Changes in the content and timing of mothers' talk to infants

Abstract

The content of mothers' talk to their infants (informative/eliciting acts versus non‐informative/non‐eliciting acts) was examined in terms of whether utterances were timed to follow their infants' ‘talk’ after a brief silence interval (alternating mode of temporal patterning), or to overlap their infants' ‘talk’ (covocalizing mode of temporal patterning). A total of 2827 maternal utterances in 39 mother‐infant dyads were collected at three‐month intervals over infant ages 3 to 24 months. The results indicated that mothers consistently timed informative/eliciting acts in ways that resemble conversations between adult partners (i.e. informative/eliciting acts predominated in the alternating mode), and that the relative proportions of these acts increased significantly during the infants' first year. Corresponding decreases in the relative proportions of non‐informative/non‐eliciting acts occurred in conjunction with significant reductions in the use of covocalizing mode, and this trend continued in the infants' second year: whereas at 3 and 6 months non‐informative/ non‐eliciting acts were predominant in the covocalizing mode, at 15 and 18 months they were predominant in the alternating mode. It is argued that such changes in content and timing constitute stylistic adjustments in mothers' management of interactions at the local moment‐to‐moment level, and occur within the context of global transformations in the dynamics of such interactions as infants' communicative abilities develop.