Characterization of the type of maternal communication used during mother-child interaction

Abstract

Introduction: The mother can be defined as a co-author in her baby’s language development. For this, maternal speech has its own characteristics expressed through the communicative function in the different moments of interaction with the child. Objective: To identify and analyze forms of communication used by the mother in the process of interacting with the child. Methodology: An integrative literature review was performed by the selection of scientific articles published between 2011 and 2020, on SciELO and LILACS databases, that passed through relevance tests. The data analysis was: performed by the identification of the article, the main techniques of data collecting applied on studies, and the communication ways used by mothers to communicate with their babies, being divided by verbal, nonverbal, and motherese. Results: Through oral communication (91%), the mother uses communicative functions in the interaction moment, resorting mainly to questions (80%), nominations (50%), meaning/describing an object (40%), and affirmation (30%). As for maternal utterance, it has been found mostly the use of compliments (30%) and as a way to direct the attention (50%). In the nonverbal communication (73%), it was highlighted the performance of gestures like pointing (63%), showing (38%) and representative (38%), and at the facial expressions, the prevalence was the use of smiles (38%) and looks (38%). The use of motherese was observed in 45% of the articles. Conclusion: It is concluded that by the interaction process, according to what was observed on results, the mother contributes to her child’s communicative-linguistic development, because she uses different ways to communicate with the child, mainly verbal communication.