MOTHERS LISTEN TO CHILDREN AND UNIQUELY ACCOMMODATE THEIR LANGUAGE WITH THEM

ABSTRACT

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) predicts that people adjust their language to match that of the other to promote comprehension, coordinate action, and facilitate harmonious relationships. CAT predicts that mothers will adjust their sentence length and complexity to match those of children. Prior tests of CAT confounded trait-like language use with accommodation; we refine the concept of accommodation using the theoretical logic of the Social Relations Model (SRM). We argue that (a) trait effects should be partitioned from unique relationship effects, (b) relationship effects are the appropriate estimate of accommodation, and (c) relationship (dyadic) reciprocity is the mechanism of accommodation. We tested our proposal in 152 mother-child dyads who interacted in play sessions. Mother and child language was recorded, transcribed, and coded. SRM revealed stable, trait-like individual differences in language used by each; however, this stability was much stronger among children than mothers. Both made unique reciprocal linguistic adjustments when interacting with specific adults or children. These results support a new theoretical perspective on communication accommodation and adult child-directed language.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Dr. Kathleen McCartney, who collected these data, and Dr. Elizabeth Jordan, for her assistance with organization of the data set. Data and BLOCKO syntax are archived and available at https://osf.io/5ats6/.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by RI-INBRE Grant # P20RR016457 from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and by a U.S. - Israel Binational Science Foundation Grant (2018055) to Rhode Island College (Malloy) and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Kluger). The Recanati Fund at the School of Business Administration of the Hebrew University also supported Kluger’s work. Its contents are solely the authors’ responsibility and do not necessarily represent the official views of NCRR, NIH, or the BSF.