The effect of maternal dominance on the communication skills of young hearing-impaired children

Master of EducationThe aims of this study were to determine whether mothers of preschool-age hearing-impaired children could adopt a less dominant and more responsive interaction style when instructed, whether hearing-impaired children could be more dominant and less responsive when interacting with a less dominant and more responsive mother, and whether these changes would result in mother-child interaction being similar to previous results for dyads with normally hearing children. Previous studies have found that mothers of hearing-impaired children use a more dominant interaction style than mothers of normally hearing children, and hearing-impaired children use poorer communication skills than normally hearing children of the same age. Furthermore, school-age hearing-impaired children have been shown to use improved communication skills when interacting with a teacher who was using a less dominant interaction style. In the current study, four dyads of normally hearing mothers and their profoundly hearing-impaired children aged 2:3 (years:months) were subjects. Data were collected over four sessions. Mothers were asked to play with their children as they normally would in the first (N) session, and were instructed to adopt a less dominant and more responsive interaction style in the subsequent three sessions (LD1-LD3). Mothers were highly dominant in the N session. They used fewer dominating moves in the LD1-LD3 sessions, but did not use more responsive moves. The children did not use more dominating moves in the LD1-LD3 sessions, but used fewer responsive moves. This resulted in a less dominant maternal interaction style, and a more dominant child interaction style for three of the four dyads only in the LD1-LD3 sessions. The fourth dyad was maternally dominant across all sessions. Also, interactions at the level of dyads were generally similar to previous results for dyads with normally hearing children in the N session. Therefore, instructing mothers to be less dominant and more responsive did not appear to be an appropriate strategy for use with dyads with preschool-age hearing-impaired children