Two-year-olds' conversations with their mothers and preschool-aged siblings

The pragmatics of sibling-infant and mother-infant conversations were compared. Sixteen children, 22 to 26 months of age, were videotaped for 15 minutes in dyadic interaction with their mothers and for 15 minutes in dyadic interaction with their preschool-aged siblings. Sibling-infant and mother-infant conversations were compared on three dimensions: quantitative characteristics, conversational style and conversational repair of potential breakdowns. Compared with mothers and infants, siblings and infants talked less and had shorter conversations. On an individual level, siblings asked fewer questions of the infants and issued more directives to them than did the mothers. Moreover, siblings failed to repair disruptions in conversations almost twice as often as mothers. The infants' conversational behaviours, however, did not differ when interacting with the siblings as opposed to the mothers. These results indicate that preschool-aged siblings are not yet adept at making the kinds of pragmatic adjustments in their speech that scaffold infants in their early conversational interactions. It is suggested that the experience later- born infants have with less responsive siblings may be valuable preparation for interacting with strangers, especially peers, who share many characteristics with siblings. © 1992, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.

Duke Scholars

Author Michael Tomasello Psychology & Neuroscience