Parent-child interaction: a father and mother with their language-impaired child

194 Caring to Communicate

Parent-child interaction: a father and mother with their language-impaired child

E RUTH PORTER Princess Elizabeth Hospital, Guernsey, Channel Islands

ABSTRACT In the last decade, research has established the competence and sensitivity of fathers with their young children. In the field of child language, the significance of father’s input has also been recognised. In fact, some researchers suggest that parents in the Western world play complementary rather than redundant roles. The present inuestigation which is longitudinal in design compares a father and mother in Conversation with their language-impaired child; i t documents the differences and similarities across the parents. Interestingly, on the part of the language-impaired child, most of the differences were influenced by differences in parental strategy. The implications of these findings which highlight the interactive nature of parent-child conversation are discussed.

INTRODUCTION

Father’s role in the development of the young child Just two decades ago, Lamb (1975) published a paper in which he described fathers as the ‘forgotten contributors to child development’ so far as empirical research by psychologists was concerned (p. 1). Indeed, from the earlier writings of Freud (1949), until Lamb’s (1975) review when he argued that both mothers and fathers play a crucial and qualitatively different role in the socialisation of the child, most researchers have em- phasised the mother-child relationship (Bowlby, 1951; Kohlberg, 1966; Kohlberg & Zigler, 1967; Ainsworth, 1969; Maccoby & Masters, 1970).

Why include fathers in research? At an early stage in this rediscovery, some psychologists felt that fathers may have an important role to play in bringing up children, even if their involvement in comparison to that of mothers, was extremely limited.

Today, Lamb’s (1975) description of fathers is clearly inappropriate. Results of more recent studies investigating the various aspects of parent-child relationships have shown that in many ways, a father’s role is as significant as a mother’s (for a review, see Lamb, 1986).

Father as a communicative partner with the normal language learning child But how does the father compare with the mother as a communicative partner for the young normal language learning child? As early as 1972, Friedlander and colleagues

Paediatric and Educational Issues 195

concluded that there is a ‘need for a major re-evaluation of the implicit assumption that mothers are the primary language model for their babies’ and that there are ‘serious questions about the almost exclusive focus on the mother-child dyad in language acquisition’ (p. 736).

Like Friedlander et al. (1972), Nelson (1973) speculated that it was the quality, and not the quantity of paternal interaction that was the meaningful variable in father-child interactions.

In 1975, Gleason proposed that secondary caregiver fathers played a special role in the child’s acquisition of language:

Fathers are not as well tuned in to their children as mothers are in the traditional family situation ... There are probably serious and far-reaching good effects that result from (this) ... Children haue to learn to talk to their fathers and other strangers ... (They) try harder to make themselues both heard and understood ... In this way, fathers can be seen as the bridge to the outside world, leading the child to change his or her language in order to be understood. (p. 293).

Therefore, according to Gleason (1975), fathers, because they are less familiar than mothers, with young children’s performance are acting as a ‘bridge to the outside world’. The underlying assumption is that communication pressure is beneficial to children’s development of communicative skills.

So, in the field of child language, the exclusive focus on the mother’s input has been questioned with some researchers suggesting that parents in the Western world play complementary rather than redundant roles (Tomasello, Conti-Ramsden & Ewert, 1990).

Father as a communicative partner with the language-impaired child In spite of the growing body of literature the father with the language-impaired child has received scant attention in the child language literature. Similarly, there is little information in the literature concerning the communicative skills of specifically language-impaired children with their fathers. It is certainly time to include not only the mother-child but also the father-child dyad when considering the language learning environment of the language-impaired child and the effect this has on communicative competence.

Furthermore, few researchers are engaged in longitudinal study of the language- impaired child (Fischel et a]., 1989). Longitudinal research is needed to unravel questions regarding the temporal and directional nature of father-child conversation. Spe- cifically, such data should help us understand the possible relationships between the language-impaired child’s difficulties and his environment. The present study, which is longitudinal in design, compares a father and mother in conversation with their language-impaired child.

METHOD

Research design In order to obtain information about the conversational style of the language-impaired child and his parents, the assessment technique was that of naturalistic low-structured observation using a longitudinal design. The family was videotaped at home on a regular basis for a period of two years. For the purpose of this paper, however, five time- points over a 12-month period have been selected.

The subject who was first-born in a family of two children was aged 5;8 at the start


of the study. This language-impaired child, who presented with a severe expressive language deficit, had a MLU which fell within the limits of Brown’s (1973) Stage I. An early stage of development was chosen since maternal effects on child language development are believed to be stage dependent (Gleitman, Newport & Gleitman, 1984). Interestingly, this child showed no variation in language stage across parents prior to start of this study. In addition, this language-impaired child had:

Normal intellectual functioning as measured by The Leiter International Per- formance Scale (Leiter, 1969). This is designed to assess non-verbal ability. Language comprehension within the normal range as measured by the Test for Reception of Grammar (Bishop, 1982) designed to assess the understanding of grammatical structures; the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (Dunn, Dunn, Whetton & Pintillie, 1982) designed to measure receptive vocabulary and the Preschool Language Scale (Zimmerman, Steiner & Pond, 1969) which offers a detailed survey of a child’s early language comprehension. Normal hearing sensitivity as determined by pure tone audiometry screening bilaterally (20 dB level across the frequencies 500-4000 Hz). No history of recurrent middle ear problems as ascertained by parental interview. No history of neurological deficits and/or emotional problems as ascertained by questionnaire and interview with the child’s parents.

Videotaping The parent-child dyads were videotaped for 20 minutes at home (following a warm- up period) using their own play materials. The instructions were simply to ‘play as you would normally’. The sequence of the sessions was guided by the family’s daily routine.

Transcription All verbal and non-verbal interactions including the context were noted. The transcriptions followed the guidelines provided by the ‘Child Language Data Exchange System’ (Childes I) as outlined by MacWhinney and Snow (1985). This format which included conventions for both transcription and coding facilitated later computerised analysis.

Coding scheme The coding scheme was developed in order to look at parent-child interaction dyadically by use of both a structural and pragmatic framework. The first 10 minutes were chosen for the purpose of analysis. The coding scheme in this investigation encompassed six different levels of analysis most of which contained a broad range of specific measures. The six major levels of analysis included structure, communicative function, appropriateness (of response to requests), initiation/response, conversational topic and communicative contingency.

Reliability Approximately 50% of the transcriptions were selected randomly in order to determine the reliability of the coding system. To determine inter-rater reliability, all decisions made in the various analyses were coded independently by a trained coder. Inter-rater reliability was calculated by use of the formula suggested by Hollenbeck (1978):


x 100 agreements percentage agreement = agreements + disagreements

The inter-rater reliability figures achieved were acceptable for the five sets of analyses with results ranging from 85.5% for the appropriateness code, to 97.7% for the topic code. In addition, Cohen’s (1960) Kappa of reliability was calculated for the entire coding scheme. Cohen’s (1960) Kappa was 0.93 (99% confidence limits 0.925, 0.935) suggesting good inter-rater reliability for the five sets of analyses.

DISCUSSION

Because of the large number of variables investigated, only those that reached statisti- cal significance are discussed.

Parental request strategies An interesting aspect of the current findings revealed a father who used less requestives than the mother (Table 1). Since questions provide feedback about the child’s comprehension, more questions can lead to appropriate adjustments on the part of the parent. Less frequent questioning may present a challenge for the child: the language-impaired child may have to exert himself more, in an effort to communicate satisfactorily with the father. In short, the data suggest that the mother was wanting to engage the language-impaired child in conversation and thus used a conversation-eliciting strategy.

TABLE 1: Father and mother on request measures as a function of time

Parents’ request Time 2 T i m e 2 T i m e 3 T i m e 4 T i m e 5 m easu res

Requests (%) Father 43.89 51.43 38.5 40.0 39.39’ Mother 55.45 61.29 51.67 53.25 51.41

‘Yes/No’ requests (9’6) Father 44.35 44.44 46.75 45.24 53.85’ Mother 29.91 33.33 42.74 29.27 35.62

Information requests (%) Father 11.3 12.96 7.79 5.95 0.0’ Mother 18.8 14.92 13.71 26.83 20.55

‘p<0.05. Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test.

Of added interest was the finding that the father used more ‘Yes/No’ requests and less information requests than the mother (see Table 1). It is conceivable that the request strategies used by the father are a consequence of his being unable to fully understand the language-impaired child. ‘Yes/No’ requests have a narrower range of response possibilities, that is two alternatives, affirmative or negative, as opposed to the wide range of responses for information requests. Thus, the father adjusts his comunicative behaviour - in order to elicit responses that are easier for him to understand. Conversely, the mother is encouraging a more balanced communicative style:


the language-impaired child is being encouraged to share the conversational floor through the mother's greater use of information requests (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1990). It is precisely this kind of strategy (information-seeking questions) which predicts auxiliary development in the language-impaired child (Yoder, 1989).

Requests for clarification The mother and father differed in the way in which they attempted to repair communicative breakdown. As shown in Table 2, the father used more non-specific requests for repetition and fewer specific requests for confirmation than the mother. When using a non-specific request for repetition, the father did not need to specify what was to be repaired, whereas in contrast it is necessary to repeat part or all of the child's utterances when using a specific request for confirmation. These findings may well emanate from a comprehension failure (on the part of the father).

TABLE 2: Father and mother on clarification request measures as a function of time

Parents' clarification Time I Time 2 Time 3 Time 4 Time 5 request m easu res

Non-specific requests for repetition (%) Father 42.86 53.85 33.33 33.33 100.0' Mother 0.0 23.03 28.57 0.0 4.55

Specific requests for confirmation (%) Father 57.14 46.15 66.67 66.67 0.0' Mother 90.91 76.92 71.43 80.0 95.45

'p<0.05. Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test

Maintaining conversational flow Looking at conversational management, the findings again suggest a lesser degree of conversational competence on the part of the father. Specifically, the father used more regulatives and, in particular, appeared to use more regulative accompaniments than the mother (Table 3). These regulative conversational acts often fulfilled turn-taking responsibilities by maintaining social contact while adding little information to the conversation. For example:

'CHILD: dar, dar Action: looks around for his car

'FATHER: oh, oh, oh. whee. Action: pushes train along floor

In this excerpt, father seemed to need to use this regulative strategy to control the situation and push his choice of topic forward.

Poediotric and Educational Issues 199

TABLE 3: Father and mother on regulative measures as a function of time

Parents’ regulative Time I T i m e 2 T i m e 3 T i m e 4 T i m e 5 measures

Regulatives (%) Father 22.14 17.14 32.0 20.0 19.19’ Mother 12.8 16.13 17.08 12.99 18.31

Regulative accompaniments (%) Father 75.86 77.78 89.06 90.00 78.95’ Mother 66.87 73.33 63.41 88.1 61.54

‘p<0.05. Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test.

Communicative contingency Another asymmetry that lent support to the notion that the father was less sensitive to the input needs of the language-impaired child focused on the contingency of parental responses. Specifically, the father used fewer complex recasts and more non-contingent continuations than the mother (Table 4). These non-contingent continuations are topic-continuing but as in ‘default continuations’ (Nelson et al., 1995), the semantic overlap is mimimal.

~ ~~

TABLE 4: Father and mother on contingency measures as a function of time

Parents’ regu la tiue Time 1 T i m e 2 T i m e 3 T i m e 4 T i m e 5 measures

Complex recasts (%) Father 0.4 1.92 1.01 0.0 1.01’ Mother 1.43 4.32 2.95 7.79 6.34

Non-contingent continuations (%) Father 2.38 4.81 10.05 13.46 11.11’ Mother 1.43 2.16 0.42 1.95 2.11

‘p<0.05, Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test.

Research has shown (Camarata & Nelson, 1992) that recasting can efectively trig- ger the introduction of new language structures into the language-impaired child’s spon- taneous language. Thus, it is the mother who is more inclined to provide this facilitatory input through perhaps her greater understanding of the language-impaired child’s focus of attention. The following is a typical example:

2(!0 Caring to Communicate

CHILD: xxxxx xxxxx. (2 unintelligible words) Action: points to broken wing on toy aircraft trying to tell father aircraft is broken

FATHER: made in Hong Kong. what would we do without them? Action: looks at underside of aircraft

CHILD: 0 Action: points to broken wing and gestures that something is broken

This example illustrates the father’s lack of support for the language-impaired child’s communicative attempts. The father’s strategy here seems to be more concerned with maintaining contact and pushing his thoughts forward rather than engaging in meaningful conversation which would in turn enhance the language-impaired child’s partici- pation. This example illustrates what seems to be a gross mismatch between the father’s lexical usage and the receptive skills of his language-impaired child. Interestingly, the language-impaired child is having to resort to different or additional strategies in order to communicate effectively with the father’s unsupportive and challenging communicative behaviour, thus lending support for Gleason and Weintraub’s (1978) hypothesis, ‘fathers may provide just the sort of comfortable cognitive dissonance that leads children to exert themselves in an effort to communicate’ (p. 196).

Conversational turns Consistent with reports in the normal acquisition literature was the finding that the father had fewer conversational turns than the mother (Golinkoff & Ames, 1979). This quantitative difference outlined in Table 5 lends further support to the notion that the father is providing a lower level of support for the communicative attempts of his language-impaired child.

TABLE 5: Father and mother on turn-taking measures as a function of time

Total number Time 1 Time 2 Time 3 Time 4 Time 5 of turns

Father Mother

84 52 94 83 66’ 106 105 104 90 86

‘pc0.05, Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test.

Developmental trends And, what of father’s communicative behaviour during the 12-month period? His apparent intention to control the behaviour of his language-impaired child continued. As outlined in Table 6, the father was found to increase his use of ‘Yes/No’ requests, and reduce his use information requests; the forced to take a passive role.

language-impaired child was being

201 Paediatric and Educational Issues

TABLE 6: Summary of changes across time on the part of the father

Variable Time 1 Time 2 Time 3 Time 4 Time 5

‘Yes/No’ requests 44.35 44.44 46.75 45.24 53.85‘

Information requests 11.3 12.96 7.79 5.95 0.0

No response 0.0 0.0 33.33 40.0 71.43;

Non-contingent communications 2.38 4.81 10.05 13.46 11.11;

‘~~0.05. Spearman’s coefficient of rank correlation

The main goal on the part of the father appeared to be that of maintaining social contact. The father’s lessening use of information requests may have emanated from a continuing difficulty in understanding the communicative attempts of his language- impaired child.

Interestingly, the father increased his use of non-contingent continuations. Thus, the father increasingly presented his language-impaired child with communicative chal- lenges through wanting to push forward his own focus of attention.

Breakdown in father-child interaction was again revealed in the father’s increasing lack of response to the language-impaired child’s requests. Hence, the language- impaired child’s increasing need to attract father’s attention (through a greater use of regulative attention-getters) is understandable. Such findings seem to suggest not only an increasing difficulty in understanding the language-impaired child as he progresses from non-verbal expression, but appear also to emanate from a lack of motivation on the part of the father perhaps due to a history of unsuccessful communication.

And what of the mother? As Table 7 reveals, the number of conversational turns in the mother-child dyad showed a reduction across time. It may be argued that this conversational adjustment was a result of the language-impaired child requiring a lower level of support for his conversational attempts across time. There was no such reduction in the father-child dyad.

The most striking adjustment was a reduction in the mother’s use of action requests across the 12-month period (see Table 7). This change in strategy suggests that as the language-impaired child matured in both age and communicative competence, the mother no longer felt the need to be so controlling or directive.

In sum, the across-time data suggests a father who is less familiar than mother with the language-impaired child’s communicative attempts. This unfamiliarity seems to lead to a less supportive, more controlling, and more challenging communicative environment (Gleason, 1975; Tomasello, Conti-Ramsden & Ewert, 1990). On the other hand, the mother, although making few conversational adjustments across time, encouraged a more balanced communicative style. Moreover, according to well-designed studies in the literature, the mother’s communicative strategies appeared more facilitative to a child’s language advances.


TABLE 7: Summary of changes across time on the part of the mother

Variable Time 1 T i m e 2 T i m e 3 T ime4 T ime5

Total number of turns 106 105 104 90 86' Action requests 41.03 39.47 37.91 36.59 10.96'

'pc0.05. Spearman's coefficient of rank correlation.

Developmental trends in the language-impaired child Tables 8 and 9 provide information on the developmental trends on the part of the language-impaired child. As indicated in Table 9, the language-impaired child showed one significant trend when interacting with the mother - an increase in MLU5 (mean length of the five longest utterances). He showed a greater number of changes, however, when interacting with the father. The language-impaired child showed a positive development trend in both his MLU (global) and MLU5.

TABLE 8: Summary of changes across time on the part of the father

Variable

MLU (global)

MLU5

Non-verbal turns

Requests

Assertive description

Non-verbal assertive

Regular attention-getter

Time 1 T i m e 2 T i m e 3 T ime4 T ime5

1.17 1.26 1.42 1.33 1.82'

2.4 2.2 3.0 3.2 4.8'

44.05 23.53 15.05 15.66 5.97'

0.0 1.45 2.8 6.67 8.73"

31.58 55.56 69.23 74.07 87.32"

57.89 33.33 15.38 11.11 2.82**

0.0 8.33 20.0 40.0 33.33'

'p<0.05. "p<O.Ol, Spearman's coefficient of rank correlation,

Another means of gauging proficiency with language is to look at the diversity and changes in communicative function. On a quantitative level, the language-impaired child increased his use of requests thus reflecting an increase in both social and linguis- tic competence (James & Seebach, 1982).

TABLE 9: Summary of changes across time on the part of the language- impaired child with the mother

Variable Time 1 T i m e 2 T i m e 3 T ime4 T i m e 5

MLU5 2.2 3.0 2.6 5.0 5.6'

'p<0.05. Spearman's coefficient of rank correlation


On a qualitative level, the language-impaired child showed a reduction in his use of non-verbal assertives (and non-verbal turns), an increase in use of assertive descriptions (which influenced the father’s attention rather than his actions), and an increase in use of regulative attention-getters. It should not be necessary for the language-impaired child to increase his use of regulative attention-getters if father was engaged in meaningful conversation with him (McDonald & Pien, 1982).

CONCLUSIONS

In this particular family, the father and mother together represented a variable set of constraints as communicative partners in the sense that the father appeared to be less familiar than the mother with the language-impaired child’s communicative behaviour. As such, the father presented a less supportive, less conversationally responsive style of interaction. This secondary caregiver father provided a more challenging and demanding style of communicative behaviour than the mother, and so evidence was provided to support the Bridge Hypothesis. The difference in communicative style across parents had an effect on the language-impaired child’s communicative behaviour. For example, the language-impaired child had to adjust his communicative behaviour when faced with the father’s increasingly disengaged style. He showed change in a greater number of conversational features when engaged in conversation with the father.

CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS

Although this study reports on one family only, the significance of the reciprocity and bidirectional influences present in parent-child interaction was apparent. Such findings suggest that variation in a child’s language learning experiences is, in part, created by the child himself. In recent years, assessment of a child’s communication skills has moved away from standardised language testing to assessing a child’s communicative competence in naturalistic contexts. Thus, this coding scheme is a potential clinical tool for speech and language therapists who wish to obtain information on a child’s structural and pragmatic communicative behaviour as a function of other variables, such as conversational partner, materials and so forth. The findings in the present study highlight the usefulness of such an assessment model in various contexts (i.e. different conversational partners) in order to provide a more accurate profile of the child’s communication skills and hence provide directions for further assessment and intervention.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work which forms part of a much larger study presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Education, University of Manchester was supported by research award COO428525020 from the Economic and Social Research Council. The author wishes to thank Dr Gina Conti-Ramsden for her encour- agement and Jane Dykins for her help with the reliability measures.

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Parent-child interaction: a father and mother with their language-impaired child