Describes the interactions of 1five mothers inexperienced with deaf people and a deaf five-year-old, a hearing two-year-old and a hearing four and one-half-year-old. The women had fewer successful initiations and shorter interactions with deaf children. Modifications in their communication, especially in relation to "motherese," were…

Results did not support previous work suggesting large amounts of communication failure in the spontaneous talk of 4-year-old children. (Author)

Dyadic free play of 32 preschool children (16 deaf and 16 hearing) was videotaped on two occasions; each child was observed once with a deaf partner, once with a hearing partner. Results are discussed in terms of the social interactions of hearing and deaf children, with particular attention to the characteristics of initiation attempts.…

Facial expressions used by children defending their possession of a disputed object were studied in 72 pairs of kindergarten children. Results showed a relationship between the facial expressions a child used and both his own subsequent behavior and that of his partner. (Author/JMB)

The effects of an observer's presence on maternal interactive behavior were examined through observation of mother-child pairs under informed and uninformed conditions. Results indicate mothers played with their children more, were more positive in their verbal behavior, and structured their children's activities more during the informed than…

Families were compared at one, three, and nine months to examine the effects of active or passive exposure to the Brazelton Neonatal Behavior Assessment. Either the mother or both parents were the target of the intervention. Assessments of interaction behavior between parents and infants revealed no effects of the experimental intervention.…

Oral responses of 180 male and female undergraduates to scenarios containing positive-loving, neutral-informational, and/or negative-rejecting male child communications were obtained. Responses were scored along 25 specific categories, as well as a global rating of acceptance/rejection of child. (Author/JMB)

Presents an analysis of the control techniques adopted by the mothers of 15- and 24-month-old children during an eight-minute laboratory play situation. Mothers were requested to take an active role in the interaction by ensuring that the child played with the full range of toys available. (JMB)

This study describes differences in the quantity and style of female preschool teachers' dyadic verbal interaction with the girls and boys in their classes. Sixteen hours of the spontaneous speech of 4 female teachers and 38 girls and boys were tape recorded in two classroom situations, then transcribed and analyzed. (Author/CS)

Study reports a technique for analyzing and categorizing certain gross features of the receptive language environment which constitute the primary source material for all of a baby's language learning. (Authors/MB)

Results indicated that girls' rule violations were affected by the model's skill level, and by interaction of the model's verbal and behavioral expressions relevant to those rules. (Authors)

It was suggested that working-class mothers less frequently believed that their infants were capable of communicating with other people, and hence felt it was futile to attempt to interact with them verbally. (Authors)

Effective family problem solving was studied in 97 families of elementary-school-aged children with definite- and indefinite-solution tasks. Incentive and task independence were manipulated. It was found that definitions of effective problem solving based on directly observed measures of group interaction were more valid than definitions based on…