Exploring Optimal Fit: Maternal Personality And Child Temperamental Reactivity In The Context Of Shared Book Reading

Date

2026-7-14

Author

Çebi, Asya Hilal

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Language development is a reciprocal process influenced not only by how children engage with and benefit from their linguistic environment, but also by how their behaviors shape that environment, eliciting certain responses from their mothers. Despite growing research on parent–child interactions, little is known about the effect of mother-child trait fit on language development. This study aimed to explore how the interaction between maternal personality and child reactivity is associated with maternal language input. In addition, the moderator role of reactivity on the relationship between maternal language input and preschoolers' language outcomes, namely, linguistic complexity and story comprehension, was explored. Fifty-six mother-child dyads (Mage = 58.02 months) were asked to read a storybook created for the study. Children were asked comprehension questions and to narrate “Frog, Where Are You?”. Mothers were asked to complete personality and child temperament questionnaires. Maternal use of book-reading strategies, gestures, and other linguistic measures (MLU, word tokens, and unique words), as well as children’s answers to the comprehension questionnaire and linguistic complexity, were coded. Hierarchical regression analyses results revealed that for reactive children, maternal agreeableness was positively associated with maternal book-reading strategies, gestures, word tokens, and unique words. Conversely, maternal openness to experience was negatively associated with book-reading strategies and gestures with reactive children. Regarding child outcomes, maternal use of book-reading strategies was positively associated with the linguistic complexity of reactive children. Overall, results point to the critical role of mother-child trait fit in language development, aligning with the “Goodness of Fit” theory.

Subject Keywords

Gestures, Temperament, Maternal personality, Shared book-reading, Language development

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119750

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis