Other

¡Mira! How Latina Mothers use imperatives to guide children’s participation during play

Cabrera Pérez R, Carlo G, Peña ED · 21 Sept 2026

Abstract

Maternal imperatives are often treated as a unitary form of directiveness despite serving distinct communicative functions. We examined how Spanish-speaking Latina mothers used imperatives during toy play and whether use varied by site and child gender. Forty-eight mother–child dyads from Mexico (n = 25) and the United States (n = 23) participated in semi-structured play interactions. Maternal imperatives were coded as encouragement, redirection, repetition, or scaffolding. Across 1,430 tokens, scaffolding was most frequent (36.4%), followed by encouragement (25.8%), redirection (23.6%), and repetition (14.3%). Lexical choice was strongly associated with communicative function, indicating systematic form–function patterning. Imperative use was largely similar across sites and child gender, although exploratory analyses identified greater repetition in the United States. Findings show that imperative frequency alone provides an incomplete account of maternal directiveness and underscore the importance of considering the interactional functions of direct linguistic forms.