言語行動の発達 VII

1才児との“対話”における母親の役割

抄録

An observational study has reported that most mothers keep their babies “bathe in sound” most of their waking hours. But, what exactly is the function of mother's talk with her baby? This was the question which we tried to answer.
Analysis was performed on the speech samples of forty children (10 min for each child), collected in the picturebook situation (PS) and the building-block situation (BS).
Main results are as follows:
1. The total number of utterances was not significantly different between mother and her child, but, as for the frequency of the initiation of “dialogues”, the initiator was predominantly the mother.
2. By the classification of mother's speech into three functional categories -“reply”, “report”, and “request” -it was found that “reply” was the most frequent, “report” the least, and “request” midway. As was expected, “request” evoked most frequently child's speech responses, and “report” least.
3. More than half of the speech of “reply” were not passive and simple but active and complex, consisting of “corrected imitations” and other more elaborated forms of speech. It may also worth mentioning that almost all of the instances of mother's imitation of her child's speech were corrected (or “educational”) imitations.
4. Frequencies, as well as forms and functions, of mother's speech were found to be dependent on the chracteristics of situations.