Child variables influencing maternal speech style. Deaf and hearing children.

This study investigated maternal speech to age-matched and linguistically matched deaf and hearing 2-yr-old and 5-yr-old infants. Maternal speech features that were examined included complexity, selected utterance, and sentence types, repetitions, expansions, utterance acceptability, and fluency. Results revealed more significant differences in maternal speech to age-matched hearing and deaf children than to linguistically matched child groups. In addition, child deafness itself seemed to account for other characteristics of maternal speech, and their possible effects on the communicative development of the deaf child were discussed.