Mother and Infant Activity and Interaction in France and in the United States: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Infants experiences are often thought to influence social and intellectual development in the individual, and on a societal level they are sometimes credited for some of the distinctiveness that typifies cultural style. To compare and contrast the experiences of French and U.S. American infants, mother-infant dyads in Paris and in New York City were observed interacting in the natural setting of their homes. This report focuses on infants' visual attention, tactual exploration, and vocalisation and on mothers' mediated and unmediated stimulation and speech to infants. The study had two main goals: One was to identify and describe activities and interaction patterns that may be similar and different in these two Western cultures, and the other was to test the cross-cultural validity of a hypothesis that states that specific mother and infant activities relate to one another in dyadic interaction. Mothers and infants in the two cultures showed some similarities and some different emphases in their activities, and patterns of mother-infant interaction in the two cultures tended to correspond.