Maternal Recasts and Other Contingent Replies to Language-Impaired Children

Mothers' recasts and other contingent replies to their children's utterances were examined in two groups of mother-child dyads. In one group there were 14 dyads that contained language-impaired children; in the other there were 14 dyads that contained non-language-impaired children. Results indicated that mothers' overall use of recasts, as well as other contingent replies, was highly similar for the two groups, except that complex recasts were used more often by the mothers of non-language-impaired children. Differences in discourse functions were also observed. Mothers of language-impaired children used recasts less often than mothers of non-language-impaired children to respond to, or request clarification of, their children's utterances. Further, they more often used such replies to serve the functions of information requests, assertion, or direction. Recasts were also found to vary in relation to observed differences in children's intelligibility and in contrasting patterns of dialogue initiation for the two kinds of dyads.