Mother-child transactions in families with normal and handicapped children

This paper describes two aspects of mother-child interaction: children's contribution to early conversations and mother's tactics for eliciting verbal responses. Normal and handicapped children matched for linguistic complexity (mean length of utterance) differed in both qualitative and quantitative aspects of their verbal interactions with their mothers. Normal children talked more, responded correctly more often, and made more attempts to control the conversation than mentally retarded children. Clear differences in mother choice of tactics for eliciting child verbalizations also were evident between the two groups. Overall, mothers of handicapped children modeled responses more and frequently asked fewer and less complex questions. The differences in mother behavior appeared to be a function of the child's specific skills, and not of the child's general classification as normal or mentally retarded; patterns of mother linguistic adjustment were identical in the two groups. These findings are discussed in terms of a general model of transactional linguistic teaching in dyads with mentally retarded children.