Parent-child interactions in normal and language-disordered children

Interactions between young children and their parents or guardians are critical factors in child language acquisition. The purpose of this study is to describe verbal and nonverbal communication patterns that occur in parent-to-child and child-to-parent interactions with normally developing children and children with language disorders. Thirty verbal and nonverbal behaviors were analyzed from videotapes of mother-child interactions. As a group, the mothers of normally developing children did not differ from the mothers of children with language disorders in the frequency of use of verbal or nonverbal interactions or in the mean length of utterance. There were no significant differences between the groups of children in frequency of use of each interaction pattern. What was different was the number of significant relationships between measures of linguistic maturity of the normally developing children and their mothers' interaction patterns that were not apparent for the language-disordered children and their mothers. Mothers' frequency of interactions as expansions, exact, reduction imitation, use of questions, answers, acknowledgements, providing information, total nonverbal behaviors, and use of nonverbal deixis all were related to some measures of the normal child's linguistic maturity. These relationships were infrequent with the language disordered group.