Maternal speech: strategy or response?

The existing data concerning the effects of maternal speech on child language development are so conflicting that it is difficult to draw even tentative conclusions about this relationship. One potential contributor to this problem is our lack of information concerning the determinants of maternal speech. The present study was designed to separate those elements of maternal speech which are heavily influenced by child language levels from those that seem to represent the mother's consistent style or strategy for 'teaching' language. Syntactic, discourse, and communicative functions of mothers' speech were examined. Mothers of highand low-level language children were compared when talking to their daughters and to another girl the same age as their daughter. Analysis indicated a striking amount of similarity and consistency in high vs. low mothers' speech to both their daughters and the other child. Those elements of maternal speech that did show differences tended to be features that are fairly easily monitored by mothers or are directly tied to child utterances.