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‘Do what I mean, not what I say!’. Changes in mothers' action-directives to young children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Maita H. Schneiderman
Maita H. Schneiderman
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Abstract

This study investigated mothers' notions of appropriate speech to 40 children aged 1; 6 to 3; 6. Spontaneous maternal action-directives were analysed in terms of the explicitness with which they expressed syntactic and lexical clues to action-directive intentions. Cross-sectional and longitudinal changes, and progressions within maternal repetition sequences, indicated that the children perceived as most limited in inferential skills elicited the most restricted input. Most of the action-directives they heard could be interpreted non-inferentially, because syntactic and lexical clues to intentions were explicitly expressed. External supports were removed gradually in response to the mother's perception of her child's increasing ability to draw extra-linguistic inferences. Several theoretical models of non-literal speech-act comprehension are supported. It is argued that the differences in language use reflect the mother's notions of the speech a listener is likely to understand.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , June 1983 , pp. 357 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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Footnotes

[*]

This paper is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Pennsylvania, 1980. It was prepared during an appointment at Syracuse University; portions were presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, Mass., 1981. I thank Lila R. Gleitman (thesis advisor), Henry Gleitman and Joseph A. Glick for advice and encouragement throughout the project; Arthur S. Reber and Marilyn Shatz for many helpful suggestions; Lenore Sherman-Schneiderman for running subjects and analysing data; Adele A. Abrahamson, Barbara Landau, Jacqueline Sachs and Norman Stein for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06268.

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