Habilidades de comunicação intencional de bebês no primeiro ano de vida: um estudo a partir das percepções maternas

Abstract

Childhood is characterized as the crucial period for the appearance of typical human skills and potentials, which allow the child to a gradual appropriation of culture and its artifacts. In this sense, when the adults interact with babies and attribute meaning to their actions, they favor the emergence of the ability of infant intentional communication. The literature in this topic indicates that the mothers perceptions about the communicative intentionality of the baby and its implications for the infant behavior may have important effects throughout the child's development. Thus, the objective of this dissertation was to know the maternal perceptions about the ability of intentional communication of infants in the first year of life, and more specifically propose an instrument capable of to detect those perceptions. The study included 40 mothers, being 20 mothers of 4 months babies and 20 mothers of 9 months babies. Maternal age ranged from 21 to 36 years, mean 29.23 (SD = 4.54). Twenty-four mothers were primiparous and 16 secundiparous. For data collection, were used a sociodemographic questionnaire, an Initial Interview about mothers' perceptions about the overall development of their children and a semi-structured interview, result from the semantic adaptation process of the Infant Intentionality Questionnaire. Initially, the information concerning sociodemographic questionnaire data were listed. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and then made the floating read and the survey of the frequencies of the responses reported by the mothers in each age group studied. Besides frequency, were considered the similarities and contradictions of the mothers discourse, a qualitative content analysis being done. The results demonstrated that mothers with higher educational levels showed, in general, more elaborate answers and more information about the baby's development and dyadic relationship. Regarding the number of children, most secundiparous mothers reported that experiences with the first child contributed to the perception and actual practice of them with the baby. As regards the age of the baby, differences were found between the responses of the two groups of mothers, especially regarding maternal perceptions of babies intentional communication ability. Mothers of 9 months babies reported greater number of intentional communicative behaviors and showed more clear examples of such actions than mothers of 4 months babies. It is emphasized that these differences in maternal responses may be related to each specific period of child development and acquisitions that take place over social interactions. Moreover, the Maternal perception of intentional communication ability of baby interview, instrument proposed at the end of this paper, can contribute to actions of psychologists and scholars of language that aim at to capture the maternal perceptions of infant intentional communication ability and to analyze the language sociopragmatic domain. It is considered that the present study can aid the discussion of maternal perceptions and practices and the early identification of developmental disorders and deficits in communication and language, providing support to the practices of psychologists in the guidelines to parents, caregivers and/or educators.