The present study examines the amount of input and output in congenitally hearing-impaired children with a cochlear implant (CI) and normally-hearing children (NH) and their normally-hearing mothers. The aim of the study was threefold: (a) to investigate the input provided by the two groups of mothers, (b) to investigate the output of the two groups of children, and (c) to investigate the influence of the mothers’ input on child output and expressive vocabulary size. Mothers are less influenced by their children’s hearing status than the children are: CI children are more talkative and slower speakers. Mothers influenced their children on most parameters, but strikingly, it was not maternal talkativeness as such, but the number of maternal turns that is the best predictor of a child’s expressive vocabulary size.

This article investigates the amount of input and the quality of mother-child interactions in mothers who differ in socio-economic status (SES): mid-to-high SES (mhSES) and low SES. The amount of input was measured as the number of utterances per hour, the total duration of speech per hour and the number of turns per hour. The quality of the mother-child interactions was analysed using a simple coding scheme: (1) response or not?, (2) incorporation or not? and (3) exact repetition or expansion? Main results showed that mothers of lowSES have fewer utterances per hour, shorter durations of speech and fewer turns per hour than mothers of mhSES. Also, lowSES mothers respond significantly less to their children's utterances and use more exact repetitions than expansions.

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The aim of the study is to analyze prelexical speech development in young children with a different socio-economic status (SES): children from low SES backgrounds (lowSES) are compared with mid-to-high SES (mhSES) children. Timing of the onset of babbling and the consonantal development in consonant-vowel (cv) syllables are investigated. Result show that lowSES children reach the babbling onset milestone significantly later than mhSES children. In addition, they use different consonant types in their cv-syllables: they use more glides, but fewer stops, nasals, fricatives, and liquids. These early differences between children of different backgrounds seem to be in line with the literature on SES differences later on in life.