported in this article were twofold. The first objective was to follow the path by which a naive suggestion made in the course of a mother-child conversation was transformed into an allegation of severe sexual abuse. The second objective was to analyze the child’s interview scientifically and explore the limitations of scientific tools for detecting implausible allegations. Methods: Independent case facts were collected and analyzed to determine whether the event described by the child was likely to have happened. The credibility of the child’s account was assessed using Criterion-Based Content Analysis and the information provided in both the “implausible” and “corrected” statements was compared to quantify the fabricated details in the implausible statement. Results: The event described by the child was “very unlikely to have happened” but the credibility assessment failed to detect its implausibility. Comparison of the two statements revealed that the child did fabricate central details but incorporated them into a description of an event she really experienced, and most of the information provided was truthful. Conclusions: The pressure to conform to suggestions can be irresistible, inducing some children to make false allegations of severe sexual abuse. Scientific tools designed for credibility assessment are limited and may fail to detect implausible statements especially when they incorporate information about genuinely experienced events.

“Did you have fun?”: American and Chinese mother–child conversations about shared emotional experiences

Twenty-two American and 25 Chinese mothers and their 3-year-old children participated in this study. Mothers were instructed to discuss with their children at home four specific one-point-in-time events in which they both participated and during which the child experienced happiness, sadness, fear, or anger. American mother–child conversations showed an “emotion-explaining style” in which mothers and children provided rich causal explanations for antecedents of emotions. Chinese mother–child conversations employed an “emotion-criticizing style” that focused on installing proper behavior in the child and gave few explanations for the emotion itself. American mother–child conversations were also more likely to center on personal themes, were more elaborative, and were more focused on the child's roles and predilections than the conversations of Chinese. Findings are discussed in light of the impact of early family narrative practices on children's acquisition of emotion situation knowledge, which may in turn affect the development of autobiographical memory.

Lexical input as related to children's vocabulary acquisition: effects of sophisticated exposure and support for meaning.

A corpus of nearly 150,000 maternal word-tokens used by 53 low-income mothers in 263 mother-child conversations in 5 settings (e.g., play, mealtime, and book readings) was studied. Ninety-nine percent of maternal lexical input consisted of the 3,000 most frequent words. Children's vocabulary performance in kindergarten and later in 2nd grade related more to the occurrence of sophisticated lexical items than to quantity of lexical input overall. Density of sophisticated words heard and the density with which such words were embedded in helpful or instructive interactions, at age 5 at home, independently predicted over a third of the variance in children's vocabulary performance in both kindergarten and 2nd grade. These two variables, with controls for maternal education, child nonverbal IQ, and amount of child's talk produced during the interactive settings, at age 5, predicted 50% of the variance in children's 2nd-grade vocabulary.

The frequency of simultaneous disfluency and phonological errors in children: A preliminary investigation

The frequency of simultaneous disfluency and phonological errors was examined in seven young English-speaking children exhibiting coexisting stuttering and phonological disorders. Data were gathered during 30 minutes of mother-child conversation and analyzed in three parts: (1) stuttering, (2) phonological errors, and (3) stuttering and phonological error co-occurrence. Results indicated that stuttering did not occur more frequently on syllables with phonological errors than on syllables without phonological errors. However, the frequency of disfluency on word-initial consonant clusters with phonological errors was significantly higher than on word-initial consonant clusters without phonological errors. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Temporal reference in Chinese mother-child conversation: morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic resources.

This paper explores two Mandarin-speaking children's (3;2 and 3;3) ability to refer to the past in mother-child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. The results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. It is suggested that maternal scaffolding functions as a discourse support for children to participate in conversation involving earlier past. When establishing past reference with overt temporal markers, the children resort mainly to aspect markers. In addition, they also rely on semantic and discourse-pragmatic resources for temporal inferencing, such as inherent semantic aspect, shared background knowledge and situational context.