Picture-Book Reading in Mother-Infant Dyads Belonging to Two Subgroups in Israel

NINIO, ANAT. Picture-Book Reading in Mother-Infant Dyads Belonging to Two Subgroups in Israel. CmLD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 587-590. This study investigated vocabulary acquisition in the context of joint picture-book reading in mother-infant dyads belonging to 2 social classes. 20 middle-class and 20 lower-class dyads were observed, the infants ranging in age between 17 and 22 months. In both groups interaction focused on the eliciting or the provision of labeling information. The most frequent formats consisted of cycles headed by What's that? questions, by Where is X? questions, and by labeling statements emitted by the mother. Cluster analysis revealed that these formats and other measures of input language fell into 3 groups, each apparently representing a different dyadic interaction style. In the high-SES group, each style was associated with the size of a different vocabulary in the infant: productive, comprehension, and imitative vocabularies. In the low-SES group, the proportion of maternal what questions was correlated with the infant's level, whereas where questions and labeling statements were not adjusted to the infant's level. Low-SES mothers talked less and provided less varied labels for actions and attributes. They asked less what questions and more where questions. High-SES infants had a bigger productive vocabulary, and low-SES infants had a bigger imitative vocabulary. The rate of development was slower in the low-SES group, as evidenced by lower correlations with the age of the infant.