title: Mothers' Sensitivity to Infants' Communicative Acts
Creators: name: Meadows, Denis
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2001
Subjects: subject: Infant
subject: Mothers
subject: Maternal
subject: Mothering
subject: Communication

description: This series of studies investigated the sensitivity of mothers towards the behaviour of their preverbal infants. More specifically, the investigation examined the consistency with which mothers identified what they considered to be communicative acts by their infants aged 6, 9, and 12 months, and the contingency and appropriateness of their maternal responses. The ability of other female adults to identify the same infant acts as communicative as the mothers was also investigated. In Studies one and two, 35 infants and their mothers were videotaped in a laboratory setting. Three weeks after the videotaping session, the mothers were asked to view a five-minute section and code the stream of infant behaviour into periods when they believed that their infant was engaging in communicative behaviours ('on' events) and periods when they considered that the infants were not ('off' events). This process was repeated three months after the first coding. At each coding session the mothers coded the videotape twice. Each mother's coded records were compared, in pairs, within and across coding sessions and the observed levels of agreement were calculated. A randomization procedure using 1000 iterations of the whole 'on' and 'off' events was used to determine the meaningfulness of the observed level of agreement between pairs of codings by providing distributions of chance levels of agreement with which the observed levels could be compared. Levels of agreement that exceeded chance values (p equals or is less than .05) were taken as evidence of consistency of maternal response. Consistency in the identification of communicative acts by other female adults (OAs) was investigated using a sample of 12 of the videotapes. Each videotape was coded by three separate OAs. The significance of the observed levels of agreement between the mother's coding and those of the OAs was determined using the randomization procedure. The results indicated that at each infant age, mothers were able to identify consistently their infant's communicatively salient behaviours, even over inter-coding intervals of three months. Further, both OAs and mothers identified the same infant behaviours as communicative. The third study investigated the abilities of a different sample of mothers and infants to describe the topography and meaning of their infants' behaviours during the 'on' events. Mothers' descriptions of their infants' behaviour during the 'on' events were also used to describe changes in the criteria that they used to identify infant behaviours as communicatively salient. Results indicated that the complexity of the criteria that the mothers used changed across infant age. First, mothers of younger infants were more likely, than mothers of older infants, to describe a single infant behaviour as being communicatively salient. The latter were more likely to identify two or three co-occurring infant behaviours as salient. Second, when more than one infant behaviour was identified in an 'on' event, the mothers of the older infants were more likely than the mothers of younger infants to state that all of the behaviours that they identified were communicatively important. These findings were interpreted to mean that mothers of older infants required more complex constellations of behaviour during the 'on' events in order to identify those behaviours as communicative. Study 4 investigated the contingency and appropriateness of the mothers' responses to the segments of their infants' behaviour that they identified as being communicative. Across infant age, findings indicated that the mothers' verbal responses to their infants were contingent upon whether they considered that their infants were engaged in communicatively salient behaviours. During periods of infant behaviour that the mothers identified as being communicative, mothers talked significantly more to their infants than they did when their infant's behaviour was considered to be non-communicative. Further, mothers' verbal responses were interpreted as being appropriate in two ways. First, during the 'on' events, changes occurred over infant age in the balance between the use of utterances designed to attract and maintain the attention of the infant (Attentional Directives) and those designed to provide comment on infant behaviour (Feedback). This shift is in keeping with widely reported changes in infant behaviour as children grow older (i.e., older infants' play a greater role in initiating and maintaining episodes of interaction). Second, during periods when the mothers considered that their infants were not communicating ('off' events) they rarely used 'Feedback' verbal responses. During 'off' events, mothers maintained high levels of 'Attentional Directive' talk, irrespective of infant age. Taken collectively, these studies provide evidence that supports the view that mothers are sensitive to what they consider to be communicative behaviours by their infants in terms of the consistency, contingency and appropriateness of their behaviour. The unique features of this investigation, the generality of the findings and the implications for future research are discussed in the final chapter.