Maternal Language Styles and Children's Cognitive Behavior

ion The Abstraction Scale measures the extent to which an individual uses language to express abstract concepts. The importance of abstraction behavior as a measure of cognitive attitude and level has long been recognized. The distinction between abstract and concrete attitudes has been useful in clinical psychiatry (Goldstein & Scheerer, 1941; Hanfmann & Kasanin, 1937; Rapaport, 1945). Concept-formation and concept-attainment studies have been devoted largely to studying how individuals achieve abstract levels of conceptualization. A number of test items in the Stanford-Binet IQ test request definitions of abstract words and concepts (although, in fact, the words used tend to be not so much abstractions as words of low frequency usage). The Similarities subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Wechsler, 1960) is presumed to measure the subject’s ability to think 56 THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 4/NO. 1 abstractly. In abstract thinking, the individual goes beyond the immediate properties or attributes of the object, situation or event and attends to inferred or abstracted attributes. Concrete thinking is characterized by adherence to immediate experiences of objects, situations or events. It has been shown that the nouns used by young Englishspeaking children are more reliably the names of things, and verbs more reliably the names of actions, than is the case for the nouns and verbs used by English-speaking adults, who use more abstract nouns and verbs (Brown, 1957). The distinction between whether a word is being used concretely or abstractly lies in the proposition being expressed, and for the Abstraction Scale, nouns and verbs were classified according to this criterion. Each Abstraction score is the proportion of abstract nouns and verbs to the total number of nouns and verbs used.ly. In abstract thinking, the individual goes beyond the immediate properties or attributes of the object, situation or event and attends to inferred or abstracted attributes. Concrete thinking is characterized by adherence to immediate experiences of objects, situations or events. It has been shown that the nouns used by young Englishspeaking children are more reliably the names of things, and verbs more reliably the names of actions, than is the case for the nouns and verbs used by English-speaking adults, who use more abstract nouns and verbs (Brown, 1957). The distinction between whether a word is being used concretely or abstractly lies in the proposition being expressed, and for the Abstraction Scale, nouns and verbs were classified according to this criterion. Each Abstraction score is the proportion of abstract nouns and verbs to the total number of nouns and verbs used. Language elaboration Four of the scales (Mean Sentence Length, Mean Pre-Verb Length, Verb Elaboration, and Syntactic Structure Elaboration) were presumed to overlap in what they were measuring. Accordingly, a common-factor analysis4 was made of these four scales across three different samples of each mother’s speech. The analysis yielded a Language Elaboration Factor, which was used in subsequent regression analyses in place of the four scales originally used in making it up. Language Elaboration Factor scores ranged from negative through a zero midpoint to positive; because of the direction of factor loadings, a negative score denotes greater language elaboration than a positive score. The factor scores were Converted to T scores? A common factor analysis of all the scales showed that the scales not loaded with the Language Elaboration Factor were independent of one another. These other scales were therefore included in the regression analyses. DATA-GATHERING PROCEDURE For the language style analysis, three samples of the mother’s speech were obtained. In her home, she was asked to describe in detail a typical day in her life. One purpose of this task was to provide a sample of the mother’s speech to an adult in an open-ended situation. The mother was also given two projective measures. In one, she was presented with a photograph of a mother and a teacher in a classroom and asked to tell the interviewer what might be going on in the picture. In the other projective measure, she was presented with Card No. 3, the “lionmouse” card of the Children’s Apperception Test (CAT, Bellak ti Bellak, 1961), and was requested to tell a story about the picture to her child; the instructions were standard TAT instructions. All interviews were taperecorded. The language protocols were scored, independently of the interviews and testing, by coders employed for the purpose, different coders for different scales. All scoring was checked for reliability by having two coders work on a 15 per4Common factors were extracted using the method of principal axes and were subsequently rotated to simple structure using the varimax criterion. The MESA 85 computer program, developed by Dr. B. 0. Wright of the University of Chicago, was used. 5 T scores are normalized standard scores converted into a distribution with a mean of 50 and a standard devialion of 10. The sigma scores are “normalized” by transforming them directly into equivalent points in a normal distribution (see Fe rg us0 n, 1966). THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 4/NO. 1 57 cent sample of the protocols. When satisfactory reliability was established, one of the two coders continued the coding of the entire speech sample for the particular scale on which he was working. Rank-order coefficient reliabilities were established for the CAT stories; since high reliabilities were obtained (.93 to 1.00), it was deemed unnecessary to test for coding reliability on the other two speech samples. COGNITIVE MEASURES OF THE CHILDREN To obtain measures of the cognitive level and style of each child, three tasks were used. The Stanford-Binet, Form L-M (Terman & Merrill, 1960) was used to assess level. The Sigel Conceptual Sorting Task for Children (Sigel, 1963) was used to assess conceptual style. A block sorting task6 was used to measure the child’s ability to learn a concept (taught by his mother) and to use it correctly in a transfer task. In the Sigel task, the child was requested to select one of three pictures that is like, or goes with, a presentation picture and to state the reason for each selection. There were 20 sets of pictures. Responses were scored on t h e basis of the kind of concept expressed. When a child gives a correct verbal tag to a conceptual category, he demonstrates both that he has the concept in his repertoire and that h e can verbalize it. It is unlikely that a child could verbalize a concept without grasping it non-linguistically (Brown, 1956). However, the converse is not necessarily true, namely, that the child who cannot verbalize the category does not have the category in his cognitive repertoire. A number of children made sorts evidencing a conceptual basis, but the responses were not scorable because of lack of verbalization. For children at the age level and with the backgrounds of the children in this project, an additional sorting task allowing nonverbal assessment of -cognitive style would probably have been useful. Because a number of children were unable to give scorable responses, additional scoring categories were developed. The following is a brief description of the response categories. Descriptive part-whole The basis of this concept is one of the manifest properties of the paired pictures, such as color (black and white only), texture, shading, shape, size, and individual items or parts of figures, such as wheels, heads, guns, etc. Descriptive global Concepts are based on some manifest global attribute of the selected pairing, such as the status or occupation of the figures (policemen, soldiers, nurses, trucks, etc.); discrete age categories (children, adults, babies, etc.); sex; and age and sex (young women, boys, girls). Relational-contextual Concepts indicate an interdependence among two or more manifest stimuli of a functional, temporal or spatial contiguity, e.g., “the horse pulls t he stagecoach,” “the man is shooting the other man dead.” Categorical-inferential Concepts are based on inferred or non-observable characteristics of the paired stimuli. Each member of the pair is representative of the total class and each instance is not interdepend6Developed by associales of the author at the University of Chicago (see Hess & Shipman. 1965). 58 THE JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VOL. 41NO. 1 ent, e.g., “these are sick people,”

Field of study: Education