Communication Deviances and Clarity Among the Mothers of Normally Achieving and Learning-Disabled Boys.

The main purpose of the study was to reexamine the association between maternal communication deviances and learning disabilities in children. In this study, we adapted and extended the procedure used b Ditton, Green, and Singer (1987). A two-part experimental task was used: one in which the child could not request any clarification of mother's insruction, and another in which the mother and child could communicate. Both communication deviances and the clarity of mother's communication were analyzed. The subjects were 60 mother-child paires in which half of the children had learning disabilities and the other haalf were normally achieving children matched for age and parents' SES. The dyads were vedetaped in a laboratory setting. The mothers o f learning-disabled (LD) children were found to give less exact instructions and to present more ambiguous messages to the child than the mothers of non-LD children.