• This study provides a novel set up from which to examine mother child interactions • Patterns of interpersonal coordination were often very dyad specific • Some developmental trends concerning interpersonal coordination were observed • Evidence for children's role as active agents in social interactions matches previous empirical findings • Children from different school readiness profiles did not differ much in terms of interpersonal coordination . Well-developed school readiness skills set the stage for later school success. Individual differences in school readiness might partially stem from differences in the proximal context of the child. During early childhood, mother-child interaction constitutes an important proximal context. Our aim was to examine the coordinative basis of these interactions, or interpersonal coordination, for dyads from different school readiness profiles. A second goal was to explore the development of interpersonal coordination over a one-year period. A multiple case study was carried out on mother-child dyads ( N = 7; all 3-year-old girls), from four different school readiness profiles. These dyads all resided in the Netherlands. To examine interpersonal coordination, cross-recurrence quantification analysis was performed on detailed time-series data across the verbal, affective, and body movement modalities.A main finding was that the seven dyads, despite representing different school readiness profiles, showed many similarities in their patterns of interpersonal coordination. Moreover, variation in measures of interpersonal coordination within profiles was often comparable to (or even larger than) variation between profiles, indicating that differences in interpersonal coordination mainly manifest at a dyadic, rather than a school readiness profile level. Some similarities between profiles as well as between dyads, indicated the presence of some unique/specific developmental trends in interpersonal coordination. Although it is still premature to draw conclusive interpretations from our study, it provides a novel set up from which to examine mother-child interaction (operationalized as interpersonal coordination) as associated with school readiness. Future work is needed to further disentangle the complex interplay of dyadic-, task-, and modality-specific factors.
Kamphorst et al. (Sun,) studied this question.