Language patterns of adolescent and older mothers and their one-year-old children: a comparison study

Abstract

Adolescent mothers (15;4 years) were compared with older mothers (23;7 years) when talking to their one-year-old infants using precise coding of written transcripts. The 32 subjects were similar on demographic characteristics other than age: white, primiparous, and had no more than 12 years of education. Multivariate and univariate analysis of variance indicated that, compared with older mothers, the adolescent mothers spoke significantly fewer words to their infants, fewer utterances in joint attention and in object labelling, fewer utterances of positive affective speech, and more command utterances. The infants of adolescents vocalized significantly less often than the infants of older mothers. Pearson product-moment correlations indicated a positive significant relationship between mother language variables and infant variables.