Early Development and Parenting, Vol. 2 (2), 89-97 (1993)

"""""""""""Mat do Parents Talk About to Infants?

Marie-Germaine PCcheux* Florence Labrell Marc Pistorio Universitt Rent Descartes, Paris, France

The content of parents' talk is studied here as expressing their conception of their developing infant, from the initial symbiotic fusion to an individual situated in space, time and society. The topics parents introduce in their speech to their infant reflect the perception and expectations they have of their baby. The social and parental status of fathers and mothers, and the anticipated role and status of the child- and adult-to-be, and in particular the age and gender of the infant, mediate the choice of topics. Parents' spontaneous speech to >month- and 9-month-old infants was studied during a diapering episode, before leaving the day-care centre. Five minutes of such a speech was recorded, and each utterance was assigned to a semantic category (e.g. greetings, comments on diapering, on mood). Sex-typing is already noticeable as early as 3 months of age : comments on the present situation and state are more frequent for girls, and comments about absent persons or events more frequent with boys. Both parents contribute to this effect, fathers more than mothers. With age parents become less concerned with immediate problems and more aware of the infant's own performances. First names are used more for boys than for girls. As a whole, boys are considered as individuals earlier than girls.

I Key words: Speech, parental beliefs, infancy, sex typing.

The structure and functions of parental speech to infants have been extensively studied during the last two decades, focusing mainly on its role in language acquisition and social interactions (Brown, 1977; Freedle and Lewis, 1977; Snow, 1977; Sherrod et al., 1978; Penman et al . , 1983). Only occasionally, however, do researchers consider parental verbalizations as reflecting the representation that parents have of their infant and of themselves. Kaye (1980) suggests that the infant is a projective stimulus, and Newson (1977) assumes that the mother thinks of her baby as a person with thoughts and feelings. Snow (1977) argues that mothers have

'Requests for reprints should be sent to Marie-Germaine PCcheux, Laboratoire de Psychologie du Dkveloppement et de I'Education de l'Enfant, Universitk Renk Descartes, 46 rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris, France.

1057-3593/93/02oO89-O9$09.50 0 1993 by john Wiley & Sons, Ltd

genuine conversations with their infants. If so, parents should talk about topics they consider appropriate to their infant interlocutor, and the content of their speech should reflect the status and role, and the personal and gender identity attributed to the infant. Content of speech may seem much more variable, and context-dependent, than syntax or function. However, one may assume that during a typical caretaking activity a limited number of topics are present in parental speech, and variations in the topics that are included are linked to diversified representations of the infant as a potential interlocutor.

Francophone social psychology has studied social representations extensively (Moscovici, 1984; Chombart de Lauwe, 1986); however, representations of infancy were not considered as such. While

Received 10 Ianuary 1992 Accepted 22 june 7 992

90 M.-G. Pgcheux, F. Labrell and M . Pistorio

parental beliefs about children's development, and about their role in this development, are presently an expanding field of research (Goodnow, 1988; Miller, 1988; Sigel, 1982), only a few investigations have considered infancy (Palacios, 1990). Studies based on questionnaires focus on factors influencing these representations, or describe their general features (e.g. role of genetic endowment, timetable for development, educational goals). The present research is concerned with a limited aspect of such representations. One major dimension of the image parents have of their infant involves the dependence or independence of the infant (Winnicott, 1963) or, to use Mahlerian terminology (Mahler, 1968), how individuation develops. Individuation refers to the elaboration of self as a coherent unity, which may establish consistent relations with the outer social and physical world, the two being tightly linked with each other (Stern, 1985). In a Piagetian perspective, initial egocentrism stems from the lack of differentiation between self and external world (Piaget, 1947). If intuitive parenting is adjusted to the infant's abilities (Papous'ek and Papous'ek, 1987), then it may be hypothesized that parents will first comment about the infant's self, and only later refer to topics indirectly related, or unrelated, to the infant. Comments about what the two members of the dyad are presently doing should then be the core of parental speech, which would eventually extend to more stable, or less contingent, aspects or events in the environment. Objects, persons, and events in the external world should then be talked about more frequently with older infants than with younger ones, while comments about an ongoing common activity should be less frequent as the infant develops. In their study of maternal speech to 3-month-olds in Japan and the United States, Morikawa et al. (1988) observed virtually no reference to objects or persons other than infant and mother.

The early fusion between mothers and their children has been extensively described in the literature, and it might be expected that maternal speech reflects fusional relations (Lebovici, 1984). Robin (Josse and Robin, 1983; Robin and Josse, 1984) systematically studied how the content of maternal speech changes as the infant develops during the first year of life, and individuation proceeds from fusion. She related the frequency of various semantic categories to the age of the infant, and noted two basic factors in the choice of topics discussed: first the current sensorimotor abilities of the infant, and second the continuous maternal anticipation of communicative competences. Robin

argues that the child's progress plays a dynamic and essential role in the representation mothers develop of their infant as an efficient individual, but she provided only examples, and no systematic analyses, to support her assumption.

Although mothers are usually the primary care- takers, from birth onwards the social world of the infant is not limited to them, and includes at least the father. Research is no longer restricted to mother-infant interaction (Parke, 1979). No primitive fusion has been demonstrated between fathers and their infant, and it may therefore be expected that fathers consider their infant as an individual earlier than mothers. According to their general status and role - primary breadwinners and secondary care- takers -fathers may be considered as bridges between the family and the external world. The bridge hypothesis was developed by Gleason (1975) in the context of language acquisition: fathers are less 'tuned in' to infants' speech than mothers, they are more demanding and therefore help the child to become an efficient partner with any interlocutor (Mannle and Tomasello, 1987). The concept can probably be extended to other areas of development: when some cognitive problem is to be solved, a challenge may incite the child to solve it 'by himself', and challenge is a specific paternal behaviour (Pecheux and Labrell, 1992). If they take up their role of a bridge between infant and external world, then fathers should talk more often about external events. Few differences have been observed between mothers and fathers in the structure of the speech to infants and language- learning children (Golinkoff and Ames, 1979; Masur and Gleason, 1980; Rondal, 1980; Malone and Guy, 1982; Hladik and Edwards, 1984; Kruper and Uzgiris 1987), but there still may be differences in the content of their speech.

Another factor plays a crucial role in the representations parents have of their infants, namely, the sex of the child. Research on sex- differentiated socialization systematically shows that a major dimension of differentiation between boys and girls is dependencelautonomy, both in the behaviours of children and in the parental representations (Huston, 1983). The concepts of dependencelautonomy and individuation, though distinct, are related, and it may be expected that parents do not address themselves in the same ways to girls and boys. In a review about differential socialization of the sexes, Block (1983, p.1336) stresses that the present state of 'developmental literature cannot tell us whether differential socialization precedes differentiation of the

What do Parents Talk About to Infants? 91

behaviour of boys and girls, or whether it follows and augments such differentiation. In the interest of achieving a better scientific understanding of development, one strategy is to look at the relative timing of various experiences and various behaviours, to see which came first’. No major behavioural differentiations between 3-month-old boys and girls are documented, and possible differences in parental speech would support the hypothesis of an early differential socialization. One could then expect that differences would be more important for older infants. Moreover, a possible interaction between the sex of the parent and the sex of the infant must be investigated (Roggman and Peery, 1989): specifically, we predicted that fathers would be concerned with the physical appearance and supposed weakness of their girl, and consider their son as a playmate sharing responsibilities of men in the wide social world.

The present study compares the talk of mothers and fathers to two age groups of infants. Following the study of Josse and Robin (1983) and of Snow (1977) on two mother-infant pairs, we observed parents of 3-month-old infants, when fusional relations are sti l l powerful, and parents of 9-month- old infants, when the child has gained some autonomy and may be considered as a skilled non- verbal communicative person. In addition, parents of male and female infants were studied.

METHOD

Subjects

Parents were recruited in nine day care centres in Paris. The families were from the middle or upper middle classes. Their age ranged from 22 to 35 years for mothers and 25 to 38 years for fathers. Mothers went back to work when the infant was 10 weeks old, and parents typically shared domestic activities. As usually one parent brings the child early in the morning and the other picks him or her up in the evening, it was not feasible to recruit both father and mother for the same child. Therefore independent groups of mothers and fathers were studied. Parents were recorded when talking to their 3-month-old infant or to their 9-month-old infant. In each independent group of infants half were boys and half were girls; 80% of the infants were firstborns. Thus the study involves four groups of fathers (two agesxtwo sexes of infants) and four groups of mothers. Each group of fathers included 10 subjects, groups of mothers included five

subjects’ and thus the total sample pooled 60 observations.

Data Collection We took advantage of an almost standard situation for mothers and fathers in French day care centres: when the parent comes to pick up the infant and go home, between 4.30 and 6.00 pm, slhe takes the baby to a speaal quiet room, to change diapers and put on home clothes before leaving. Infant and parent meet again after being separated since the morning: therefore, those few minutes are at the same time an important emotional milestone and a standardized routine.

Parents’ spontaneous speech to their infants was recorded in this situation. An experimenter, who contacted the parents on a previous day, monitored the tape recorder without interacting with the dyad, and noted down all contextual events linked to parental speech. Parents knew the study was focused on parentlinfant interaction; they were told to take their time. The mean duration of a session was 5 min 20 sec (SD=25 sec).

Utterances Categorization Each recording was transcribed, and divided into utterances according to intonations and pauses. Nonsense sounds and exclamations such as ’Hop!’, ‘Bourn!’, ’Oh Zd ld!’were counted separately. First, each meaningful utterance was assigned to one out of seven semantic categories, according to criteria given in Table 1. The rationale of the categorization follows the analysis, presented above, of topics related to various degrees of individuation. The seven categories are conceived as ordered from activitycentred talk (Diap) to comments on external events and people (Out). Other categories are intermediate, as they concern present events which are not directly part of the activity: comments on physical aspects of the child (Phy) and Mood, on social contact (Greet), on sensorimotor activity (Sens.mot) and on vocal (Voc) productions of the infant. As the independent variables may have specific effects on some of these intermediate categories, they were not pooled together. The syntactic form of each utterance (statement, question, command, exclamation, etc.) was taken into account for a more refined Categoriza- tion, but only for Diap comments, which are the more frequent (see Results). Second, names given to infants were classified in two categories: first names. ” and others (pet names, ’darling’, ‘baby’, etc.). ‘As the present data gathered on mothers duplicated previous data from Robin and Josse (1984), the sample of mothers was not further extended.

92 M.-G. Ptcheux, F. Labrell and M . Pistorio

Table 1. Categorization of utterances: definitions and examples

Diapering: comments about the ongoing activity (diapering and dressing)

Physical: comments about physical and physiological aspects of the infant

Mood: comments about the infant's expressions of emotions

Greetings

Sensorimotor activity: comments on visual, oral and manual activities

Vocalizations: comments on infant's vocalizations

Out: comments on persons who are absent or on events in the past or future or outside

OK, you are all wet! Let us put the shoes on! Keep quiet, it is nearly done.

You look very tired. Oh, the cold little feet! How pretty you are, darling!

You don't agree, do you? Please don't cry! He finds it funny!

Hi, Lucy, my darling! Hullo! You old monkey!

What are you looking at? Don't put your fingers in your mouth! Don't (grasp the microphone)

You have plenty to say, haven't you?

Hurry up, we have to go. Imagine, when you walk! Life isn't easy, hey?

Reliability of transcription and categorization was assessed through the coding of 20 recordings (10 mothers and 10 fathers, randomly chosen) by two independent judges. The correlation between numbers of utterances was 0.96, showing that the segmentation in utterances is reliable. For each category a percentage of agreement was computed (number of agreements/(number of agree- ments + number of disagreements) x 100). All such percentages were over 96%.

RESULTS To summarize our hypotheses, the speech of mothers to younger infants, and to girls, would concern more proximal topics in our categorization (i.e. the ongoing activity of diapering, and present fads and events) than that of fathers to older infants and to boys, which should refer more to events not directly linked to the activity, or even absent, past or future.

In order to compare proportions of the seven categories, we first considered the total number of utterances. While the mean duration of a session was fairly stable between subjects, the number of utterances was quite variable (SD 19.5), ranging from 11 to 127, with a mean of 34.3. Mothers

produced significantly more utterances (m = 42.2) than fathers (m=30.3, t(58)=2.22, p<O.O5), the sex and age of the infant having neither main effect nor interaction effects. Mothers produce significantly more unintelligible sounds than fathers (7.5 vs 4.3, t(58) = 2.65, p < 0.05); for meaningful utterances (34.8 for mothers, 26.0 for fathers), the effect was not significant. Individual raw numbers of utterances in each category were converted into percentages of the individual total number of meaningful utterances. Table 2 shows the mean frequencies of utterances in each semantic category for each cell of the experimental design. As expected, comments concerning the situation (Diap) were the most frequent in all groups of subjects, the other six categories ranging from 0.6% to 21.2%, with substantial inter-individual variations.

Distributions of utterances among the seven categories did not differ between 3 and 9 months. Specifically, the comments on the ongoing activity (Diap) were not less frequent at 9 months, as expected. However, age had an effect on the type of utterances concerning diapering: imperative utterances were much more frequent at 9 months (18.8 % vs 5.0 9'0 at 3 months, t(58)=4.56, p<O.OOOl) while descriptions were less frequent (44.4% vs 65.9%). The only significant difference with age for categories was on sensorimotor activity, which

What do Parents Talk About to Infants? 93

Table 2. Proportions of the seven categories or utterances (mean and SD) according to sex of the parent and the infant’s aee and sex

Fathers Mothers 3 months 9 months 3 months 9 months

Boys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls

No. of utterances 27.7 Diap 50.8

(14.2) Phys 9.0

(10.1) Mood 2.4

(3.5) Greet 11.7

(6.3) Sens.mot 4.3

(4.7) voc 0.6

(1.9) out 21.2

(15.7)

19.2 45.0 16.4)

5.5

7.2

18.2 (16.6)

9.0 (16.2)

9.1 (11.1)

6.0 (6.2)

(8.3)

(8.5)

29.3 41.3

(18.3) 4.1

(6.5) 9.7

(11.1) 7.2

(7.3) 10.3 (8.4) 6.7

(7.3) 20.7

(16.4)

34.8 48.5

(11.5) 5.0

15.1) 6.9

(5.8) 8.0

(9.3) 11.9 (9.1) 6.1

(6.7) 13.6 (7.2)

29.4 31.5

(15.7) 13.7

(13.0) 6.7

10.7 16.3) 2.7

15.6 (13.6) 19.0

(11.4)

(7.3)

(3.1)

41.0 46.3

(26.8) 18.2

7.6

11.31

1.0

3.6

12.0 (13.0)

(8.8)

(9.3)

(8.1)

(1.4)

(4.7)

303.2 29.6

(20.7) 11.6

9.4

3.6 (16.3) 16.1

(13.6) 6.5

(11.4) 13.1

(6.0)

(8.3)

(9.2)

38.6 55.1

(11.5) 11.0 (4.4) 4.8

(6.4) 8.4

(6.6) 11.7 (7.6) 2.9

(4.4) 6.0

(4.8)

induced more comments at 9 months (rn = 12.0%) than at 3 months (m=5.0%, t(58)=3.08, p<O.Ol). The hypothesis of an increase in the frequency of Out comments between 3 and 9 months was not supported. Contrary to our expectation, the sex of the parent had no main effect either, except that mothers commented on the physical manifestations of the infant (m=13.7?40) more than fathers did (rn=5.9%, t(58) =3.53, p < 0.01). However, the sex of the infant had significant effects, the distributions of utterances among the seven categories being different for boys and girls. More specifically, Out events and persons are commented on twice as much to boys (m=19.3%) as to girls (m=9.5%, t(58) = 3.25, p < 0.01).

Figure 1 shows the interaction between the sex of the parent and the sex of the infant for each category. While fathers commented on the dressing situation (Diap) with the same frequency to boys and girls, mothers did so significantly less to boys than to girls (post hoc Newman-Kreuls test significant at the 0.05 level). Out comments were more frequent when the addresser was a man and the addressee was a boy (F(1,52)=4.21, p<0.05). Mothers tended to give fewer Out comments than fathers, and more such comments to boys than to girls. Vocalizations of the infant were commented on more frequently by parents of the other sex (F(1,52)=6.92, p < 0.05).

Additionally, fathers used first names sigruficantly more to address boys (35.6%) than girls (18.1%) (x2=6.91, p < =0.01); the effect was not significant for mothers (28.6% vs 17.6%).

DISCUSSION

We hypothesized that topics referred to by parents when they talk to their infant in a commonly occurring situation would reflect systematic variations in their representations of their infant. Specifically, we investigated whether the parent’s talk is limited to the common ongoing activity (diapering), or includes present events unrelated to this activity (infant’s mood and behaviour) or concerns absent events and persons, thus situating the infant as a individual in space, time, and society. The present research was designed to study how the age of the infant, the sex of the parent and the sex of the infant may have a role in choosing what is discussed.

First of all it must be stressed that our results concern a sample of French parents, and evidence of French ways of considering infants. How such results can be extended to other samples remains to be studied. For instance, if one considers maternal behaviours with 5-month-olds, substantial differences appear between France and the United States (Bornstein et al., 1990), although the two countries are relatively similar in terms of industrial level and living standards. But they differ considerably in terms of history and culture . . . and maybe in the representations parents have of their infant, of themselves and of their common goals and expectations.

The most important differences are linked to the sex of the infant. The frequency of the seven semantic categories depends on whether the

94 M.-G. P&heux, F. Labrell and M. Pistorio

L

6ot 40

20

0 Diap. Phy. Mood Greet. Sens.Mot. Vocal. Out.

Categories Fa1h.r. to Boy.

0 Father8 to Glrl8

Molher8 to Boy.

Mother8 10 Qlrl8

Figure 1. Percentages of utterances in each semantic category according to the sex of the parent and the sex of the infant. Diap, diapering; Phy, physical aspect of the infant; Mood, infant’s expressions and emotions; Greet, greetings; Sens.Mot, sensorimotor activities; Vocal, vocalizations; Out, persons or events not present

addressee is a boy or a girl, and the general hypothesis of discourse to boys being less related to the ongoing activity was supported. Parents of both sexes commented twice as much on the mood and physical aspect of their infant girl than that of their infant boy. Mothers commented on dressing and diapering more to girls than to boys, asking more for cooperation and compliance. When fathers talked to boys, one out of five utterances referred to Out events or persons; fathers only shared concern about paying taxes with boys. Mothers referred more to past and coming events with boys than with girls. First names, which involve a reference to a unique individual, were used more with boys than with girls. These data bring additional support to the assumption that sex- related expectations are an important component of the representations parents have of their infant. To answer Block’s (1983) query about what comes first, we found that before any behavioural differentiation actually occurs parents do make distinctions.

The sex of the parent interacted with the sex of the infant. Globally, the hypothesis of fathers’ and mothers‘ talk differing in the frequencies of the seven semantic categories was not supported. One aspect is, however, significant: mothers were twice as much concerned with physical manifestations of their infants than fathers were, a behaviour that may be considered as showing more involvement with the infant’s state, and consequently less independence and individuation of the baby. Fathers have been shown to display a greater variety of behaviours towards boys and girls than

mothers do (Fagot, 1974; Langlois and Downs, 1980; Maccoby et al., 1984). However, such results concern early childhood, while our data, which did not evidence such a tendency, concern the first year of life. For example, mothers, and not fathers, commented much more on the situation to the girls than the boys. It may be argued that during early infancy mothers as well as fathers refer to the same representation of sex-related behaviours which their infant shouldlwill display as a child, and that their own social and parental status does not affect this primary feature of parental speech.

Interestingly, we observed no differences in speech to infants as a function of the age of the infants. First, the same number of utterances was directed towards 3- and 9-month-olds, with a mean number of 34 utterances in about five minutes. Even the younger infants were addressed as genuine partners. Second, the frequencies of each type of utterance did not vary with age. The hypothesis that Out comments would be more frequent to older infants is thus not supported: even a 3-month-old may be considered as interested by what happens in the wide world. The category concerning the ongoing activity, which includes 45% of the whole set of utterances, was not less frequent with age either. When infants are 3-months-old, the situation is probably not yet a routine; the infants entered the day care centre only a few weeks previously, and parents, especially fathers, may not yet be quite used to diapering and dressing the baby, and thus focus on this activity. When infants are 9 months old, parents are confronted with a quite different problem; the infant is very often very active, wriggles, attempts to touch everything and does not cooperate. Comments about diapering and dressing have a different meaning with age: when one distinguishes, within this category, between various types of speech which were used (requests, imperatives, statements; see Morikawa et al., 1988), it appears that parents of 3-month-old infants mostly describe what they are doing-or rehearse aloud what they should do-while parents of 9-month-old infants ask for cooperation or summon the baby to keep quiet. Congruent with this result was the fact that the only significant age difference concerned comments on sensorimotor activity, which was acknowledged by parents to be a more interesting topic for older infants. A further refinement would then be to relate parental speech to the infant’s actual behaviour, in order to separate parental reactions from parental ideas. Data collection, which the host institution required to be as unobtrusive as possible, was limited to speech

What do Parents Talk About to Infants? __ ~ -

recording. The findings support both the relevance of the approach and the need for additional data and analyses.

It must be stressed here that our data were not collected in an experimental setting; consequently, parent and child were not confronted with a new situation, inducing some kind of presentation1 explanation of the new information from the parent to the infant. On the other hand, the script of the sequence is well established, and the situation is much more structured than during more protracted free activity at home. Therefore our results cannot be compared directly with other experimental data. For example, previous results (Brown, 1977; Freedle and Lewis, 1977; Snow, 1977) stress a shift during the first year from an affective function of parental talk to a communicative function. But taxonomies used in such a perspective mainly distinguish between proposition-present and proposition-free utterances (Cross and Morris, 1980) or between content and contentless utterances (Sylvester- Bradley and Trevarthen, 1978). In addition, they take the syntactic form (statements, questions, etc.) into account. The rationale of such taxonomies is especially apparent in Penman et al.’s study (1983), which relates mothers’ talk to the behavioural modes of the infants : that is, as infants develop, they are more and more interested in objects, and mothers adapt their talk to this behavioural change. Function-based taxonomies primarily rely on infants’ developing abilities. Studies on the content of parents’ talk cannot be based on such a rationale, and the classifications of utterances are based on different principles. For instance, Kruper and Uzgiris (1987) distinguish between attention-seeking utterances, game-related statements, utterances made in lieu of the child, interpretations, comments and explanations. This classification is based on findings concerning differences between fathers and mothers in their interactive style with infants, mostly during play. Our own taxonomy is not based on parental behaviours, but on a major dimension of parental representations of their infant, namely their conception of the baby as an individual. Though it was elaborated from research concerning pre-school children and not infants, Sigel’s theory of distancing (1982) is quite relevant here; as McGillicuddy-de Lisi (1982, p. 262) puts it, (distancing strategies are) ‘teaching strategies that challenge the child to anticipate outcomes, reconstruct past events and attend to transformations’. Parents’ talk to infants may be viewed as the preludes to teaching strategies, and from birth onwards distancing seems more important for boys than for girls.

Obviously most behaviours that are referred to in parental talk are not actually displayed, and there is no behavioural differentiation between 3-month- old boys and girls. At that age, and even at 9 months, it seems at least questionable that infants can ’project themselves into the past or into the future, or can transcend the immediate present’ (Sigel, 1982, p. 50). But this does not imply that their distancing experiences are the same, and various experiences may lead to various behaviours. Our results support the contention that what comes first in sex typing is the parents‘ representation of what their infant will and should be. What s/he really is, and becomes, is interpreted through the prism of such a representation, which, in turn, may change when confronted with the infant’s actual behaviours. For mothers as for fathers, boys will be boys (and girls will be girls), and their proper behaviour is largely determined before they are even conceived. It is high time, as Goodnow (1988) stresses, to include in our models of parent-infant interactions the fact that, unlike infants, and even if parenting is mainly intuitive (Papous’ek and Papous’ek, 1987), parents are not cognitively naive.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Preparation of this article was supported in part by INSERM Grant no. 859012 to M.-G. Pecheux. We gratefully acknowledge Linda Siege1 for comments on a draft of this article.

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