The aim of this study was to verify the maternal communicative styles directed to boys and girls, especially the directive one, in a free-play situation. The mother's and the children's communicative styles were based on the social interaction perspective, which recognizes the importance of maternal input to the development of the infant's is language. In this study there were sixteen mother-child dyads equally distributed in terms of gender. The dyads were recorded in natural environment in a free-play situation. The transcriptions of the sessions were carried out following the norms of the Codes of Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) that composes the computational system Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). Mann-Whitney test showed that mothers used more directives in the group of boys, while maternal request was more used in the group of girls. These results were discussed considering children's linguistic level of development and the interactive contexts in which the utterances appeared.
Mother-child interaction; language; gender
