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Maternal speech to three-month-old infants in the United States and Japan*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Suero Toda ,
Alan Fogel  and
Masatoshi Kawai
Suero Toda*
Affiliation:
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Alan Fogel
Affiliation:
University of Utah
Masatoshi Kawai
Affiliation:
Nagoya University
*
NIH, Building 31, Room B2–B15, 9000 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA
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Abstract

An American-Japanese comparison of maternal speech to 3-month-old infants is presented. Mother-infant dyads were videotaped in the laboratory, and the maternal speech was analysed by function and syntactic form. US mothers were more information-oriented than were Japanese mothers; they also used more question forms, especially yes/no questions. Japanese mothers were affect-oriented, and they used more nonsense, onomatopoeic sounds, baby talk, and babies' names. The differences between countries in maternal speech addressed to 3-month-olds appear to reflect characteristic culture-specific communicative styles as well as beliefs and values related to childrearing.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 279 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

Portions of this paper were presented at the Southeastern Conference on Human Development, 1988. The research was supported by a Visiting Fellowship at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the first author. It was also funded by a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship awarded to the second author, by the Department of Educational Psychology of Nagoya University, and by a Hatch Act grant from the Purdue University Agricultural Experiment Station. The authors wish to thank the coders, assistants, and subjects who participated in this study. We are grateful to E. Nwokah for her assistance in coding maternal speech. We thank M. Bornstein for comments.

References

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