In this paper, I address the question of how interactions with deaf youth and their hearing interlocutors are able to unfold in economical and fluid ways despite the existence of sensory and communicative asymmetries. Bringing together ethnographic insights from two years of fieldwork in Iquitos, Peru with the microanalysis of moments of situated…

One hundred dyads of low-income, Spanish-speaking mothers and their bilingual children (age = 12-18; M = 14.12, SD = 1.89) who have language brokered for the mother (i.e., culturally or linguistically mediated between the mother and English speakers) were surveyed. Multiple goals theory posits that mothers and children who do not recognize and…

Maternal wait time after open- and closed-ended questions with eight Down syndrome (DS) and eight language-age (LA) matched peers was investigated. Mothers provided a longer mean wait time for LA children (2.5 seconds) than for DS children (1.8 seconds). These wait times matched well with children's usual response times. No differences for…

Families were compared at one, three, and nine months to examine the effects of active or passive exposure to the Brazelton Neonatal Behavior Assessment. Either the mother or both parents were the target of the intervention. Assessments of interaction behavior between parents and infants revealed no effects of the experimental intervention.…

The study with 18 children with Down Syndrome (DS), their mothers, and a control group replicated previous findings that mothers of DS children are more directive and identified qualitative differences in types of directives (e.g., mothers of DS children were more likely to request actions) suggesting differences in maternal interactive…

This study of 16 dyads of mothers and their children with a language age of 2-5 years found no significant differences between the interactional patterns of normal-hearing mothers and their normal-hearing children and of normal-hearing mothers and their children with mild to moderate hearing impairment. (Author/JDD)

The study investigated: (1) whether the mothers of young stuttering children differ from the mothers of young normally disfluent children in their verbal interaction patterns during free play with their children; and (2) whether disfluency in young children is related systematically to the type of speech act expressed. Four preschoolers and their…

Comparison of communication between hearing mothers and their deaf or hearing children (n=80) at child-ages 22 months and 3 years found most of the differences in communication by mothers of deaf and hearing children seemed attributable to the deaf children's linguistic delays. Results suggest that intervention efforts should focus on fostering…

Sixteen dyads comprised either of deaf toddlers and their deaf mothers or deaf toddlers and their hearing mothers were compared on the use and success of various means for establishing mutual attention for communication. Results suggested the deaf-deaf dyads experienced significantly more episodes of mutual attention because the deaf mothers were…

Fourteen mother-child dyads involving preschool children with autism and 14 matched dyads of typically developing children and mothers were observed during free play. Mothers of autistic children directed verbalizations to something within the child's focus of attention as often as other mothers. They directed verbalizations to something not…

Comparison of 18 mothers and their late-talking male toddlers with 18 mothers and their typically developing male toddlers found no significant differences in degree of synchrony between mothers and children, mothers' use of social cues, play synchrony, compliance, or overall communicativeness, although the late talkers made significantly fewer…

This study compared efforts of 20 deaf and 20 hearing infants to reengage their deaf or hearing mothers in a maternal "still-face" situation. When all kinds of infant signal behaviors were considered, few overall differences were found in eliciting efforts by deaf and hearing infants. (Author/DB)

This study of 5 hearing-impaired and 6 normally hearing children (ages 1-3) and their mothers found that mother directives were more frequently expressed during interaction with children exhibiting less advanced language abilities, and both groups of children were more likely to produce topically related responses to their mother's directive…

Three matched groups--hearing mother-hearing child, hearing mother-deaf child, and deaf mother-deaf child--were videotaped. Hearing mothers of deaf children were less likely to adapt their interactional strategies to meet their children's communicative needs and achieve intersubjectivity than were the other mothers. Results support Lev S.…

This observational study examined 60 mothers' comments during play with their 4- to 8-month-old infants who had been either full-term, preterm well, or preterm sick. Mothers of sick preterm babies engaged in the most overall talking, mothers of full-term babies made the most negative remarks, and mothers of healthy preterm babies made the fewest…