This
study investigates the relationship of maternal education to the style of
mother-child conversations about past events. Previous research conducted in the
US has identified two distinct styles of communication that mothers use to
elicit talk about past events from their children (i.e., elaborative style and
repetitive style), but the relationship of these patterns of talk to mothers?
education level has not been investigated. In this study, we recorded 22
mother-child pairs. Of these, half included mothers of high educational
background, and the other half had mothers of low educational background.
Mothers? child-directed utterances were coded in terms of their forms, contents,
and relationships to the child?s responses. Results show that high-education
mothers addressed more utterances per event to their children than low-education
mothers. Also, child-directed speech of high-education mothers tended to be more
elaborative and less repetitive than the speech of low-education mothers. One
major contributor to this overall difference was that high-education mothers
offered more elaborative statements than low-education mothers. The proportions
of questioning behavior, on the other hand, were the same across the two groups
of mothers. The pattern of differences found in the study could be explained by
the longer exposure of high-education mothers to "classroom discourse" in
addition to the potential facilitative effects of schooling on their
communicative and narrative skills.
Keywords: Autobiographical narrative, mother-child conversations, maternal educational level