Communication patterns between mothers and mentally retarded infants

Abstract

This investigation was conducted to identify patterns of maternal communication with young mentally retarded children and to deter mine how these patterns relate to children's level of communicative competence. Samples of communication between 60 mother-child dyads were collected. All children were mentally handicapped and were either one, two, or three years of age. Maternal and child vocal and communicative behaviours were analysed for the entire sample according to their communicative function, MLU, grammatical com pleteness, mood, and relationship to the topic of conversation. The results indicated that distinct patterns of mother-child communication could be differentiated on the basis of how children responded to their mothers' communication. These patterns were related to differences in linguistic and discourse features in mothers' communication and to children's level of communicative functioning, but were generally unrelated to other factors that might influence children's rate of language development.

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