6533b81ffe1ef96bd1278513

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Communication between mothers and their normal or developmentally dysphasic children in experimental sessions

subject

description

The interaction of 32 Finnish mother-child dyads were analyzed in order to compare the behavioral features of normally developing (8 boys, 8 girls) and developmentally dysphasic (language-delayed) children (12 boys, 4 girls) doing tasks with their mothers. The average age of the children in the normal group was 4:1 years and in dysphasic group 4:7 years. The groups were matched to educational background of the mothers and to the age of the children. The videotaped observation sessions consisted of a block construction task and a discussion task. Results showed that mothers of dysphasic children tended to be more dominant and controlling and less cooperative. The dysphasic childrens' lower levels of initiative and attention were felt to elicit these behaviors by the mothers. In addition, mothers of dysphasic children gave less explanations, acknowledgements and statements, made less suggestions and questions which required reasoning, but expressed more disagreements. Conversely, mothers of dysphasic childr...