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Maternal mental state talk and infants' early gestural communication*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

VIRGINIA SLAUGHTER ,
CANDIDA C. PETERSON  and
MALINDA CARPENTER
VIRGINIA SLAUGHTER*
Affiliation:
The University of Queensland, Australia
CANDIDA C. PETERSON
Affiliation:
The University of Queensland, Australia
MALINDA CARPENTER
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
*
Address for correspondence: Virginia Slaughter, The University of Queensland, Australia, School of Psychology, Brisbane, Australia 4072. fax: 617-3365-4466. e-mail: vps@psy.uq.edu.au
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Abstract

Twenty-four infants were tested monthly for the production of imperative and declarative gestures between 0 ; 9 and 1 ; 3 and concurrent mother–infant free-play sessions were conducted at 0 ; 9, 1 ; 0 and 1 ; 3 (Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello, 1998). Free-play transcripts were subsequently coded for maternal talk about mental states. Results revealed that the earlier infants produced imperative gestures, the more frequently their mothers made reference to the infants' own volitional states (want, try, need, etc.) at 1 ; 3. The same relation also emerged using maternal reports of their infants' gestural communication on a standard language development measure. These results indicate that mothers' talk about desires and intentions is linked to their infants' early developing communicative competence.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2009 , pp. 1053 - 1074
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

An Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to the first two authors supported this work. We thank Katherine Nagell and Michael Tomasello for their contributions to the original dataset and for their willingness to share the data for the current study. We also thank Philippa Neary for her work on the maternal language coding. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.

References

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