CHANGES IN THE CONTENT AND TIMING OF MOTHERS TALK TO INFANTS

The content of mothers' talk to their infants (informative/eliciting a cts versus non-informative/non-eliciting acts) was examined in terms o f whether utterances were timed to follow their infants' 'talk' after a brief silence interval (alternating mode of temporal patterning), or to overlap their infants' 'talk' (covocalizing mode of temporal patte rning). A total of 2827 maternal utterances in 39 mother-infant dyads were collected at three-month intervals over infant ages 3 to 24 month s. The results indicated that mothers consistently timed informative/e liciting acts in ways that resemble conversations between adult partne rs (i.e. informative/eliciting acts predominated in the alternating mo de), and that the relative proportions of these acts increased signifi cantly during the infants' first year. Corresponding decreases in the relative proportions of non-informative/non-eliciting acts occurred in conjunction with significant reductions in the use of covocalizing mo de, and this trend continued in the infants' second year: whereas at 3 and 6 months non-informative/non-eliciting acts were predominant in t he covocalizing mode, at 15 and 18 months they were predominant in the alternating mode. It is argued that such changes in content and timin g constitute stylistic adjustments in mothers' management of interacti ons at the local moment-to-moment level, and occur within the context of global transformations in the dynamics of such interactions as infa nts' communicative abilities develop.