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To explore whether imitation of novel behaviors might serve as a lexical acquisition strategy for some infants, relations between infants' early spontaneous reproduction of novel and of familiar words and their subsequent lexicons were compared in a longitudinal sample of 20 infants during natural interactions with their mothers at 13, 17, and 21 months of age. Both maternal report and observational measures of noun and non-noun lexicons were analyzed. There were marked contrasts in quantity and proportions of nouns between reported and observed lexicons. However, when earlier vocabulary levels were statistically controlled, infants' early replication of novel, but not familiar, words was associated with growth in both reported and observed noun and non-noun vocabularies. Infants' early imitation of novel words predicts, and may facilitate, their later lexical development.

Stability over time and consistency across contexts in the interactive behaviors of 10 girls and 10 boys and their mothers were investigated during play and bath sessions when the children were 10, 13, 17, and 21 months of age. Despite general instability and inconsistency in the children’s social responsivity, interest in the toys, and positive affect, these behaviors evidenced systematic and expected relations with maternal characteristics by the middle of the second year. Mothers’ behaviors demonstrated striking differences, with responsiveness a highly stable and consistent personal style, affect expression an unstable but consistent temporary quality, and directiveness an unstable and inconsistent pattern. The results also highlight the importance of considering both child age and interactive context in understanding dyadic behaviors. Mothers’ interactive patterns of behavior have been associated with significant consequences for both normal and disabled infants and children. In particular, mothers’ responsiveness, characterized by “prompt, contingent, and appropriate (not simply contiguous) behaviors” (Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda (1989, p. 50), has been positively correlated with their children’s concurrent and subsequent scores on a variety of measures of intellectual, play, and language competence (e.g., Beckwith & Cohen, 1989; Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda, 1989; Bradley, 1989; Fewell, Casal, Glick, Wheeden, & Spiker, 1996; Mahoney, Boyce, Fewell, Spiker