The role of maternal verbal sensitivity during parent-child shared book reading in socio-emotional functioning in the preschool years

The concept of maternal sensitivity has shifted over time to include a focus on engagement with the child at a mental level in addition to physical and emotional care. This study investigates this idea, using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort. Maternal verbalization was captured using the Reading Aloud Profile–Together coding during mother-child book reading. Findings using latent class analyses showed that mothers could be classified into two distinct classes having different verbalization styles. Identified maternal verbal sensitivity was marked by bringing her child‘s world into communication and by facilitating the child to engage in communication, asking both close- and open-ended questions; whereas, less sensitivity at the verbal level was marked by focusing on the book rather than the child‘s experiences. The predictive validity of maternal verbal sensitivity was supported as it was positively associated with the child‘s social competence as rated by mothers, while at the same time being negatively associated with the child‘s externalizing behaviors as rated by both mothers and early care/education providers. This study fills a gap in the literature concerning correlates of maternal verbal interactive styles. Its findings suggest that maternal verbal sensitivity is a behavior not depending on contextual factors. Its findings also support Ainsworth‘s conceptualization of maternal sensitivity—a capacity to tailor responses to the child‘s individuality. Importantly, the overall findings showed the moderating role of maternal verbal sensitivity on the relation between mother/child background characteristics and the child‘s socio-emotional functioning, suggesting the effectiveness of interventions utilizing mother-child dyadic book-reading contexts. Furthermore, the findings imply that preschoolers have come to refine or re-organize the internal working models of the social worlds in the context of mother-child communication, which supports theoretical notions posited by attachment researchers. Finally, the findings underscore the methodological advantages of a person-level approach in investigating a new construct which is exploratory in nature and empirically driven. This study looked at the constellation of verbalizations at the person-level, thereby yielding the information about the complexity of them.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Hillary Mi-Sung Ki