Mother-child interaction with preschool language-delayed children: structuring conversations.

The discourse skills of mothers and their language-delayed children were examined to determine how participants opened and responded to each other in conversation. Four language-delayed children were matched to four normal children on mean length of utterance. Videotapes were made of the children and their mothers during 15 minutes of play. The types of utterances used to open and respond were similar; however, the flow of dialogue was different for the two groups in the use of invitations, initiations, sustaining, and non-sustaining responses. In the language-delayed child-mother dyads the flow of information through dialogue was interrupted by the necessity to clarify and the lack of definitive control of the turn-taking structure. Conclusions were that there was less shared context between mothers and their language-delayed children. These differences could be explained by the linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic ability of the children.