Maternal interactional styles and topic maintenance in mandarin mother-child conversational interactions

本研究的目的為探究中文母子對話中，母親的互動風格與話題延續的關係。 研究問題為: (a)本研究中兩位母親的互動風格為何? (b)兩位孩童的話題延續表現有何不同? (c)母親的互動風格與話題延續有怎樣的互動關係? 研究語料為兩組親子互動的自然語料，各取三個小時，孩童的年紀約為三歲。研究結果顯示兩位母親的互動風格有所不同，分別屬於命令型和引誘型。 而小孩的在話題延續上表現則是相近，大多用回應母親問題的方式來延續話題並且能在不同的情境中提供新資訊。對兩組親子互動的探究顯示命令型的母親比較不會延續對話而經常改變話題，造成較短的話題片斷。引誘型的母親則較注重對話的延續且較少改變話題，造成較長的話題片斷。The purpose of the study is to investigate the interaction of the maternal interactional styles and topic maintenance in Mandarin mother-child conversational interaction. There are three research questions: (a) What are the mothers’ interactional styles in the current case? (b) What are the differences among children’s competences of topic maintenance? (c) How do the maternal interaction styles interact with topic maintenance in the conversational interactions? Naturally occurring conversations of two dyads' conversational interactions were adopted as the data and analyzed. Results suggested that while the two mothers differed in terms of their interactional styles, the two children showed nearly equal sophistication in terms of their topic-maintaining competences. Examinations of the two dyads' interactions also revealed that the directive mother was less interested in maintaining the conversations, changed topics more frequently, and maintained discourse topics for less turns. The conversation-eliciting mother paid more attention on maintaining of the conversations, change topics less frequently, and maintained discourse topics for much more turns