Mother-Child Interactions: A Foundation for Language Development SUE SEITZ SALLY MARCUS

urrent studies of the language environC ment of the normally developing child (Baldwin Baldwin, Breen, Nel&

Abstract: Interactions between the normally develop ing child and his parents are characterized by mutual responsiveness: each initiates and reciprocates communications. When children's language development is delayed or impaired, this communication process may also become impaired , with parents unable to respond appropriately to confusing or reduced messages from the ch ild . A methodology is presented for developing effective communications between such children and parents. The approach is illustrated by the case history of a multiply hand icapped, hearing impaired toddler and her parents.

SUE SEITZ is Psychologist, Center for Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison; SALLY MARCUS is Language Resource Specialist, Montgomery County Schools, Rockville, Mary/and. This study was supported in part by Research Grant #5-P01-DH03352-6 , Department of HEW; and by funds from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

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1973;

1972;

son, 1973 ; Seitz & Stewart, in press; Snow, 1972) have implications for providing appropriate language for hearing impaired children. One common finding in such studies is that mothers alter the complexity of their speech to young children, e.g., the mother's mean length of utterance increases systematically with that of the child. It would seem that some child cues or characteristics govern the complexity of maternal language. although the nature of these child characteristics is not yet clear. Seitz and Stewart (in press) have shown that mothers seem to be especially sensitive to child language which is tied to their own language, such as child imitations of the mother's speech or child responses to the mother's Wh- questions . However, mothers may also gauge the child's competence by his age, size, or the kinds of activities around which mother-child communications revolve. In this regard. Bloom (1970) has pointed out that children talk about what they do. Nelson (1973) agrees. adding that children's choice of words is personal and selective, and that they tend to learn the names of objects upon which they can act. Nelson further points out that the manner in which parents react to the child's early productions has consequences for subsequent language acquisition: For each child produced word, parents pro vide or fail to provide feedback indicating acceptance or rejection . . . .the more tolerant of de viat ions the parents a re, the more positive feedback the child

445

will receive. Positive feedback is conducive to rapid acquisition of new words. [p. 115)

Maternal feedback for child communications begins before the child uses verbal language. Lewis and Freedle (1972) refer to the communication network linking the mother and infant as the "cradle of meaning." It would appear that language is acquired within this communication network as the infant relates acoustic signals to events, objects, and relationships which he experiences. Thus determining appropriate language for any child imposes consideration of the quality of mother-child communications: the manner in which the mother responds to the child which in turn, is affected by the way in which the child responds to the mother. Normally developing children provide their parents with very consistent cues to their cognitive development, for their age, size, language, and cognitive skills develop at a predictable rate. However, when children do not develop normally they may present confusing cues and reduced responsiveness to their parents. Impaired and confusing feedback from retarded children has been shown to produce parental uncertainty which is expressed by a high rate of inefficient commanding and intrusiveness [Terdal, Jackson, & Garner, 1974). Parents and hearing impaired children also interact under impaired and reduced feedback from one another. Because of reduced responsiveness from the child. it is hard for these parents to know when they have provided language that is appropriate in its complexity or content One strategy for insuring the appropriateness of language addressed to hearing impaired children might be to teach mothers to direct their communications to the child's activities and interests, just as mothers of normally developing children do. Thus the treatment program to be described attempts to establish the same communication process between handicapped children and their parents as exists between normally developing children and their parents. A program using this strategy has improved communications between retarded children and their parents (Seitz, 1975; Seitz & Hoekenga, 1974: Seitz & Riedell, 1974) . The criterion for acceptance into this program is impaired and inadequate mother-child communications. For the duration of the program, therapists give the mother feedback

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regarding her interactions with her child until her child's responses can serve this function. At this point the mother and child can be discharged from treatment. Because children at various levels of functioning enter and leave the program at different points in time, it is difficult to sum data across particular treatment "groups." This case history illustrates such an approach to communication development, with assessment and intervention focused on the interactions of a multiply handicapped, hearing impaired toddler and her parents. Method Subjects

A 20 month old multiply handicapped female and her parents were subjects of this study. The child wore a Radioear 980 Y-cord body hearing aid, although the level of her hearing had not been determined. Behaviorally, she seemed indifferent to most sounds. She had undergone cataract surgery on one eye, and the unimpaired eye was covered on alternate days to force use of the weak eye. These disorders were attributed to maternal exposure to rubella during pregnancy. The child's behaviors included stereotypies and tantrums. The parents had been enrolled in a program for education of the deaf, where they were told the child was probably severely retarded. They came to the senior author for assistance both in understanding the level of their child's functioning and in learning how to manage her behavior. Procedure

The procedure followed that for all families enrolled in the program. First, a sample of the mother and child's interaction was recorded on videotape. Instructions to the mother were: "Here is a room where children can playas they Iike.,We would like you to spend about 20 minutes playing with your daughter as though you two were at home . We would like to make a videotape of this. and let you see it so you can tell us more about what she is doing and how it compares to home." Progress was monitored on similar videotapes collected in the clin ic, at home, and on discharge. Each tape was transcribed by two observers. Any utterance not fully understood by both was scored as an unintelligible vocalization. A run-on sentence or compound sentence was scored according to the intonation pattern and pause location. A sentence fragMay 1978

ment was scored as an utterance if it was characterized by a complete intonation pattern (Snow, 1972) . Intelligible utterances were summed and divided into the total words to compute the mean length, and then classified into the following mutually exclusive categories: 1. Questions: utterances marked either by

rising intonation and/or grammatical structure. Questions were subdivided into yes/no and Wh- forms . 2. Affirmatives and Negatives: "yes," "yeah," "good," "right," "okay," and "no." 3. Statements: imperatives and declaratives. In addition to monitoring utterance types, a time sampling analysis of the mother-child interaction was made. This analysis scored the social and psycholinguistic intent of the communications as they were distributed across the 15 minute play session, thus providing a check against data biased by a high frequency of a particular type of utterance during one time period. Parental behaviors were coded as directive (commands and questions requiring a response from the child), positive (conversational comments or praise). negative (physical or verbal abuse or criticism], and unrelated. Parental utterances which told the child how to do something were considered positive responses by the parent. Directions which told the child what to do were considered directive. Child behaviors were scored as positive responses (verbal interactions , compliance, or attending to the mother), independent play, no response, or negative responses (verbal or physical refusal to comply). These subjects (mother and child) attended the program one hour per day, four days per week for 20 weeks, with two to five other parent-child pairs. Both normal and language

impaired children participated. Each session took place in a playroom with an adjoining observation room, where the mothers observed graduate students receiving training in child language taking turns interacting with the children in the playroom. The students were trained to comment on activities the children initiated, rather than to direct the children's activities. Children were never required to speak. Comments to the children consisted of short, simple statements, recast or repeated child utterances, and reinforcing remarks. Each mother spent two weeks in observing and discussing therapist-child interactions prior to replacing the students in the playroom for short periods daily. After each period, each mother received feedback about her interactions from students, other parents, and as training progressed, from the children. At the conclusion of the program individual parent conferences were held .

Results and Discussion The preclinic tape data and the mother's manifest anxiety when viewing this tape were helpful in making a decision to enroll this family in the program. Her greatest concern was around the child's withdrawal from her . The child's vocalizations in the preclinic tapes consisted of two phonemes, /6/ and t r. t , Her 39 vocalizations were used (and interpreted by the mother) primarily as negatives. The mother's mean length of utterance and Wh-questions were used as indexes to the appropriateness of the complexity of the mother's speech. The mother's sentence length seemed appropriate. judged by Phillips (1973) and Seitz and Stewart (in press) data. They report mean sentence lengths of 3.5 and 3.6 words to 18- and 22 month old children, respectively. The mother's speech usage, however, was weighted with directives

TABLE 1 Mother', Speech Before, During, and After Training

Date

9-73 12-73 12-73' 3-74

Total utterances

307 230 166 190

Mean length (words)

3.7 3.5 4.6 3.8

Questions

Wh 14 14 8

3

YoN 17

12 13 14

Declaratives

Perc ent of utterance types ImperOther atives

25

7

59

13 11

53

17

3 9 13

37 58

, Taped at home by father

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(Table 1). Notably lacking in the mother's speech were attempts to interpret the child's vocalizations (Bloom, 1970), and the use of developmentally appropriate Wh- questions such as "What is this?" (Brown, 1968). The Wh- questions used were relatively complex such as "What do we have here?" Table 1 summarizes data on these aspects of the mother's speech before, during, and after the treatment program. Table 2 presents a time sampling of the mother-child interactions fram a behavioral point of view, and reflects the nature of the mothers communications. During the play periods, student therapists positioned themselves so that they were visible to the child, but did not disturb her toys. They made frequent comments, principally two- and three-word statements of function words (up, over, in, out, more). Whenever thechild vocalized they immediately repeated the vocalization, sometimes expanding it to be a word. The child began by week three to engage in vocal play, sometimes echoing the therapists as they shifted the pattern of a vocalization. The mother saw that the child could respond to sound. When she was in the playroom she practiced behaviors modeled for her. Rather than commanding the child to attend to her, the mother tried to use her activities to intrigue the child. As the child became more responsive, the mother was increasingly successful in this. The data from the last videotape show an increase in the child's phonemes (8), with 30 utterances. Strings of inflected babbling of one minute or more in duration were recorded in the home tape and observed in the clinic. There was an absence of negative and unresponsive behavior on the child's part and an increase in independent play, reflecting a reduction in intrusions and a high level of posi-

tive responding to child play by the mother. The last videotape also shows data which escape tabulation: the increased smiling and positive affect which the child directed to the mother. During the first few weeks of the program the child frequently had tantrums. The mother explained that the child was never disturbed when playing at home, indicating that mother and child did not interact around childinitiated activities. Tantrums were ignored and none were observed during the last month. The father attended regularly and provided useful interpretations of the child's stereotyped behaviors, such as head tossing, which he had playfully reinforced. When he understood that such behavior was often interpreted as indicating severe mental retardation, he ceased reinforcement and the behavior also ceased. As shown in Tables 1 and 2, the interactions of the mother and child were quite different following three months of training. There was a sharp increment in positive responding between parent and child. accompanied by a reduction in the mother's directive behavior. The videotape made at home was recorded by the father, with no therapists present, since both parents felt their daughter would be more responsive under these conditions. In this tape the child produced 83 vocalizations, the most recorded. Following are some comments by the mother as she viewed the pre- and posttapes during the closing parent conference: Before (the program) all I could think'of was I'm not gonna get language into her. She would completely shut me off. Now I give when she is receplive. It means twice as much to her than if I say, "Here is this thing. We are going to talk about it whether you like it or not." That's common sense,

TABLE 2 Parent-child Responses As Percent of 60 15-sec-ond Intervals

Date

Positive

9-73 12-73 12-73 ' 3-74

20 22 92

448

83

Mother's responses Negative Unrelated

3 0 0 0

12 22 8 17

Directive

65

Child 's responses Posit ive Negative No Response Independent Play

8

17 40

0 0

30

34

13 2 0 0

18 8

0 0

52 50 66 70

May 1976

but when you're intent OR talk, talk, talk, you forget that. As it ends up, you're not doing anything different than you would with a normal child.

In summary, this program, built on the normal mother-child developmental communicative process. helped a mother and her multiply handicapped, hearing impaired child establish an ability to respond positively tooneanother, thus laying the foundation for language development. Educators of hearing impaired children are faced with a dilemma. To some extent they must intrude in order to insure verbal input. On the other hand, excessive intrusion may result in a child's complete withdrawal so that an emotional impasse becomes a prime concern in itself. In this approach, the issue is resolved by attaching language to child initiated activities. thus capitalizing on the child's attention and motivation, Because the mother is trained to respond positively to such activities, which change as a function of the situation and the child's growth and developmerit, her training can generalize across time and to different settings.

orders, 1974, 7, 295-304. Seitz, S. & Stewart, C. Imitations and expansions: Some developmental aspects of mother-child communications. Developmentol Psychology, in press. Snow, C. Mothers' speech to children learning language. Child Development, 1972,43,549-565. Terdal. L., Jackson, R. & Garner, A.M. Mother-child interactions: A comparison between normal and developmentally delayed groups. Paper presented to the Banff International Conference on Behavior Modification. Ontario. Canada, March. 1974.

REMINDER

June 15th is the deadline for submitting papers for CEC's 55th Annual International Convention, April 11-15, 1977. Write to Program Chairman, Harold W. Perry, c/o Conventions Unit, CEC Headquarters, 1920 Association Drive, Reston, Virginia 22091. See the March journal for more details.

References Baldwin, A.L. & Baldwin, C.P. The study of motherchild interaction. American Scientist, 1973. 61, 714-721. Bloom. L.M. Language: Form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1970. Broen, P.A. The verbal environment of the language learning child. American Speech and Hearing Association Monographs, 1972, No. 17. Brown, R. The development of Wh- questions in child speech. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1968. 7, 279-290. Lewis. M. & Freedle, R. Mother-infant dyad: ThecradIe of meaning. Princeton NJ: Educational Testing Service, 1972. Nelson, K. Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1973. 38, (1-2, Serial No. 149). Phillips, J. Syntax and vocabulary of mothers' speech to young children: Age and sex comparison. Child Development, 1973,44,182-185. Seitz, S. Language intervention: Changing the language environment of the retarded child. In R. Koch & F. de la Cruz (Eds.]. Down's Syndrome: Research, Prevention, and Management, New York: Brunner.Mazel, 1975. Seitz, S. & Hoekenga, R. Modeling as a training tool for retarded children and their parents. Mental Retardation, 1974, 12,28-31. Seitz, S. & Riedell, G. Parent-child interactions as the therapy target. Journal of Communicative Dis-

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Mother-child interactions: a foundation for language development.

Mother-Child Interactions: A Foundation for Language Development SUE SEITZ SALLY MARCUS urrent studies of the language environC ment of the normally...
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