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 childre n. In this study, we adapted ard extended the procedure used by 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 in structions, and another in which the mother and child could communicat e. Both communication deviances and the clarity of mothers' communicat ion were analyzed. The subjects were 60 mother-child pairs in which ha lf of the children had learning disabilities and the other half were n ormally achieving children matched for age and parents' SES. The dyads were videotaped in a laboratory setting. The mothers of learning-disa bled (LD) children were found to give less exact instructions and to p resent more ambiguous messages to the child than the mothers of non-LD children. Despite the more inaccurate input from their mother, the LD boys did not request clarification for ambiguous statements any more than did the NLD boys.