Agreement between mothers and other female adults on infants' communicative behaviours

Abstract

Adults' ability to provide consistent, contingent and appropriate responses to what they consider to be salient infant communi cative behaviours may provide a means by which infants become aware of functional relationships between their behaviours and those of their partners. The studies reported below investigated whether there was consistency between mothers and other female adults on what they identified as communicatively salient behaviours in infants aged 6, 9 and 12 months. For each comparison of a mother's coding with that of another female adult, a randomiz ation procedure produced a distribution of 1000 'chance' levels of agreement for comparison with the observed agreement value. Of a total of 56 comparisons across the two studies, only four failed to show significant levels of agreement between mothers and other female adults. The results indicate that certain infant behaviours are perceived as communicatively salient, not only by caregivers but also by adults unfamiliar with the children.