mother-child conversation in different social classes and communicative settings

Mother-Child Conversation in Different Social Classes and Communicative SettingsAuthor(s): Erika Hoff-GinsbergSource: Child Development, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Aug., 1991), pp. 782-796Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Society for Research in Child DevelopmentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1131177 .

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Mother-Child Conversation in Different Social Classes and Communicative Settings

Erika Hoff-Ginsberg University of Wisconsin-Parkside

HOFF-GINSBERG, ERIKA. Mother-Child Conversation in Different Social Classes and Communi- cative Settings. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1991, 62, 782-796. 30 working-class and 33 upper-middle- class mothers were videotaped in dyadic interaction with their 18-29-month-old children in 4 settings--mealtime, dressing, book reading, and toy play. Samples of the mothers' adult-directed speech also were collected. There were significant social class differences in the mothers' child- directed speech and some parallel social class differences in the mothers' adult-directed speech. These findings suggested that some social class differences in child-directed speech may be instances of more general class differences in language use. There also were main effects of communicative setting on mothers' child-directed speech and interaction effects in which setting moderated the size of the class differences in maternal speech. These findings suggested that the amount of time mothers spend interacting with their children in different contexts may be at least as important an influence on children's linguistic experience as are average characteristics of their mothers' speech.

The normative style of mother-child interaction varies across sociocultural groups (Heath, 1983; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986a, 1986b). This fact has long been considered to be problematic for the line of research that has attempted to discover how properties of mother-child interaction contribute to children's language development. The problem is that most of the research in this area has studied Western, middle-class samples of mothers and children whose style of interaction may not be representative of the interactions experienced by all children. It is also the case that mother-child interaction has most frequently been studied in contexts defined by researchers-usually toy play or book reading. Again, these interactions may not be representative of most children's typi- cal experiences. Because of the limited range of samples and contexts that have been studied, the generalizability of the research that provides the basis for the current view of the contribution of social interaction to language development can be questioned.

The current view of what constitutes a supportive style of mother-child interaction, which is widely held but not unanimously agreed upon, is that it has the characteristics that the mother focuses on the same object or activity as the child, the mother engages the child in conversation by asking questions that elicit verbal replies, and the mother responds to the child's speech in a contingent manner. Each of these characteristics of maternal speech has been found to be positively correlated with some measure of children's language development (Barnes, Gutfreund, Satterly, & Wells, 1983; Hoff- Ginsberg, 1986; Snow, Perlmann, & Nathan, 1987; Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). There is also evidence that the sheer amount of speech addressed to the child is a positive predictor of vocabulary development (Hut- tenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991). By contrast, frequent maternal use of directives is thought to have a negative effect on language development, although the evidence for this is less consistent than the

This work was supported by NICHD grant HD20936 to the author and by grants from the University of Wisconsin--Parkside Committee on Research and Creative Activity. I would like to thank the mothers and children who participated in this project and Patricia Johnson, Wendy Krueger, Karen Bonini, Gil Halsted, Jackie Palama, and Melissa Looney, who videotaped the interactions and transcribed and coded the videotapes. I would also like to acknowledge the indispensable work of Joel Levin in providing advice and assistance in the data analysis. I am grateful to Benjamin Harris and several anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Some of these data were presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Kansas City, MO, April 27-30, 1989. Requests for reprints should be addressed to the author at the Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin--Parkside, Kenosha, WI 53141.

[Child Development, 1991, 62, 782-796. ? 1991 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved. 0009-3920/91/6204-0018$01.00]



Erika Hoff-Ginsberg 783

evidence of positive predictors of language development (Barnes et al., 1983; Nelson, 1973; Vibbert & Bornstein, 1989).

Many of the characteristics of maternal speech that are associated with child language development have been found to vary as a function of social class. Low-income mothers have been found to spend less time in mutual play with their children and to talk less to their children than middle-class mothers. The speech low-income mothers direct to their children is more frequently for the purpose of directing the children's behavior, is less frequently contingent on the child's speech, and less frequently asks the child questions just for the purpose of engaging the child in conversation (Bee, Van Egeren, Streissguth, Nyman, & Leckie, 1969; Farran & Haskins, 1980; Heath, 1983; Hess & Shipman, 1965; Schacter, 1979). Thus the research suggests that poor and working-class children may have less oppor- tunity to experience interaction of the sort suggested to support language development than their more-studied middle-class coun- terparts.

Context also has been found to influence the nature of maternal speech. Several studies have compared toy play to book reading and have found that maternal speech during book reading is structurally more complex, uses a larger vocabulary, and includes a higher frequency of questions, of talk about language, of labeling, and a lower frequency of directive and social regulatory speech (Goddard, Durkin, & Rutter, 1985; Jones & Adamson, 1987; Lewis & Gregory, 1987; Snow et al., 1976; Wiley, Shore, & Dixon, 1989). Dunn, Wooding, and Herman (1977) similarly found that maternal speech during book reading interactions contained a higher frequency of characteristics that were positive predictors of language development than did maternal speech in "other" contexts. "Other" contexts in this study included free play, caretaking interactions, and times when the mothers were occupied with household chores. Within toy play, the type of toy being played with has been found to have effects on the amount and functions of maternal speech (O'Brien & Nagle, 1987). Lastly, there is evidence that mealtime conversations may have unique characteristics, although the mealtime conversations that have been studied have been multiparty rather than dyadic interactions (Ochs, Smith, & Taylor, 1988; Rondal, 1980).

The context of interaction also may act as a moderator variable, affecting the extent

and nature of the social class differences in maternal speech. This possibility is suggested by one candidate explanation for the class differences in maternal speech that are usually observed. Snow, Dubber, and de Blauw (1982) have argued that the stresses experienced by mothers living in poverty leave them with little time or energy to en- gage in play or non-goal-directed conversation with their children. A variation on that notion that might apply to class differences even in the absence of extreme poverty is that less affluent mothers may have less lei- sure time or, for other reasons, be less in- clined to play with their children, and therefore their style of talking to their children may be developed primarily in goal-directed caretaking settings that demand a less conversational, more directive maternal style. To the extent that this explanation is true, mothers from different social classes should interact in a similar manner when they are all subject to the same external demands, and class differences in maternal speech should be maximized under conditions of least constraint.

Previous studies in which both social class and interactive context were variables provide empirical support for this notion, and they further suggest that the demands of the situation can operate in both positive and negative directions. There is evidence that book reading is a context in which working-class mothers interact in a style that has been found in the past to characterize middle-class mothers. Dunn et al. (1977) and Snow et al. (1976) found equally high levels of supportive properties of maternal speech across social classes when mothers were reading books with their children, although in the same samples of mothers they found lower frequencies of those characteristics in the speech working-class mothers produced in other interactive contexts. There is also evidence which suggests that contexts in which mothers are trying to direct their children's nonverbal behavior have the effect of making middle-class mothers interact in a manner that has been found to be more characteristic of working-class mothers. Specifi- cally, Wooton (1974) reported on the basis of extensive home recordings that the most noticeable characteristic of middle-class mothers' speech was their tendency to ex- tend dialogue around child-initiated topics of conversation, and that this characteristic was minimized in contexts where the mother was trying to control the child's behavior. In a laboratory study of mothers'



784 Child Development

teaching styles, Brophy (1970) found that middle-class mothers were more helpful to their children than working-class and low- income mothers in the way that they initially oriented their children to the task, but that class differences were minimized once the children were acting on objects and the mothers were responding to their children's actions.

Although some contexts may minimize class differences in mother-child interaction, they do not necessarily eliminate them (Ninio, 1980; Wooton, 1974). Indeed, the most frequently offered explanation of class differences in maternal interactive style is in terms of internal characteristics of mothers, which presumably are more stable than im- mediate, external sources of influence such as context. One internal characteristic that has been argued to influence the nature of mothers' interactions with their children is their child-rearing attitudes and goals. American middle-class mothers' style of conversation with their children reflects the facts that they regard their children as potential conversational partners from birth, see themselves as having a role in fostering their children's communicative development, and regard a child who articulately speaks his or her mind as a desirable outcome (Heath, 1983; Snow et al., 1976; Snow, de Blauw, & Van Roosmalen, 1979). Mothers in other sociocultural groups hold different beliefs and goals, and they interact with their children in correspondingly different ways (Heath, 1983; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986a). Within Western populations, there is also evidence of social class differences in child- rearing beliefs and related differences in a variety of maternal behaviors and characteristics of the home environment (Luster, Rhoades, & Hass, 1989; Skinner, 1985). However, the relation of child-rearing beliefs to the dimensions of mothers' conversation behavior that show class differences is largely unexplored. A second internal prop- erty of mothers that may influence the way they talk to their children is their own general manner of speaking. That is, talking to children is not only one of many child- rearing behaviors, it is also one of many language behaviors, and therefore the manner in which mothers talk to their children might reflect general characteristics of their language use.

In sum, the current evidence strongly suggests that social class and the context of interaction influence characteristics of mother-child conversation. The evidence

is equivocal with respect to the cross- situational stability of social class differences and the role of external versus internal sources of influence on these differences.

The present study was designed to investigate the effects of both social class and communicative setting on mothers' interactions with their children in a single, natu- ralistic study. To investigate the effects of social class, mother-child interaction was observed in upper-middle-class and working-class families in the participants' homes. The two groups of children were selected to be as comparable as possible in their level of productive language in order to eliminate such differences in the children as a possible explanation for any observed group differences in the mothers. To investigate the effects of setting, all the dyads were observed in four different settings- mealtime, dressing, book reading, and toy play. Book reading and toy play were selected as settings because they form the basis of so much of the previous literature. Mealtime and dressing were selected, in contrast, as settings that must occur in some form for all mothers and small children and that, unlike book reading and toy play, are settings for goal-directed interaction.

In the expectation that there would be class differences in maternal behavior, the present study was also designed to investigate potential external and internal sources of such differences. The hypothesized external source of influence was the settings in which interaction typically occurs. As was already suggested, social class differences in the nature of interaction might reflect the generalized influence of constraints of the most frequent settings of interaction. This hypothesis predicts that the effect of different settings will be to moderate the effects of social class, so that class differences will be attenuated in the more constraining settings. Specifically, the caretaking settings should result in a more directive, less conversational style in both social classes, but the more leisurely play and reading settings should allow the less directive, more conversational style of the upper-middle-class mothers to emerge. These predictions were tested in analyses of the interaction effects of social class and communicative setting on characteristics of mothers' child-directed speech.

The hypothesized internal sources of influence on class differences in mothers' child-directed speech consisted of two char-




acteristics of the mothers themselves-their attitudes toward children as conversational partners and their own style of language use in conversation with an adult. The mothers' attitudes toward their children as conversational partners were assessed through interview questions about their past and current conversational behavior with their children and about their estimates of their children's ability to understand. Although the mothers' answers may not have been accurate indica- tors of their actual behavior, we assume that their answers did reflect their attitudes toward talking to children. The questions were asked as part of a more extensive interview conducted after the observations of mother-child interaction were made. The mothers' language use in conversation with an adult was assessed on the basis of the speech they addressed to the researcher during this interview.

The hypothesis that social class differences in mothers' manner of conversing with their children derive from some internal characteristic of mothers predicts that there should be a corresponding class difference in that internal characteristic. This prediction was tested in the present study by comparing the attitudes and the adult-directed speech of the working-class and upper- middle-class mothers. The hypothesis of internal sources of class differences in child-directed speech further predicts that the class differences in child-directed speech should be stable across settings. Analyses of the social class x communicative setting interaction effects tested this prediction.

Method

Subjects The participants were 30 working-class

and 33 upper-middle-class children and their mothers. All of the participants were white, native speakers of English; all the families were monolingual. The families lived in the small cities, rural, and subur- ban areas of southeastern Wisconsin. The working-class participants met the criteria that both parents had no education past high school other than technical training (mean years of education for mothers = 11.8 [SD

= .66]; for fathers = 12.0 [SD = .44]) and, if employed, they worked in unskilled, semi- skilled, or service positions. The upper- middle-class participants met the criteria that both parents had at least 2 years of col- lege (mean years of education for mothers = 16.2 [SD = 1.10]; for fathers = 16.4 [SD

= 1.26]), and, if employed, they worked in professional or managerial positions. The mean age of the working-class mothers was 26.1 years (SD = 3.6); the mean age of the upper-middle-class mothers was 33.3 years (SD = 4.0). The working-class family incomes ranged from less than $10,000 to $40,000 per year, with the median in the $20,000 to $30,000 category. The upper- middle-class family incomes ranged from $20,000 to over $70,000, with the median in the $30,000 to $40,000 category. None of the mothers worked outside the home more than 15 hours per week on a regular basis. It is estimated that nation-wide approximately 50% of mothers would not meet this particu- lar criterion (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1989). In the area of the Midwest where this study was conducted, this criterion probably excludes fewer than 50%. Nonetheless, the sample is biased in representing only mothers who elected not to work outside the home while their children were young. One of the upper-middle-class mothers was a single parent; four of the working-class mothers were single parents. All of the fathers who were present in the household were employed, with the exception of one father in the working-class sample who was disabled.

Subjects were recruited through an- nouncements in local papers, grocery store fliers, a contact at the YWCA, from acquaintances of the student research assistants, and from acquaintances of the participants themselves. Thirty percent of the working-class sample responded to some form of printed advertisement; 70% were recruited through word of mouth. Seventy percent of the upper-middle-class sample responded to an advertisement; 30% were recruited through word of mouth.

All the children were selected to be comparable in terms of their level of productive language use and to be at the point where they were just beginning to combine words. Each child was heard to produce at least three different two-word combinations in a preliminary screening visit, but no more than 50% of any child's utterances were multiword utterances-assessed on the basis of the first recorded speech sample. In terms of Roger Brown's stages, they were all Stage I speakers, and there was no between-group difference in MLU (absolute value of t < 1). The mean MLU in morphemes was 1.27 (SD = .11) for the working-class children and 1.25 (SD = .11) for the upper-middle-class children. Vocab- ulary was not a selection criterion, but the




two groups were comparable in their productive vocabularies as well. The mean number of different words produced in each setting-based on an average of all four settings observed-was 40.0 (SD = 11.4) for the working-class children and 40.7 (SD = 13.4) for the upper-middle-class children (absolute value of t < 1).

Age of the child was also not a selection criterion for two reasons. The first is that the normal variability among children makes it impractical to find 63 children at the same level of language development at the same age. Second, such a requirement of homoge- neity in the children might substantially re- duce the variability among the mothers that was of interest in the present study. The children ranged in age from 1-6 to 2-5. The mean ages were 21.6 months (SD = 3.1) for the working-class children and 21.0 months (SD = 3.1) for the upper-middle-class children. The two groups were not significantly different in terms of the children's mean age (absolute value of t < 1). The children had no known hearing or cognitive impairments. They were roughly equally balanced by gender and birth order as follows: within the working-class sample there were eight firstborn boys, eight firstborn girls, eight later-born boys, and six later-born girls. Within the upper-middle-class sample there were nine firstborn boys, seven firstborn girls, seven later-born boys, and 10 later- born girls. The later-borns in the working- class sample included 12 second- and two third-borns; the later-borns in the upper- middle-class sample included nine second- borns, six third-borns, and two fourth-borns.

Procedure Assessment of mother-child conversa-

tion.-After at least one preliminary visit by a researcher, each mother-child dyad was videotaped at home in four settings: mealtime, dressing, book reading, and toy play. The books and toys were provided by the researcher. The books included both story- books and word books. The toys included a variety of size- and shape-matching toys. Two researchers were present for each taping; one held the video camera and the other made notes to facilitate later transcription. The mothers were given a copy of the videotape as token compensation for their partici- pation.

The taping sessions were scheduled to coincide with the child's usual time for eating breakfast or lunch. The order in which the settings occurred was left up to

the mother, who was told to follow her child's usual routine as much as possible. There was one consistent difference in order of the settings between social classes. The upper-middle-class mothers tended to dress their children before feeding them, whereas the working-class mothers tended to feed their children before dressing them. The durations of the mealtime and dressing interactions were allowed to vary naturally and were taped in their entirety. The reading and toy play interactions were taped for no more than 25 min each. Other family mem- bers were not present during the videotap- ing. Because the children in this study were too young for preschool programs and because the mothers did not work outside the home, their spending several hours together at home was not a contrived situation except for the occasional exclusion of a preschool or infant sibling who would otherwise have been present.

The videotapes of these interactions were transcribed by trained research assistants following the conventions for the use of the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) program (Miller & Chap- man, 1985). Five different undergraduate assistants contributed to the transcription of these tapes. For the purpose of assessing transcriber reliability, all five people transcribed the same segment of interaction, which included approximately 240 maternal utterances. In those five transcripts, the total number of maternal utterances transcribed varied by no more than 7%, MLU varied by no more than 6%, and the number of word roots varied by no more than 1%. Further- more, each transcript was checked against the videotape two times in the course of coding, at least once by someone other than the original transcriber.

The present article reports analyses of the effects of social class and communicative setting on six characteristics of maternal speech and an analysis of the effects of social class on one nonlinguistic measure of interaction. The six maternal speech measures were as follows:

The rate of speech was calculated as the total number of utterances produced by the mother divided by the duration of the interaction. An utterance was defined as not more than one grammatical sentence and was of- ten less if intonation contour or pause time suggested an utterance boundary. (All tag questions were transcribed as separate utterances because it proved too difficult to




achieve reliability among transcribers with- out such a rule.) The measure of duration was provided by the stopwatch display function of the video camera (Panasonic model WV3250).

The richness of vocabulary was indexed by the total number of word roots produced. This measure was a raw frequency count of the number of different lexical items ignor- ing inflections-so, for example, "walks," "walked," and "walking" were counted as a single item. This count was not corrected for differences in the number of utterances produced or the duration of the interaction. This uncorrected measure was selected as the most straightforward measure of the vocabulary the children experienced. Another widely used measure-the ratio of word types to tokens-has intuitive appeal as an index of lexical diversity, but recent work suggests that it is not a good one (Miller, 1989; Richards, 1987). Miller (1989) reported that type-token ratios do not discrimi- nate among children of very different ages and levels of language development, and Richards (1987) has demonstrated that type- token ratios show a negative, but nonlinear, relation to the size of the speech samples on which they are based. Correcting the number of roots produced for differences in the durations of the interactions was not done because, like type-token ratios, such a corrected measure would have inflated the measure of vocabulary for samples of short duration. The syntactic complexity of maternal speech was assessed using mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes based on all the complete and intelligible utterances produced. The word root counts and MLUs were generated by SALT.

The contingency of maternal speech on prior child speech was indexed by the rate at which mothers provided topic-continuing replies to their children's utterances. The basis for defining this category is found in Ochs and Schieffelin's (1983) description of continuous discourse as stretches of discourse that are linked in the sense that the propositional content of each utterance is drawn from one or more of the prior utterances. Discourse topics can be linked when adjacent utterances share the same topic or when one utterance uses part of the propositional content of the prior utterance. In the present study, continuity was judged only with respect to the immediately prior utterance. Maternal utterances that immediately followed child utterances were coded as topic-continuing replies if they met one of

the following conditions: any entity or event referred to in the utterance was referred to the prior child's utterance (e.g., Ch: Slide. M: Where's the slide?), the utterance was an answer to a question (e.g., Ch: What's that? M: A key.), the utterance continued pat- terned speech such as reciting the alphabet or a nursery rhyme, the utterance com- mented on objects or events referred to in the prior utterance (e.g., Ch: My doll. M: Pretty.), the utterance was a paraphrase of the prior utterance (e.g., Ch: Fill her up. M: Put the gas in.). The category of topic- continuing replies was one of several in a scheme for coding the topic relations in mother-child conversation described in Hoff-Ginsberg (1987).

Coding of all the transcripts was done by the same research assistant using both the transcript and the videotape record. In- terrater reliabilities for the three major categories of the coding system, that is, continuous utterances, noncontinuous utterances, and indeterminate utterances, calculated between the coder and the author yielded an agreement rate of 87% and a kappa of .80, based on codings of 220 utterances from excerpted portions of the eating and toy play settings in two different transcripts. Rate of topic-continuing replies was calculated as a percentage of the child's total utterances.

Two functionally defined categories of maternal speech were coded. These categories were based on a system for coding maternal language function developed by Mc- Donald and Pien (1982) and used previously by Hoff-Ginsberg (1986). Behavior directives included utterances that served the function of directing the child's attention (e.g., "Look.") or behavior (e.g., "Can you put the orange key in here?" "Put it in here." "It goes in here."). Conversation- eliciting utterances included several subcat- egories of questions, all of which were judged to be intended to elicit verbal replies, and prompts to answer previous such questions (e.g., "What's this?" "Do you want some milk?" "Where are you going?"). All of the coding of the functional properties of maternal speech was done by one research assistant on transcripts that indicated no other coding. Interrater reliability for the 17-category coding scheme calculated between the coder and the author yielded 82% agreement and a kappa of .80 based on codings of 201 utterances in excerpted portions of the eating and dressing segments of two transcripts. This assessment of reliability was done at a different time and on different




transcripts than the assessment of reliability for topic continuity. Both the topic and function codes were done blind to social class- except as class may have been revealed in the transcripts themselves.

One measure of interaction was coded that was not dependent on conversation taking place. The percent of time spent in joint attentional focus was calculated only for the toy play setting because judging attentional focus requires eye gaze information, and the mother's face was frequently not on camera for portions of the other interactive settings. Joint attention was defined following Toma- sello and Farrar (1986) and Tomasello and Todd (1983) as periods lasting at least 3 sec during which the mother and child were both focused on the same object or activity. All coding of joint attention was done by the same research assistant. Reliability was assessed by comparing the measures to those produced by a second research assistant who independently coded six of the play sessions. The two coders were always within 8 percentage points of each other in their estimates of the total percent of time in joint attention; the correlation between the two coders' estimates was r = .98. The second coder was unaware of the social class of the participants. Another measure of the ability of the mother and child to sustain joint interaction is the length of their joint attention episodes. In the present data, that measure was so highly correlated with the percent of time spent in joint attention (r [61] = .84) that it was not included as an additional variable in the study.

Assessment of mothers' attitudes toward children as conversational partners and of mothers' adult-directed speech. -Each mother was interviewed by one of three different female research assistants during a separate home visit 10 weeks after the observations described in the present article were made. The research assistants who conducted the interviews were under- graduates who had grown up and who still lived in some of the same communities as the research subjects. By the time of the interviews the researchers were very familiar to the mothers, having spent several hours over at least three different visits in their company. (Four interviews were lost due to technical problems, leaving data from 31 upper-middle-class mothers and 28 working-class mothers.) The mothers were asked open-ended questions concerning their short- and long-term goals for their children. Each mother was also asked three

specific questions related to her attitude toward children as conversational partners. Those questions were (1) what age her child was when she started talking to him or her, (2) at what age she estimates her child started to understand the speech addressed to him or her, and (3) how much of what she says to the child she thinks the child understands now. Mothers' responses to the first question were categorized as "before birth," "at birth," or "sometime after birth." Mothers' reports of when their children started to understand were recorded in months of age. The mothers' estimates of how much of the speech addressed to them their children understood were categorized as "most" or "all or nearly all." The categorization of these responses was done by one research assistant who was blind to the mothers' social class. Interrater reliabilities for this categorization, assessed on the basis of 20 protocols, ranged from 87% to 100% agreement. Each interview was transcribed in its entirety in SALT format. Using SALT, each mother's language use during the interview was characterized in terms of the number of utterances produced, the number of different words produced, and the mean length of utterances in words.

Results

Effects of Social Class and Communicative Setting on Mothers' Child-directed Speech

The intercorrelations among the six measured characteristics of maternal speech were calculated within each class x setting cell of the research design in order to ask whether there were any measures that could be considered redundant for the purposes of testing for effects of class and setting. There were not. With alpha = .01 for a two-tailed test, there were no two measures of maternal speech that were significantly correlated for both classes in every setting. Given that 36 correlations were calculated in each of eight conditions, that significance level was liberal.

A rough indication of the stronger or more stable of the correlations is provided by the intercorrelations among the measures averaged across settings. Tables 1 and 2 "present those intercorrelations for each social class. In both groups, the number of word roots was positively and significantly related to the rate of speech and to MLU. In the working-class sample only, there was also a significant positive correlation between the number of word roots and the percent of child utterances given a topic-




TABLE 1

INTERCORRELATIONS AMONG MATERNAL SPEECH MEASURES AVERAGED ACROSS SETTINGS FOR THE WORKING-CLASS SAMPLE (n = 30)

1 2 3 4 5 6

1. Utterances per minute ............... 1.00 .46* -.10 .45 -.18 .14

2. Number of roots ........ 1.00 .53* .51 - .07 -.39 3. M LU ...................... . 1.00 .00 -.02 -.43 4. % child utterances

given topic- continuing reply .... 1.00 .30 -.41

5. Rate of conversation-eliciting utterances ............... 1.00 - .57*

6. Rate of behavior directives ............... 1.00

* p < .01 (two-tailed).

continuing reply, and there was a significant negative correlation between the rate of conversation-eliciting utterances and the rate of behavior directives. When the intercorrelations for each sample were calculated within each setting, the correlation between the rate of speech and the number of roots produced was significant in two settings for the working-class sample and three settings for the upper-middle-class sample. The correlation between the number of roots produced and MLU was significant in two settings for the working-class sample and in two, but not the same two, settings for the upper-middle-class sample. Of the other correlations that were significant in the data from the working-class sample only, the correlation between the number of roots produced and the rate of topic-continuing replies reached significance in only one setting; the negative correlation between conversation-eliciting utterances and behav-

ior directives was significant in two settings. (The complete correlation matrices are available from the author.)

Because the pattern of intercorrelations varied across classes and settings, combin- ing measures might have obscured the effects of class and setting that the present study was designed to investigate. There- fore, the data were not reduced prior to further analysis. The use of MANOVA as a means of handling multiple dependent variables was also rejected because each measure represented an aspect of conversational style that is both conceptually distinct and that, in many cases, has its own history in previous studies of maternal speech. Thus, effects on composites of these variables that might be revealed by a MANOVA were not of interest (see Huberty & Morris, 1989). Separate ANOVAs were selected as the most straightforward way of asking whether the

TABLE 2

INTERCORRELATIONS AMONG MATERNAL SPEECH MEASURES AVERAGED ACROSS SETTINGS FOR THE UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS SAMPLE (n = 33)

1 2 3 4 5 6

1. Utterances per minute ... 1.00 .62* .00 .40 -.15 -.08 2. Number of roots ............. 1.00 .48* .34 -.34 -.21 3. M LU ................................ 1.00 .03 - .44 .06 4. % child utterances given

topic-continuing reply 1.00 .33 - .19 5. Rate of conversation-

eliciting utterances ..... 1.00 -.32 6. Rate of behavior

directives ..................... 1.00

* p < .01 (two-tailed).




characteristics of maternal speech varied as a function of social class and communicative setting and whether setting moderated the social class differences (Baron & Kenny, 1986).

In each ANOVA, social class was a between-subjects factor and communicative setting was a within-subjects factor. The significance of effects involving the repeated- measures factor, that is, the effect of setting and the interaction effect of class and setting, was tested using multivariate repeated-measures ANOVA as described in Hertzog and Rovine (1985). All post hoc comparisons were performed using the si- multaneous Roy-Bose procedure based on a family-wise Type I error probability of .05 (Marascuilo & Levin, 1983). Following Mar- ascuilo and Levin (1983), post hoc comparisons that tested for the source of effects of setting consisted of all possible pairwise comparisons of setting means, asking, for each pairwise combination of settings, which settings differed from each other in the mean value of the dependent variable. Post hoc comparisons that tested for the source of interaction effects of class and setting consisted of comparisons of pairs of means. That is, where there was a class x setting interaction, the post hoc tests asked, for each pairwise combination of settings, which settings differed from each other in the size of the class difference observed. Where there was only a class comparison to make (i.e., for time spent in joint attention), an independent-samples t test was used.

The means for the measured characteristics of maternal speech in each social class and setting and the mean time in joint attention during toy play are presented in Table 3 along with the means of the number of maternal utterances produced and the mean durations of each interaction.

The ANOVA for the mothers' rate of speech indicated that the main effect of social class was not significant, the effect of communicative setting was significant, F(3,59) = 26.84, p < .001, and the class x setting interaction was not significant. Post hoc analyses of the effect of setting revealed that the rate of maternal speech was significantly higher during reading and dressing than during either toy play or mealtime. The rates of maternal speech during dressing and reading were not different from each other; the rate of maternal speech during toy play was significantly higher than the rate of speech during mealtime.

The ANOVA for the number of word roots used indicated that the main effect of social class was not significant, that the effect of communicative setting was significant, F(3,59) = 44.28, p < .001, and that the class x setting interaction was significant, F(3,59) = 4.48, p < .01. Post hoc analyses of the setting main effect revealed that the number of word roots mothers produced during reading was significantly larger than the number of roots produced in any other setting. Also, the number of roots produced during mealtime and during toy play were both significantly larger than the number of roots produced during dressing. The num- bers of word roots produced during mealtime and toy play were not significantly different from each other. Post hoc analyses of the class x setting interaction revealed that the class difference in the number of word roots produced during dressing was significantly greater than the class difference in the number of word roots produced during toy play.

The ANOVA for MLU indicated no significant main effect of class, a significant main effect of communicative setting, F(3,59) = 15.65, p < .001, and no significant class x setting interaction. Post hoc analyses of the setting effect revealed that mothers' mean MLU was significantly higher during reading than during every other setting. The mean MLUs in the other settings were not significantly different from each other.

The ANOVA for the percent of child utterances given a topic-continuing reply indicated a significant main effect of social class, F(1,61) = 6.01, p < .02, a significant main effect of communicative setting, F(3,59) = 31.04, p < .001, and no significant class x setting interaction. Upper-middle-class mothers provided topic-continuing replies to a greater proportion of their children's utterances than did working-class mothers. Post hoc analyses of the setting effect revealed that the rate of topic-continuing replies was significantly higher in the context of reading than in every other setting and was significantly higher in dressing than in toy play.

The ANOVA for mothers' rates of conversation-eliciting utterances indicated no significant main effect of social class, a significant main effect of communicative setting, F(3,59) = 15.77, p < .001, and no significant class x setting interaction. Post hoc analyses of the setting effect revealed that maternal conversation-eliciting utterances




TABLE 3

MEANS (and Standard Deviations) FOR CHARACTERISTICS OF MOTHER-CHILD CONVERSATION BY SOCIAL CLASS AND COMMUNICATIVE SETTING

COMMUNICATIVE SETTING

MEASURED CHARACTERISTIC All OF CONVERSATION Mealtime Dressing Reading Toy Play Settings

Properties of maternal speech: Number of utterances:

Working class .......................... 181(105) 103(58) 337(136) 238(106) 215(71) Upper middle class ................. 260(136) 170(69) 334(139) 267(88) 258(80) All subjects .............................. 222(127) 138(72) 336(136) 253(97)

Utterances per minute: Working class .......................... 11.5(4.7) 16.2(4.7) 23.6(14.5) 13.0(5.3) 16.1(5.5) Upper middle class ................. 13.9(4.3) 22.4(12.8) 21.7(5.0) 16.0(4.7) 18.5(5.3) All subjects .............................. 12.6(4.6) 19.5(10.3) 22.6(10.6) 14.6(5.2)

Number of roots: Working class ........................ 148(52) 105(32) 264(98) 155(36) 168(40) Upper middle class ................. 190(76) 149(48) 251(83) 169(46) 190(50) All subjects ............................ 170(69) 128(46) 257(90) 162(42)

MLU: Working class .......................... 3.51(.50) 3.46(.45) 3.95(.72) 3.49(.38) 3.60(.42) Upper middle class .................... 3.63(.54) 3.60(.52) 3.85(.59) 3.66(.54) 3.69(.49) All subjects .............................. 3.57(.52) 3.53(.49) 3.90(.65) 3.58(.48)

% child utterances given topic-continuing reply:

Working class .......................... 35.1(13.6) 38.4(16.0) 43.9(13.0) 31.3(12.3) 37.2(10.9) Upper middle class .................... 41.7(13.1) 45.4(16.1) 51.4(12.1) 38.3(14.1) 44.2(11.8) All subjects ................................. 38.6(13.6) 42.1(16.3) 47.8(13.0) 35.0(13.6)

Rate of conversation-eliciting utterances:

Working class ............................. 32.3(12.3) 32.0(13.7) 29.0(10.6) 25.2(11.3) 29.6(9.3) Upper middle class ................ 39.6(10.8) 36.7(13.7) 31.4(10.4) 27.0(8.4) 33.7(8.9) All subjects .............................. 36.1(12.0) 34.5(13.8) 30.2(10.5) 26.1(9.9)

Rate of behavior directives: Working class .......................... 24.3(11.8) 23.5(11.3) 16.1(5.1) 25.5(8.8) 22.3(6.8) Upper middle class .................... 13.0(7.8) 15.1(8.4) 14.6(9.9) 20.5(7.8) 15.8(6.6) All subjects .............................. 18.3(11.4) 19.1(10.7) 15.3(7.9) 22.9(8.6)

Nonverbal properties of interaction: Duration (min):

Working class .......................... 15.6(5.7) 6.5(3.4) 16.0(5.9) 18.3(2.7) 14.1(2.3) Upper middle class ................. 19.0(7.3) 8.4(4.0) 15.2(4.9) 16.9(3.9) 14.9(3.0) All subjects .............................. 17.3(6.7) 7.5(3.8) 15.5(5.3) 17.6(3.4) 14.9(3.0)

% time in joint attention: Working class .................... .. ......... 26.3(12.6) Upper middle class ............. .......... 29.2(14.0) All subjects ................................ 27.8(13.3)

were significantly more frequent during eating and dressing than during reading or toy play. The frequency of conversation- eliciting utterances during dressing was higher than during reading, and the frequency of conversation-eliciting utterances during reading was higher than during toy play.

The ANOVA for the rate of behavior directives indicated a significant main effect of social class, F(1,61) = 15.01, p < .001, a significant main effect of setting, F(3,59) =

16.72, p < .001, and a significant class x setting interaction, F(3,59) = 4.67, p = .005. Working-class mothers' speech to their children served the function of directing behavior more frequently than did the upper- middle-class mothers' speech. Post hoc analyses of the main effect of setting revealed that the rate of behavior directives was significantly higher in toy play than in each of the other settings, which were not different from each other. Post hoc analyses of the class x setting interaction revealed that the class difference in the use of direc-




tives was significantly greater in the mealtime conversations than in the book reading conversations.

Effects of Social Class on Joint Attention Comparison of the means of the percent

of time during toy play that was spent in joint attention indicated no difference between the upper-middle-class and working- class samples.

Effects of Social Class on Mothers' Attitudes toward Their Children as Conversational Partners

There were no class differences in the age at which the mothers reported that they started talking to their children, in the age at which the mothers reported that their children started to understand, or in the mothers' estimates of how much of the speech addressed to them their children currently understood. Twenty-two percent of working-class and 31% of upper-middle-class mothers reported talking to their children before they were born. Sixty-seven percent of working-class and 59% of upper-middle- class mothers reported talking to their children from the time they were born. Eleven percent of working-class and 9% of upper- middle-class mothers reported starting to talk to their children at some later point in the children's development. Both groups of mothers reported that they thought their children started to understand the speech addressed to them at an average age of 6 months. Eighty-six percent of the working- class mothers and 68% of the upper-middle- class mothers estimated that their children currently understood "all or nearly all" that was said to them.

Effects of Social Class on Mothers' Adult-directed Speech

There were significant differences between the working-class and upper-middle- class mothers in characteristics of the speech they produced in answering the interview questions. The upper-middle-class mothers produced more utterances, produced longer utterances, and used a richer vocabulary than the working-class mothers. The upper- middle-class mothers produced a mean of 60.4 utterances (SD = 22.9) compared to the working-class mothers' mean of 45.8 (SD = 25.1), t(57) = 2.35, p < .05. The mean length in words of the upper-middle-class mothers' utterances was 9.56 (SD = 2.24) compared to the working-class mothers' mean of 7.58 words per utterance (SD = 1.97), t(57) = 3.58, p < .001. The upper-middle-class mothers used a vocabulary of 208 different

words on average (SD = 65) compared to a mean vocabulary for the working-class mothers of 139 different words (SD = 57), t(57) = 4.31, p < .001.

Discussion

Intercorrelations among Maternal Speech Measures

The finding that the intercorrelations among maternal speech measures varied de- pending on social class and communicative setting suggests that the separate characteristics of maternal speech that were measured in the present study are affected differently by class and setting. However, two correlations were significant for both classes in the data averaged across settings, suggesting some common influence. The positive correlation between the rate of speech and the number of word roots produced probably reflects the fact that the count of word roots was not corrected for total verbal output, and thus indicates only that mothers who talked more produced a more varied vocabulary. However, that correlation was not a logical or mathematical necessity. Mothers who talked more could have produced only more of the same with respect to vocabulary, but they did not. The positive correlation between the number of word roots produced and MLU seems most interpretable as re- flecting that mothers who spoke at a more advanced level in terms of vocabulary also spoke at a more advanced level in terms of syntax. What determines the level at which mothers spoke is unclear in the present data. Maternal vocabulary and MLU were not significantly related to the children's ages or MLUs, but maternal vocabulary was significantly related to child vocabulary in both classes, r(28) = .63, p < .01 for the working- class sample, and r(31) = .59, p < .01 for the upper-middle-class sample. Thus mothers' levels of language use seem at most only partly the result of adjusting to their children's levels. These findings might reflect the facts that mothers' levels of language use were independent of the range of variability in the children in the present samples, but that maternal and child productive vocabularies were related due to the prior or concur- rent influence of maternal language on child language.

The correlation between properties of maternal speech obtained in the present study that has been referred to most in the previous literature is the negative relation between the rate of conversation-eliciting utterances and the rate of behavior direc-




tives. In the present data, that correlation was significant in the working-class sample only. McDonald and Pien (1982) have suggested that mothers differ in the communicative goals they have when talking to their children and that these differences can be captured on a single continuum ranging from a primary concern with directing their children's behavior to a primary concern with eliciting conversation from their children. The intercorrelations among speech measures obtained in the present study support the notion of a trade-off between these two goals to a certain extent, but the present data also suggest that a single continuum does not capture all the variability among mothers and among communicative settings in the nature of child-directed speech.

Effects of Social Class on Mothers' Child-directed Speech and Joint Attention

The findings that upper-middle-class mothers' speech was more contingent on their children's speech and was less directive are consistent with class differences in maternal conversational style that have been reported elsewhere in the literature. What is new in the present findings is the evidence that such differences obtain even between two mainstream groups where neither group lives in poverty and where the groups do not differ in their expressed beliefs about the appropriateness of talking to children. Fur- thermore, the lack of a social class difference in joint attention suggests that in some contexts, at least, the two groups of mothers were equally capable of sustaining interaction with their children despite differences in language use.

Effects of Communicative Setting on Mothers' Child-directed Speech

There were significant effects of setting on every measure examined in the present study. Reading stood out as the most different of the four settings studied. Mothers' child-directed speech during reading had the greatest lexical diversity, the greatest syntactic complexity, and the highest rate of topic-continuing replies. Reading was also among the two highest settings in terms of the overall rate of maternal speech. These findings support the widespread notion that book reading is particularly conducive to a supportive style of mother-child conversation. The pattern of differences among the other settings was complex, suggesting that supportive characteristics of child-directed speech do not vary as a single complex of features, but that different supportive features are maximized in different contexts.

Toy play was distinguished from the other settings in having the highest rate of directives and the lowest rate of conversation- eliciting utterances. Mealtime was lower than all other settings in the rate of maternal speech and highest, along with dressing, in the rate of conversation-eliciting utterances. Maternal speech during dressing was different from speech in all other settings in having the least lexical diversity.

Because conversation during reading does seem to have special properties, asser- tions regarding the support for language development that mothers provide which are based on studies of book reading interactions may be of limited generalizability. Ma- ternal speech during toy play, which is the other most studied communicative context, was distinguished from speech in the other settings studied in having lower rates of the characteristics thought to support language development. This finding also suggests caution in generalizing from the results of previous studies. It further suggests that conversations that occur during caretaking activities are not necessarily of less value for children's language development than conversation in less goal-directed interaction.

The Stability of Class Differences in Maternal Speech across Settings

The pattern of interaction effects that was observed suggests that social class differences in mothers' child-directed speech occur across a range of communicative settings, but that the setting can moderate some of those differences. The settings of book reading and toy play minimized differences that were more noticeable in mealtime and dressing. It should be noted that the attenuating effect of book reading on social class differences in maternal language use was not solely a reflection of the fact that the mothers were reading the same books. Com- parisons of the two groups of mothers' ex- temporaneous speech in the book reading setting showed the same pattern of findings. That is, the upper-middle-class mothers produced significantly more topic-continuing replies to their children's utterances, t(61) = 2.10, p < .05 (not surprisingly, in that these utterances would have to be extemporane- ous), and there were no significant differences on any other measure of maternal speech (all p's > .30). The attenuating effect of book reading on the class difference in directives echoes findings by Snow et al. (1976) and Dunn et al. (1977) that book reading minimized class differences in mother- child conversation. Although vocabulary is a




different measure of language than the characteristics investigated by Brophy (1970), the attenuating effect of toy play on the social class difference in maternal vocabulary that was observed in the present study is reminiscent of Brophy's finding that social class differences in mothers' speech were minimized when their children were acting on objects and were greater when the children were not engaged in actions. In the present study, there was no prescribed initi- ation phase of the toy play activity; thus the data reflect primarily the nature of maternal speech when toy play is under way.

Sources of Class Differences in Child-directed Speech

The hypothesis that social class differences in mothers' manner of conversing with their children are due to generalized influences of constraints of the caretaking settings in which less affluent mothers spend more of their time was not supported. The pattern of differences predicted by this hypothesis-fewer class differences in caretaking settings and more class differences in less constrained settings-was not obtained. The observed difference in the rate of topic- continuing replies was stable across all settings, and the observed difference in the rate of directives was greatest during the caretaking setting of mealtime. Furthermore, although the presently observed differences between upper-middle-class mothers and working-class mothers are similar to descrip- tions of class differences reported by other researchers-including differences found between low-income and middle-class samples (Bee et al., 1969; Hess & Shipman, 1965), the general circumstances of these working-class families' lives make inapplica- ble the notion that social class differences in talk to children are due to the oppressive effects of economic deprivation and environ- mental stress on human interaction.

The hypothesis that social class differences in conversational interaction with children would reflect differences in beliefs about children's language ability or about the appropriateness of talking to children was also not supported. There were no differences on any of those measures.

The hypothesis that class differences in talk to children would reflect general class differences in conversational style was supported-to the extent that the present data provided a test. In speech to the researcher, the upper-middle-class mothers talked more, produced longer utterances,

and used a richer vocabulary. The significant differences in vocabulary and verbal output in adult-directed speech paralleled trends in the data on mothers' vocabulary and rate of utterances in child-directed speech (see Ta- ble 3). Social class differences in the syntactic properties of adult-directed speech probably were not reflected in child-directed speech because of the simplifications all adults make in talking to children. The present study provided no parallel in the measures of adult-directed speech to the measure of topic-continuing replies and directives that were the variables that showed significant class differences in child-directed speech. Thus the claim of similarity in the social class differences in adult- and child-directed speech can be made only at the most general level. The upper-middle-class mothers appeared to be more responsive conversational partners than the working-class mothers, both with adult researchers and with their children.

Conclusion The present study was designed to ask

how mother-child conversation varies as a function of social class and the settings in which interaction occurs and to test compet- ing hypotheses with regard to the source of social class differences. The present study found social class differences in maternal speech and found evidence that these differences may reflect social class differences in language use that are not specific to interaction with children. The present study also found that the setting in which conversation occurs influences the characteristics of maternal speech and influences the size of the class differences observed.

Part of the motivation for this study was concern that previous work on the relation of maternal speech to child language development has concentrated on middle-class samples and a restricted range of communicative contexts, perhaps jeopardizing the generalizability of those results. The present study found that the child-directed speech of the upper-middle-class mothers more closely resembled the description of a supportive style of interaction drawn from previous studies than did the speech of the working-class mothers. Whether or not this finding suggests that previous work on the effects of maternal speech does not apply to other, less-studied groups depends on whether or not there are consequences of these social class differences in maternal speech for the children's language development. Future analyses of the language de-




velopment of the children who participated in the present study are planned. Those analyses will allow asking whether the char- acterization of the upper-middle-class mothers' style as more supportive is borne out. However, the effects of setting that were observed suggest that average characteristics of maternal speech-even sampled across several settings-may be only a rough indi- cator of children's experiences. To ade- quately characterize children's language- learning experiences, it may also be necessary to know how much time mothers spend interacting with their children in different contexts.

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mother-child conversation in different social classes and communicative settings

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