ABSTRACT
This chapter reports several analyses of ongoing patterns of mother-child verbal interchanges, and of their concurrent relationships with the child's verbal performance at varying levels of development. A basic skill required of conversational partners in order that a dialogue can proceed is that of turn-taking between the speaker and listener roles, which indeed characterizes both the temporal sequencing and the interpersonal nature of verbal behavior. Investigating maternal contingent approval and disapproval, which should theoretically facilitate language development, several authors have in fact documented negative evidence. Taking into consideration the differences between the mothers' and the children's linguistic repertoires, one wonders about which behavioral cues could possibly orchestrate the coparticipation of such differing partners in a smooth interactional pattern. One relevant conclusion to be drawn from the evidence given in the chapter is that there are extrinsic forces in the M-C dialogue propelling the child's language development.
