Mother-child interactions with language-impaired children and their siblings.

There are possible effects of language impairment on adult-child interaction. Previous research focused on (1) examining common features of adult-child interaction in different groups of atypical language learners and (2) examining differences between language-impaired parent-child dyads and normal control dyads. The present investigation studies language-impaired children and their mothers in comparison both to their own younger siblings of the same language stage and to normal controls of the same language stage. Consistencies within families but not across families were found. In addition, large individual differences were observed for different families. The implications of these findings for our understanding of interactive styles and language impairment are discussed.