Date of Award
4-1984
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences
First Advisor
Dr. Michael Clark
Second Advisor
Dr. Nickola Nelson
Third Advisor
Dr. Fran Lohr
Access Setting
Masters Thesis-Open Access
Abstract
Language intervention strategies of the mothers of ten normal and ten language-impaired children were compared. An experimenter asked each child questions of varying difficulty about a storybook, in the presence of the mother, who was free to help her child as needed. Both the children's and mothers' utterances were coded. The frequency and types of mothers' strategies were analyzed. The analysis revealed that mothers of normal children intervened significantly more often than mothers of language -impaired children, when all interventions were considered. However, the differences were not significant when only interventions related directly to the predetermined questions were considered. The strategies which the mothers of normal children used were significantly more often at certain difficulty levels were focusing, repeating, checking and sustaining: positive, whereas mothers of language-impaired children sued significantly more informing and sustaining: negative at the hardest level of question difficulty. Clinical implications of the findings are discussed.
Recommended Citation
Hill, Marcia C., "Mothers' Intervention Strategies in a Structured Question-Answer Dialogue" (1984). Masters Theses. 1492.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses/1492