Mother‐child interactions in Canada and Italy: Linguistic responsiveness to late‐talking toddlers

Abstract

The aim was to examine cross-cultural variation in linguistic responsiveness to young children in 10 English-speaking mother-child dyads and 10 Italian-speaking mother-child dyads. All 20 children were late talkers who possessed delays in expressive vocabulary development but age-appropriate cognitive and receptive language skills. Dyads were filmed in 15-minute free play contexts, which were transcribed and coded for measures of maternal linguistic input (e.g. rate, MLU, labels, expansions) and child language productivity (e.g. utterances, different words used). The results revealed that the Italian mothers used more utterances, spoke more quickly and used a more diverse vocabulary than the Canadian mothers. The Italian children mirrored their mothers and also used more utterances and a more diverse vocabulary than the Canadian children. Mothers in both groups used similar percentages of responsive labels and expansions. However, Italian mothers responded to fewer of their children's vocalizations, using a smaller percentage of imitations and interpretations than the Canadian mothers. Correlations between maternal input and children's language productivity revealed that contingent language measures (e.g. imitations, interpretations, expansions) were related to high levels of productivity in children in both cultural groups. The results support the use of language interventions based on increasing maternal responsiveness for these children at the one-word stage of language development. They also point to differences that may be culturally based. For example, Italian mothers use faster rates of interaction and appear to have higher expectations for their children's verbal participation in interaction. This is reflected in higher rates of language production from their children, even though children in both cultural groups have similar vocabulary sizes.

Parental Support for Language Development During Joint Book Reading for Young Children With Hearing Loss

“…One particular intervention, dialogic reading , incorporates many specific adult behaviors into target child communication attempts to support language development in the context of JBR (Whitehurst, Falco, Lonigan, & Fischel, 1988). Higher level FLTs such as expansions (i.e., extending a child’s utterance) and open-ended questions (i.e., asking why and how questions) seem to elicit more words from children who are at the early word phrase level of language development (Mol, Bus, DeJong, & Smeets, 2008; Whitehurst et al, 1988), while lower level FLTs such as linguistic mapping (i.e., putting child’s unintelligible utterance into words) and imitation (i.e., repeating the child’s utterance verbatim) may enhance language skills in younger populations of children at the prelinguistic stage of development (Girolametto et al, 2002; Yoder, McCathren, Warren, & Watson, 2001). Evidence-based research in dialogic reading techniques has shown dramatic improvements in oral language development for children who are at risk for language delays (Bus, 2001; Institute of Education Sciences, 2010).…”

Evidence-based intervention for preschool children with primary speech and language impairments: Child Talk – an exploratory mixed-methods study

“…318,320,321 Parents-as-aides conceptualises parents as assuming an active role in supporting implementation of therapy objectives. In this instance, SLTs often provide home activities for parents to reinforce learning that has taken place during therapist-led intervention with the child.…”

The effects of expansions, questions and cloze procedures on children’s conversational skills

“…Dependent variables were children's topic extensions, verbal topic maintaining responses, non-verbal topic maintaining responses and non-relevant responses. The coding system used was adapted from Keenan and Schieffelin (1976), Brinton and Fujiki (1984), Fey (1986), Girolametto (1988), Girolametto, Bonifacio, Visini, Weitzman, Zocconi, and Pearce (2002), Girolametto, Sussman, and Weitzman (2007), Tannock (1988) and Roberts et al (2007). Table III summarises the coding categories and provides examples of the conversational turns.…”