Correlates and antecedents of maternal expansions of utterances of children with language disabilities

Fifty-one children with language delays, and their mothers, were studied to identify characteristics of the children’s utterances that potentially influence an aspect of maternal linguistic input: expansions. A subset of 33 of these dyads was studied and submitted to sequential analysis to identify the types of child utterances mothers were most likely to expand. Twenty-minute mother-child free-play sessions were videotaped and transcribed. Trained observers coded utterances for child intelligibility, child topic maintenance, adult expansions, and adult non-expansions. The extent to which mothers expanded child utterances increased with increasing child mean length of utterance (MLU) and intelligibility. Moreover, mothers expanded multiword fully intelligible child utterances more than they did partially intelligible or single-word child utterances. The implications of the results for language intervention and future research are discussed.