Maternal speech to singleton and first-born dizygotic twin infants: a four-month longitudinal and naturalistic study

ABSTRACT

We compared maternal speech in interactions of mothers with their firstborn dizygotic twin and singleton infants. Nine twins and nine singletons were video-recorded at home in spontaneous face-to-face interactions with their mothers, from the 2^nd to the 6^th month. Continuous micro-analysis revealed that there are more quantitative and qualitative similarities than differences between singleton and twin mothers’ speech. Singleton and twin mothers are similar in the frequency of thematic sequences though duration of maternal speech favours singletons. Singleton mothers’ speech favours infant emotion and attention thematic sequences. However, singleton and twin mothers responded similarly to the rest infant internal states. Twin, but not singleton, mothers’ infant attention utterances differed at times when there are marked advances in the infants’ attentiveness. These results are discussed in relation to the theory of innate intersubjectivity and the sensitivity that twin mothers, similarly to singleton mothers, express to the young infants’ expressions.

KEYWORDS:

• Singleton infants
• twin infants
• maternal infant-directed speech
• infant-focused thematic sequences
• infant internal state thematic sequences

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to the infants and their families for offering their time, cooperation and patience to participate in the study.

Data availability statement

Data not available due to [ethical/legal/commercial] restrictions.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ The term ‘mind-mindedness’ is rooted in Ainsworth’s work about maternal sensitivity and it is inspired by Vygotsky’s writings on parental focus on child’s mental states (Meins et al., 2001).

² Analysis of the duration of maternal speech between singletons and twins is based on all content categories (Table 2). To shorten naming each of these categories, they will be referred to as a total as ‘maternal input’.:

³ We studied only first-born twin infants in order to have a homogeneous sample due to the following reasons: (a) recent studies have shown that the risk of neonatal morbidity and admission to neonatal intensive care unit was higher for the second than the first twins in twin couples (Jamala et al., 2013), (b) mothers show different patterns of expressed emotion towards each of their twins (Mark et al., 2017) and there are differences between twins in expressive movements (Nijhuis & Visser, 2003) and in the myelination of visual pathways (Piro et al., 2020); (c) the association between mothers psychological well-being and infants’ negative affectivity is higher for the second twin than for the first twin (Prino et al., 2016); and (d) to exclude effects of differences in the brain structure and brain size between first-born twins and their second-born co-twins (Hulshoff Pol et al., 2002).

⁴ The sample of twins included only DZ infants, after parents of MZ twins refused to participate (see, Pateraki et al., 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Greek Ministry of Education and Religion [1909, 203/12-3-2004].