MOTHER'S USE OF LANGUAGE AS A FUNCTION OF THE INFANT'S STAGE OF SENSORIMOTOR DEVELOPMENT

Recent research in the field of developmental psycholinguistics has revealed a strong link between cognitive development and the emergence of language. The work of Bates, Bloom, and others has provided evidence that achievements during Stages V and VI of the sensorimotor period may be precursors of language acquisition.;The present study was based on the assumption that changes in mothers' language to prelinguistic infants may be cued by behaviors of the infants. The purpose of the study was to identify changes occurring in mothers' language during their infants' first 7 months of life and to relate these changes to the infants' entrance to Stage III of sensorimotor development.;Subjects and Procedures. The subjects of the study were three middle-class mothers and their normal 2-month-old infants. Each dyad was videotaped during unstructured interactions at home every 2 weeks for 30 minutes until the infants were 7 months old. In addition, the infants' level of sensorimotor development was assessed by the author at each session, using a series of tasks based on Piaget and the Uzgiris-Hunt scales of sensorimotor development. Three time periods were defined: Time I described the infant at Stage II; Time II described the infant's transition from Stage II to Stage III; and Time III described the full attainment of Stage III by the infant and major alterations in the mother's language. Time III began when the infants were 6 to 6 1/2 months old.;Results. The stages of sensorimotor development attained by the three infants followed very closely the sequence outlined by Piaget in terms of age of attainment and tasks representative of each stage.;Bruner and Snow have emphasized the importance of mother-infant interaction in the language acquisition process. Both researchers have identified reciprocal activities between mother and infant that may promote later language learning. Snow refers to these interactions as conversational. She has identified certain changes in mothers' use of language to very young infants that may be important to the language learning process.;Major changes in the communicative function of the mothers' language occurred at the same time the infants attained Stage III. These changes consisted of (1) a dramatic shift in reference from talking almost exclusively about the child to conversations about objects and the child's interaction with them, (2) an increase in the proportion of meaningful utterances and a corresponding decrease in the number of contentless utterances, and (3) less use of language to maintain interaction (affective) and a greater use of it to regulate the child's behavior or teach the child (directive).;Little change was measured in the mothers' use of syntactic structures or semantic relations across the three time periods. Mothers' language was simple in syntactic form and semantic content, correct and redundant throughout the study.;Discussion. The fact that the infants' emergence into full Stage III and the major shifts in mothers' language occurred within 2 weeks of each other suggests that the former may be a precursor of the latter.;The results of this study suggest that by changing their language to focus on the infants' interaction with objects, the mothers may be preparing their 7-month old babies for later language learning. Previous work (e.g. Lois Bloom) has reported that the babies' first words reflect this sensorimotor knowledge, encoding the relationship among agent, action and object. The present study gives evidence that this link between cognitive development during the sensorimotor period and early language acquisition may extend to Stage III when a shift in mothers' reference from infant to object occurs.