Maternal speech to 1-year-old children in two Italian cultural contexts

✍ Scribed by Camaioni, Luigia ;Longobardi, Emiddia ;Venuti, Paola ;Bornstein, Marc H.

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Weight: 147 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1057-3593
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0917(199803)7:1<9::aid-edp159>3.0.co;2-t

✦ Synopsis

The present study examines maternal speech to 1-year-old children in two cultural contexts in the same nation: an urban industrial town (Padua) and a small rural village (Ruoti). The aim was to evaluate if and how intranational cultural variation influences the ways in which Italian-speaking mothers use language when addressing their children. We hypothesized that mothers in the rural context would adopt speech acts with a control function ('directive' speech style) more than mothers in the urban context, whereas urban mothers would use speech acts with a didactic and a tutorial function more than rural mothers ('child-centred' speech style). Forty primiparous mothers and their 13-monthold children were videotaped at home in a play session. Maternal speech from transcripts was examined in terms of five different communicative functions (Tutorial, Didactic, Conversational, Control, and Asynchronous) using a 21-category coding scheme validated in previous studies. Parents also completed a demographic and living standards questionnaire. The results showed systematic cultural differences in a variety of maternal communicative functions, presumably related to different life environments and childrearing practices in the two sites.