Mothers' attributions to their young children: the verbal environment as a resource for children's self-concept acquisition

Abstract

There has been a century of theorizing that self-conceptions begin to develop early, heavily involve language, are important aspects of personality, and are much influenced by others' reactions. Nevertheless, no one has heretofore probed the empirical characteristics and antecedents of mothers' language that might be relevant to their 2 1/2-year-old children's acquisition of self-conceptions. In this research, such "maternal attributions" were located in video transcripts of 3 mother-child pairs, each interacting for 300 minutes (Study 1), and of 35 mother-child pairs, each interacting for 35 minutes (Study 2), all in a seminaturalistic setting. Study 2 replicated and extended results from Study 1 regarding (a) types of occasion for maternal attributions; and (b) the attributions' specificity/abstractness, vocabulary content, substantive referent, explicitness/implicitness, evaluative tone, and direction toward the whole child or an aspect of the child. Antecedent-consequent relationships were found between children's roles in occasioning attributions and the language specificity and evaluative tone of the attributions. Results are discussed in terms of the development of the self.