MATERNAL SPEECH TO 1-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN IN 2 ITALIAN CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The present study examines maternal speech to 1-year-old children in t wo cultural contexts in the same nation: an urban industrial town (Pad ua) and a small rural village (Ruoti). The aim was to evaluate if and how intranational cultural variation influences the ways in which Ital ian-speaking mothers use language when addressing their children. We h ypothesized that mothers in the rural context would adopt speech acts with a control function ('directive' speech style) more than mothers i n the urban context, whereas urban mothers would use speech acts with a didactic and a tutorial function more than rural mothers ('child-cen tred' speech style). Forty primiparous mothers and their 13-month-old children were videotaped at home in a play session. Maternal speech fr om transcripts was examined in terms of five different communicative f unctions (Tutorial, Didactic, Conversational, Control, and Asynchronou s) using a 21-category coding scheme validated in previous studies. Pa rents also completed a demographic and living standards questionnaire. The results showed systematic cultural differences in a variety of ma ternal communicative functions, presumably related to different life e nvironments and childrearing practices in the two sites. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.