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learns that behavior can have an effect upon the environment. At first, the infant’s communi-cation is general and unspecified. During the second six months, he or she develops intentional communication, first gesturally, then vocally. When the infant begins to use meaningful speech, it is within this context of gestures and vocalizations.

Maternal Communication Behaviors 129

TA B L E

5.4

BEHAVIOR DESCRIPTION EXAMPLES

Preparatory activities Free infant from physiological state dominance

Reduce interference of hunger or fatigue

Sooth or calm infant when upset State-setting

Use of continuates by caregiver Modulate speech, rhythmic tapping and patting, rhythmic body movements; provide infant with a focus of attention and action, a set of timing markers Source: Information from Tronick, Als, & Adamson (1979).

limited repertoire that is used frequently. The purpose of these modifications is to enhance recognition and discrimination by a child. The behaviors of one mother differ from those of another. Each caregiver develops his or her own style. Infant-elicited social behavior also consists of maternal adaptations in speech and language, gaze, facial expression, facial presen-tation and head movement, and proxemics.

Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)

The speech and language of adults and children to infants is systematically modified from that used in regular conversation. This adapted speech and language has been called infant-directed speech (IDS) or motherese. For our purposes, we shall use IDS to signify the speech and lan-guage addressed to infants (Table 5.5). We will use the term motherese or parentese later to denote speech and language used with toddlers. Use of IDS does not imply that mothers use forms such as horsie or ni-night. Parents do not use such “babyish” forms until a child is old enough to understand them.

Maternal input is very important for an infant’s own communication development.

For example, children who are deaf and exposed to maternal signing from birth achieve all linguistic milestones at or before the expected age for hearing children (Petitto &

Marentette, 1990, 1991). In a second example, when Korean mothers speak to their infants, they use sounds that closely match their infant’s production abilities as well as highlight per-ceptual differences between sounds (Lee, Davis, & MacNeilage, 2008). In this way infant-directed speech (IDS) may facilitate infant learning of phonological regularities of their native language.

130 CHAPTER 5 ■ The Social and Communicative Bases of Early Language and Speech

IDS is characterized by short utterance length and simple syntax and use of a small core vocabulary. Mothers also paraphrase and repeat themselves. Topics are limited to the here and now. The mother’s choice of content, type of information conveyed, and syntax appear to be heavily influenced by the context too. In addition, mothers use paralinguistic variations, such as intonation and pause, beyond those found in adult-to-adult speech. Employing more fre-quent facial expressions and gestures and an overall higher pitch, any one of us might engage in the following monolog:

See the dog. (points, turns, looks, pauses) Big dog. (spreads arms, pauses)

Nice dog. (pauses) Pet the dog. (pets, pauses) Can you pet dog? (pauses)

Nice dog. Do you like dog? (pauses) Un-huh. Nice dog.

This little monolog contains most aspects of IDS.

Maternal speech prior to 6 months may contain fewer than 3 morphemes per utterance.

This may increase to about 3.5 or more morphemes at 6 months. In part, this rise may reflect the increasingly complex communication of a mother and her infant. After one year, average maternal utterance length is reported to be between 2.8 and 3.5 morphemes. These lower values may represent maternal modeling in anticipation of an infant’s speech. These adult-to-infant averages are well below the adult-to-adult average, which is around 8 morphemes. In addition, IDS is less complex structurally than adult-to-adult speech. In general, mothers who use more short sentences when their children are 9 months of age have toddlers with better receptive language abilities at 18 months (Murray, Johnson, & Peters, 1990). Such short, simple utterances can be found in IDS of many languages.

Mothers also use a considerable number of questions and greetings with their infants.

These conversational devices may enable a mother to treat any infant response as a conver-sational turn, since both questions and greetings require a response. In turn, mothers respond to their infants’ behaviors as a meaningful reply. Even an infant’s burps, yawns, sneezes, coughs, TA B L E

5.5

Short utterance length (mean utterance length as few as 2.6 morphemes) and simple syntax Small core vocabulary, usually object centered

Topics limited to here and now

Heightened use of facial expressions and gestures Frequent questioning and greeting

Treating of infant behaviors as meaningful: Mother awaits infant’s turn and responds even to nonturns Episodes of maternal utterances

Paralinguistic modifications of pitch and loudness Frequent verbal rituals

Maternal Communication Behaviors 131

coos, smiles, and laughs may receive a response from its mother. Over 20% of maternal utterances are greetings such as hi and bye-bye or acknowledgments such as sure, uh-huh, and yeah. This maternal response pattern does not occur with noncommunication like infant behaviors, such as arm flapping or bouncing.

Appropriate and consistent adult responsivity is very important in the emergence of early communication although the amount and type of responsivity varies greatly across caregiver–

infant pairs. Communication results when the caregiver attributes meaning to a baby’s behaviors.

Consistently, mothers are able to identify what they perceive as communicatively important behaviors in their infants (Meadows, Elias, & Bain, 2000). Gradually, a child learns that his or her behavior results in consistent, predictable effects.

Caregivers spontaneously respond to 30% to 50% of infants’ non-crying vocalizations.

When adults fail to respond, 5-month-old infants will increase their vocalizing (Goldstein, Schwade, & Bornstein, 2009). Interestingly, those infants who respond most vigorously have the best language comprehension abilities at 13 months.

For its part, an infant responds selectively. Situational variations are important, and an infant is least likely to vocalize when engaged in activities such as being changed, fed, or rocked, or when its mother watches television or talks to another person. In contrast, some maternal nonvocal behaviors, such as touching, holding close, looking at, or smiling at an infant, increase the likelihood of infant vocalizations.

Maternal utterances often occur in strings of successive utterances referring to the same object, action, or event. These verbal episodes may facilitate understanding because speech is less difficult to understand if a string of utterances is produced referring to the same object. In-formation gained from preceding utterances assists comprehension of following ones. Most episodes with infants begin with object manipulation and a high proportion of naming by the mother. At the beginning of the episode, pauses between utterances are twice as long as pauses

M

132 CHAPTER 5 ■ The Social and Communicative Bases of Early Language and Speech

within the episode itself. Young children receive help with object reference and episodic bound-aries. A typical episode might proceed as follows:

(shakes doll) Here’s baby! (pauses) Mommy has baby. (cuddles doll, pauses)

Uh-huh, Betsy want baby? (surprised expression, pauses) Here’s baby! (pauses)

Oh, baby scare Betsy? (concerned expression, pauses)

High rates of redundancy also occur in IDS, and there is a great degree of semantic sim-ilarity between successive utterances. This high rate of syntactic and semantic redundancy increases the predictability and continuity of each episode. Mothers repeat one out of every six utterances immediately and exactly. These self-repetitions decrease as a child assumes increas-ing responsibility in the conversation.

Early content tends to be object centered and concerned with the here and now. For a mother, topics are generally limited to what her infant can see and hear. As a child’s age ap-proaches 6 months, mothers in the United States tend to use a more informational style and, as a result, talk more about the environment and the infant’s behavior.

Within an episode, an infant and mother engage in a dialog in which the infant’s new communication abilities can emerge. Certain elements appear over and over in the mother’s speech and give her infant the opportunity to predict and engage in the dialog. These pre-dictable maternal behaviors may aid the infant’s comprehension, allow the infant to concen-trate her or his attention, and provide models of the expected dialog.

One of the most common sequences is that of joint, or shared, reference. Referencing is the noting of a single object, action, or event and is signaled by a mother either following her infant’s glance and commenting on the object of its focus, shaking an object, or exaggerating an action to attract her infant’s attention.

In addition, mothers use paralinguistic variations, varying the manner of presentation.

For their part, infants respond to intonation patterns before they comprehend language, pre-ferring a high, variable pitch. Mothers use a broad range of pitch and loudness, although over-all, their pitch is higher than in adult-to-adult conversations (Sachs, 1985). This pitch contour has been found in a number of languages. Conversational sequences may include instances of maternal falsetto or bass voice and of whispers or yells. Content words and syllables receive additional emphasis.

The mother also modifies her rhythm and timing. Vowel duration is longer than in adult-to-adult discourse. The mother also uses longer pauses between utterances. Signing mothers of children who have deafness maintain similar rhythms with their hands (Fernald, 1994).

Japanese mothers use responding to alter the duration of their infant’s vocalizations. The length of maternal pauses is reflected in the child’s subsequent response (Masataka, 1993).

There are many similarities in intonation across parents from languages as different as Comanche, English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Latvian, Mandarin Chinese, Sinhala, and Xhosa, a South African language. Parents use a higher pitch, greater variability in pitch, shorter utterances, and longer pauses when talking to their preverbal infants than when talking to other adults. In general, regardless of the language, mothers use a wider pitch range than fathers.

Parents who speak American English seem to have more extreme modifications in their speech than do parents in other languages, especially Asian languages. These differences may reflect the more open American style of communicating and the more reticent and respectful Asian style. Regardless of the language, infants seem to prefer the intonational patterns of IDS from a very young age (Cooper & Aslin, 1990).

Maternal Communication Behaviors 133

In elicitation sequences with their infants, mothers use all the behaviors just mentioned in an attempt to get their infants to make sounds. Unlike games, elicitation sequences continue even when an infant does not respond. In such situations, the mother redoubles her efforts with increasing use of IDS. There is no fixed repertoire of behaviors, and mothers are very adaptable.

Mothers talk to their infants for several reasons. First, selected infant behaviors are treated as meaningful communication turns. For a 3-month-old infant, these behaviors include smiling, burping, sneezing, coughing, vocalizing, looking intently, and gaze shifting. Second, mothers talk about what they are doing. They employ baby talk, ask their infants’ permission, and give reasons for their own actions. Finally, mothers also talk to their infants just for the fun of it. Three spe-cific occurrences of “fun talking” are game playing, attempting to elicit infant vocalizations, and offering objects for play.

After speaking, a mother waits approximately 0.6 second, the average adult turn-switching pause. Next, she waits for the duration of an imaginary infant response and another turn switch.

Since many maternal utterances are questions, the duration of an infant response is relatively easy for the mother to estimate. Thus, the infant is exposed to a mature time frame in which later discourse skills will develop.

Language development experts differ as to the purpose of IDS. First, a mother probably uses both repetition and variation to capture and maintain her infant’s attention. Maternal pat-terns of repetition are found in nonverbal as well as verbal behaviors. Prosodic and intonational variations reach a peak at 4 to 6 months. This variety helps keep an infant alert and interested.

As an infant gets older, mother introduces more vocal and verbal variety, and rhythm declines.

Second, simplified speech aids children in learning language. Because maternal modifi-cations differ only slightly from what an infant already knows, stimuli provide an optimal level of training. Although mothers’ responses to 2-month-old infants are stimulating and inject meaning into infants’ expressions, it seems doubtful at this stage that verbal meaning has any influence on an infant.

Third, maternal modifications may maintain a child’s responsiveness at an optimal level.

A mother assumes that her infant is a communication partner. Thus, maternal speech modifi-cations are an attempt to maintain the conversation despite the conversational limitations of the infant. With a 3-month-old infant, the mother structures the sequence so that any infant response can be treated as a reply.

Fourth, maternal modifications maintain a conversation in order to provide a context for teaching language use. The mother’s modifications are highly correlated with the level of her infant’s performance.

Finally, maternal adaptations may reflect evolutionary developments in the human species (Fernald, 1994). The long period of offspring dependency found in humans may necessitate the use of such adaptations as an important part of nurturing and survival of the infant.

In a final analysis, IDS adaptations fulfill three functions. First, the mother’s speech mod-ifications gain and hold the infant’s attention. Second, the modmod-ifications aid in the establish-ment of emotional bonds. Third, maternal speech characteristics enable communication to occur at the earliest opportunity.

Gaze

A mother modifies her typical gaze pattern, as well as her speech, when she interacts with her infant. Mature adult gaze patterns, which rarely last more than a few seconds, can evoke strong feelings if extended. In a conversational exchange, mature speakers look away as they begin to speak and check back only occasionally. When a mother gazes at her infant, however, she may remain in eye contact for more than thirty seconds. During play, maternal gazing may occur up to 70% of the time simultaneous with vocalization.

134 CHAPTER 5 ■ The Social and Communicative Bases of Early Language and Speech

A mother also monitors her infant’s gaze, adjusting her conversational topic accordingly.

Gradually, an infant’s gaze behavior comes to follow its mother’s pointing or naming, although the infant is still free to gaze where it chooses. Caregivers also learn that their infant will look into their faces for interpretation of novel events.

Maternal gaze modifications help maintain an infant’s interest and focus attention on mother’s face. A mother’s monitoring of her infant’s gaze enables them to establish joint refer-ence to be discussed later.

Facial Expression

Mothers use facial expression skillfully to complement their talking. Facial expressions can ful-fill a number of conversational functions, including initiation, maintenance and modulation of the exchange, termination, and avoidance of interaction. Mock surprise is frequently used to ini-tiate, invite, or signal readiness. In this expression, a mother’s eyes open wide and her eyebrows rise, her mouth opens, her head tilts, and she intones an “o-o-o” or “ah-h-h.” Owing to the brevity of most interactional exchanges, a mother may use mock surprise every 10 to 15 seconds.

An exchange can be maintained or modulated by a smile or an expression of concern. Sim-ilar to adult exchanges, a smile signals that communication is proceeding without difficulty. An expression of concern signals communication distress and a willingness to refocus the exchange.

Termination is signaled by a frown, accompanying head aversion, and gaze breaking.

Occasionally, the frown is accompanied by a vocalization with decreased volume and drop-ping pitch.

Finally, avoidance of a social interaction can also be signaled by turning away, but with a neutral or expressionless face. There is little in a mother’s face, therefore, to hold her infant’s attention.

Naturally, a mother’s repertoire includes a full range of facial expressions. Mothers use these expressions to maintain their infants’ attention and to aid comprehension.

Facial Presentation and Head Movement

Mothers use a large repertoire of head movements to help transmit their messages, including nodding and wagging, averting, and cocking to one side. The sudden appearance of the face, as in “peekaboo,” is used to capture and hold a child’s attention. In a variation of this procedure, a mother lowers her face and then returns to a full-face gaze accompanied by a vocalization.

Many games, such as “I’m gonna get you” and “raspberries on your tummy,” are accomplished by a full-face presentation. Frequently, a mother also exhibits mock surprise.

Proxemics

Proxemics, or the communicative use of interpersonal space, is a powerful interactional tool.

Each person has a psychological envelope of personal space that can be violated only in the most intimate situations. When communicating with her infant, however, a mother acts as if this space does not exist and communicates from a very close distance. As an infant gets older, the American mother communicates more and more from a distance. The resultant decrease in touching is accompanied by increased eye contact.

C U LT U R A L , S O C I O E CO N O M I C , A N D G E N D E R D I F F E R E N C E S

The interactional patterns just described reflect the infant–caregiver behaviors found in middle-class American culture. In other cultures, a caregiver provides different types of linguis-tic input. For example, extended families, common in many cultures, offer multiple caregivers.

Maternal Communication Behaviors 135

In general, maternal responsiveness is determined by an interplay of the maturational level of the infant and culture-specific interactional patterns (Kärtner, Keller, & Yovsi, 2010).

Differences in the interactions of mothers and infants may reflect cultural differences, especially as regards the assumed intentionality of infants to communicate (Toda, Fogel, &

Kawai, 1990). Mothers in the United States are more information oriented than mothers in Japan. U.S. mothers are more chatty and use more questions, especially of the yes/no type, as well as more grammatically correct utterances with their 3-month-olds. In contrast, Japanese mothers are more emotion oriented and use more nonsense, onomatopoetic, and environmen-tal sounds, more baby environmen-talk, and more babies’ names. These differences may reflect each society’s assumptions about infants and adult-to-adult cultural styles of talking. In the United States styles are direct and emphasize individual expression. Styles in Japan are more intuitive and indirect and emphasize empathy and conformity.

Japanese mothers also vocalize less with their 3-month-old infants but offer, in turn, more physical contact than do mothers in the United States. This difference is also reflected in more frequent nonverbal responding by Japanese mothers and more frequent verbal respond-ing by U.S. mothers. The types of utterances to which mothers are most likely to respond also differ. U.S. mothers are more likely to respond to their 3-month-old’s positive cooing and com-fort sounds, while Japanese mothers are more likely to respond to discomcom-fort or fussing sounds.

In response, Japanese mothers try to soothe their infants with speech. U.S. mothers are more likely to talk to maintain attention while Japanese mothers talk more within vocal activities to elicit vocalizations.

Mothers make use of pitch very early. In English, a rising contour is used to gain an

Mothers make use of pitch very early. In English, a rising contour is used to gain an