The nonverbal context of mothers' speech to infants

Abstract

Six infants were videotaped twice between six and ten months of age while engaged in a free play session with their mothers. Division of the mothers' utterances into verbal episodes revealed that for all mothers, the majority of episodes began in response to something done by the child: from session 1 to session 2, the number of episodes initiated by a shift in the child's gaze decreased and the number initiated by a child action increased. During both sessions, a large percentage of maternal utterances referred to an object within the child's current frame of reference. It is argued that such a close correspondence between maternal speech and a contiguous nonverbal context is helpful for language development.