What Mothers Do to Support Infant Visual Attention: Sensitivities to Age and Hearing Status

This article presents a descriptive, longitudinal study of maternal use of communicative strategies to accommodate and direct infant visual attention. The two questions that guided our research were whether maternal use of particular attention-related strategies changes as the child developed from 9 to 18 months of age and whether the mother's ability to make appropriate modifications in strategy use was disrupted when she was using a new mode of communication. Four groups of mother-infant dyads were included: deaf mothers with deaf children (Dd), hearing mothers with deaf children (Hd), deaf mothers with hearing children (Dh), and hearing mothers with hearing children (Hh) (n = 77). When the infants were 9, 12, and 18 months old, they were videotaped while they engaged in free play with their mothers. Using a time-sampling technique, videotapes were coded to determine the frequency with which mothers used specific attention-related strategies. Our findings showed group differences in the attention-related strategies used by deaf and hearing mothers. These group differences were consistent with the hypothesis that while mothers appeared to be sensitive to and tried to accommodate their children's communication needs, the mothers may have been limited by their own communicative experiences. With regard to changes in mothers' use of attention-related strategies over time, our hypothesis of a developmental transition in the chosen strategies was only partially supported. Attention strategies related to language did evidence a pattern of developmental progression; however, maternal use of strategies that directed the children's visual focus to an object or a social partner did not show any such trend. Overall, the patterns indicated in the data from this study suggest that bidirectional influences were operating to some degree in each of the four groups. Among mothers whose hearing status differs from their children, the use of certain attention-related strategies might need to be taught, particularly the use of specific strategies that may scaffold deaf infants' developing abilities to alternate attention between objects and persons.