Maternal depression and the timing of mother-child dialogue

Abstract

Early social interaction lays the foundation for developing language skills. Maternal depression may affect social interaction by disrupting the temporal structure of turn-taking. In this study, we examine the temporal properties of dialogue extracted from video recordings of semi-structured play between mothers and preschool children enrolled in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Program (n = 110). Our preliminary analyses examine how higher levels of maternal depression (on the CES-D scale) are related to the number and duration of utterances, the number of conversational turns, and the latency and variability of responses for both the mother and the child. The primary goal of the study is understanding how depression impacts bidirectional processes in mother-child interaction, and the quality of children's early language experience.