The linguistic codes and the types of verbal interactions of Turkish mothers in the context of shared book reading

This cross-sectional study investigates the nature of Turkish maternal input in the context of shared book reading. Mothers differing in socioeconomic status (SES), particularly in education and income, read story books to their 3 and 5-year-old children. Forty mother-child dyads, twenty coming from high-SES and the other twenty from low-SES, are recorded in shared book reading setting in their homes. Since it is well established that family SES is a powerful predictor of many aspects of child development and particularly of children?s linguistic development, transcripts of these parent-preschooler interactions provide the basis of our research for uncovering the relation between family SES and motherese. Within the framework of Bernstein?s Code Theory and Bloom?s Taxonomy of Cognitive Domain, this study is an attempt to explore the grammatical and interactional properties of Turkish maternal speech, which is an almost untouched phenomenon in this respect. To this end, firstly having presupposed that different social structures generate different linguistic codes with regard to Code Theory, in terms of grammatical structure, we try to find out to what extent Turkish mothers? linguistic codes differentiate depending on their SES and their child?s age, in the context of shared book reading as a speech event. And secondly, having presupposed that home literacy affects emergent literacy, and likewise, emergent literacy affects the child?s academic achievement, we try to find out how Turkish mothers coming from different SES guide their 3 and 5-year-old infants in the context of shared book reading as a speech event, i.e. we try to explore to what extent the types of maternal verbal interactions differentiate depending on their SES and their child?s age.In the context of shared book reading, the findings reveal that Turkish mothers? linguistic codes differentiate to a large extent and the types of maternal verbal interactions also differ substantially depending on their SES and their child?s age.