‘Let’s talk! What will you say to me … ?’: comparing spontaneous dyad-focused maternal speech to singleton and dizygotic twin infants at home

ABSTRACT

We compared dyad-focused maternal speech (protoconversations and maternal speech describing the dyad) in interactions of mothers with their twin and singleton infants. Nine twins and nine singletons, coming from urban areas of Crete (Greece), were video-recorded at home in spontaneous face-to-face interactions with their mothers, from the 2^nd to the 6^th month at 30-day intervals. Continuous micro-analysis revealed that the following: (a) variations in proto-conversations favoured singleton compared to twin infants; (b) twin and singleton mothers addressed different, but possibly of equivalent communicative significance, verbal comments to their infants within protoconversations; (c) both twin and singleton mothers showed age-variant efforts for conversation with their young infants. Though we showed quantitative variations of maternal dyad-focused speech between mother-singleton infant and mother-twin infant dyads, both singleton and twin mothers used devices of equivalent communicative significance and age-variant attempts to respond sensitively to their infants’ expressive behaviours according to the latter’s age-related motives for communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Twin infants
• maternal infant-directed speech
• dyad-focused speech
• protoconversations
• innate intersubjectivity

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to the infants and their families for offering their time, cooperation and patience to participate in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data not available due to [ethical/legal/commercial] restrictions.

Informed consent

Parents were informed about the procedure of the study, and asked to sign the consent form prior to video-recordings.

Notes

¹ The video-recordings of singletons communicating with their mothers used in this study were made for the Ph.D. research of the first author at the Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, under the supervision of Prof. Colwyn Trevarthen. Ethical approval for their use was granted by the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, NHS Trust (8/95). The video-recordings of twins and their mothers came from a longitudinal naturalistic study which aimed to compare basic aspects of spontaneous imitation in dialogues of mothers with twins and singletons.

² It is noted that percentages presented in this section refer to the proportion of occurrence of infant-, mother-, other- and dyad-focused maternal speech within each birth status category (singleton mothers vs twin mothers).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Greek Ministry of Education and Religion under the Grant entitled: “Pythagoras: Reinforcement of Research Teams in the University of Crete” which was approved by the Special Account for Research Funds of University of Crete [Grant number: 1909, 203/12-3-2004].