Maternal Speech in Mother-Toddler Picture Book Reading

Maternal Speech In Mother-Toddler Picture Book Reading Picture book reading provides children with various information about vocabularies and communication styles. The First research question examined here consisted on how mothers help toddlers to acquire vocabularies in picture book reading activity; the second one was made of what other kinds of acquisition were possible for toddlers. The investigation was made through the analysis of maternal speech to children. Five mother-toddler dyads (1:06-2:00) took part in this longitudinal, four-month study. Their interactions including picture book reading were videotaped and five minutes of each observation session were transcribed. The analysis of mothers' strategies of reading labels in the books showed that their strategies did not strictly correspond with children's comprehension level, but that their speech always included labels in some phase of the reading cycle. Mothers gave opportunities to hear again the label of the thing children had misnamed in the preceding cycle. Classifying mothers' speech suggested that in picture book reading mothers gave children various informations about print, category, story, book-handling, moral, and discipline. (170).