| Abstract: | This study examined the language input of mothers to their infants in three groups of mother-infant dyads: abuse, neglect, and adequate. The speech of the 10 mothers in each group was coded for well-formedness, complexity, sentence type, and accepting and rejecting content. In comparison with the neglect group mothers, the adequate group mothers spoke to their infants much more: The adequate group mothers produced more complete grammatical utterances and used more indirect imperatives and acceptance phrases than did the neglect group mothers. There were relatively few differences on the linguistic measures between the adequate and abuse group mothers. On the content measures, the abuse group mothers were more rejecting than either the adequate or neglect group mothers. |
