Explanatory talk in low-income families' mealtime conversations

The purpose of this article is to outline the types and frequency of explanatory talk that occur in naturalistic conversations of low-income families of preschoolers. Thirty-one families participated in the study, tape-recording family mealtimes when their children were 3, 4, and 5 years old. A total of 75 transcripts were collected and analyzed for the presence of nine categories of explanatory talk, including intentional, causal, evidential, definitional/descriptive, procedural, and consequential. Explanatory talk consisted of conversation concerning some connection between objects, events, concepts, and/or conclusions that one speaker is pointing out to another. The most frequent type of explanations fell into intentional categories, which accounted for more than half of all segments of explanatory talk.