Can I help you understand me ? Maternal repair practices and responsiveness in interactions with language-impaired children

This study examines the interplay between repair practices and emotional responsiveness and availability in interactions of 12 mothers with their 4- and 5-year-old children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Conversational sequences characterized by linguistic and communicative mother-child misunderstanding were identified and described through a qualitative analysis. Frequency of different types of mothers’ repair practices was then analysed as a function of two factors : (i) the mother’s emotional sensitivity and capability of providing an emotional-cognitive scaffolding to her child ; (ii) the child’s linguistic abilities. By using a qualitative Conversational Analysis approach we identified a gradation in the mothers’ repair practices, from mitigated conversational sequences, that were likely to promote the child’s participation to the building of intersubjective understanding or to control child’s emotions, such as shame or anger, to unmitigated sequences characterized by other-repair practices in which mothers took all the responsibility for clarifying the child’s turns and/or express corrections in an emotionally aggravated way. By analyzing the frequency of different types of repair practices as a function of the mothers’ emotional availability (Biringen 2008) we found that the mothers who were more likely to be emotionally connected with their children were less likely to be involved in unmitigated repair sequences. Reciprocally, the mothers who were more emotionally sensitive and skilled in constructing a “holding environment” for their child were more likely to be involved in mitigated repair sequences. Finally, we observed that mothers tended to be involved in other-repair unmitigated practices more often when their child’s linguistic abilities were lower.