Background. Despite recent interest in relationships between maternal gesture and speech and communicative development in typically-developing (TD) children, little work has examined either speech or gesture in mothers of children with Down Syndrome (DS).
Aims. The aim of this study was to compare aspects of speech and gesture production by mothers of children with DS to that of mothers of TD children.
Methods & Procedures. Participants were 5 mothers of children with DS (mean CA = 47.6 months; mean MA = 22.4 months) and 5 mothers of TD children. To equate for expressive language ability, children in the TD and DS groups were individually matched on the basis of: a) gender; b) correspondence between the TD childs chronological age and the DS childs language age; and c) observed expressive vocabulary size. Each mother-child dyad was videotaped for approximately 30 minutes during free play. Data analyses focused on: a) number and types (speech only, gesture only, mixed) of maternal utterances; b) gesture types (deictic, iconic, conventional, emphatic); and c) for mixed utterances, the structure and the temporal patterning of spoken and gestured components.
Outcomes & Results. Results indicated that relative to mothers of TD children, mothers of children with DS produced significantly fewer utterances overall, but the distribution of utterance types did not differ between the two groups. Relative to mothers of TD children, mothers of children with DS used proportionately more deictic gestures and made more frequent use of SHOWING. Mothers of TD children produced more POINTING gestures. Finally, mothers of children with DS produced a significantly higher proportion of utterances consisting of a single gesture and a single verbal utterance; in contrast to mothers of TD children, more complex structures (1 gesture with multiple verbal utterances, 1 verbal utterance with multiple gestures) were never observed. Within the category of utterances consisting of a gesture and a single verbal utterance, mothers of children with DS tended to produce gestures that were held throughout the complete verbal utterance, while the gestures of mothers of TD children tended to co-occur with only a portion of the utterance.
Conclusions. These findings suggest that mothers of children with DS adjust their communication to the developmental status of their child. Results are discussed in terms of the role of gesture in maternal communication and in the regulation of mother-child interaction.
