The relationship of pragmatic dimensions of mothers' speech to the referential-expressive distinction

A 50-utterance corpus for each of sixteen mothers during caretaking situations (diapering, dressing, bathing) was extracted from in-home tape recordings obtained over a three-day period. The children ranged from 1; 3.15 to 1; 7 and were classified according to Nelson's referential-expressive distinction. A coding scheme consisting of three categories – communicative intent, focus of attention and evaluation – was employed to characterize the mothers' speech. Mothers of referential children produced a greater number of utterances per caretaking incident, more description and less prescriptives than did mothers of expressive children. The findings suggest that Nelson's referential-expressive distinction in child's speech is related to differences in mothers' pragmatic speech characteristics.