Exploring "Associative Talk": When German Mothers Instruct Their Two Year Olds about Spatial Tasks

In this study, maternal semantic input was analyzed during a task, in which German mothers instructed their two-year-old children to put two objects together in a particular way. In the setting, the spatial relation (ON and UNDER) and the canonicality of these relations (canonical such as ‘an iron on an ironing board’ and noncanonical like ‘a cup under a table’) were varied and related to children’s spatial cognitive skills. Two kinds of discourse strategies are proposed that characterize mothers’ semantic input in this task: bring-in and follow-in. For the analysis, an automatic procedure was developed, in which the amount of words spent on a strategy was related to the overall word amount. The data suggest that the canonicality of the task can change the discourse: Bring-in strategies dominated the discourse in the UNDER tasks with canonical spatial relations while in the more difficult non-canonical tasks, mothers used follow-ins significantly more often than in the canonical tasks. Together, the results of this study shed light on the process of an on-line adaptation of the mother to her child and give us insight into how a situated understanding in a task-oriented discourse emerges.