Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Semester of Degree Completion

1990

Thesis Director

Robert M. Augustine

Abstract

This study was conducted to examine the relationship between training mothers to systematically stimulate their infants using form, semantic, and pragmatic behaviors during interactions with their infants and the rate and quality of language acquisition. A review of the literature indicated that mother-child interactions have a significant effect on later linguistic development. Researchers had investigated the effects of systematically manipulating the frequency or variety of mother-child syntactic or semantic or pragmatic behaviors to determine if it influences language acquisition. These studies were limited because they examined the manipulation of only one language variable. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of simultaneously stimulating form, semantics, and pragmatic behaviors within the mother-child dyad on the acquisition of language. The question posed at the beginning of this study was, "Do the infants of parents trained to provide interactions, simultaneously using semantic, pragmatic, and form strategies, show language acquisition increases when compared to infants who were not provided with such systematic training?"

The infants of the present study were pretested using the Ordinal Scales of Psychological Development (Usgiris and Hunt, 1984), The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales -Interview edition ( Sparrow, Balla, and Cicchetti, 1984), The Communication Intention Inventory (Coggins and Carpenter, 1981), and the Receptive-Expressive Emergent Language Scale (Bzoch-League, 1971) and then assigned to either a control or experimental group. The experimental group mothers received specific training for the form, semantic, and pragmatic behaviors to be used with their infants over a five month period. All subjects were posttested using the same instruments.

Inter/Intra group comparisons were completed for both the pre-test and post-test scores of each test. This investigation did not find a significant difference between the control and experimental groups for any of the assessment tools. Several limitation of the study, including length of the study, tests possibly not specific enough, and control mothers who may have provided sufficient stimulation to decrease the effect of the training received by the experimental group, may have contributed to not finding a significant difference between the groups.

Further research is indicated to determine if examination over a longer period of time, use of different measurements, or stimulation of an "at-risk" population would have an effect on observation a significant difference.

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