Structural aspects of maternal speech to infants reared in poverty

Mother-infant dyads (N = 27) were seen as part of a longitudinal study of lower-socioeconomic-status infants at high but varying risk for mild mental retardation. A 20-min unstructured interaction session was videotaped in a laboratory setting when the infants were 6 months old. Transcriptions were made of mothers' speech to their infants. Measures of maternal language included sentence form, amount of speech, and syntactic complexity. It was found that the proportion of imperatives, but not the amount of maternal speech, was positively correlated with a composite measure of risk status (High Risk Index) and negatively correlated with maternal education and WAIS IQ. Similar to previous findings for maternal speech to older infants, syntactic complexity was not significantly related to social risk indices. In terms of descriptive aspects of the data, there was a high degree of variability on the language measures-indicative of wide individual differences in maternal language style.