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Mothers’ provision of utterances with internal state words has been shown to influence infants’ acquisition of internal state vocabulary and has been proposed to foster preschoolers’ theory of mind development. In this article the authors examine maternal internal state speech during free play with infants at 13, 17, and 21 months. The study assessed developmental changes in the frequency and complexity of the mothers’ utterances referencing perception, volition, disposition, and cognition. Mothers’ use of internal state words, especially volition and cognition words, increased with age. Internal state utterances were longer than utterances without internal state words, and more than half of all cognition and two-thirds of all volition utterances were syntactically complex. Mothers’ production of utterances with internal state words was related to their overall MLUs whereas their production of utterances without was not. Thus, mothers do not simplify utterances when they talk about internal states, even with young infants, and mothers’ growing use of internal state words as their infants age may partially explain increases in their overall utterance lengths during the second year of life.

Research on immediate effects of background television during mother–infant toy play shows that an operating television in the room disrupts maternal communicative behaviors crucial for infants’ vocabulary acquisition. This study is the first to examine associations between frequent background TV/video exposure during mother–infant toy play at home and subsequent maternal speech characteristics and infant vocabularies. Twenty-five mothers completed a survey of background television exposure and a vocabulary measure for infants aged 13 and 17 months. Mothers’ total word production and numbers of different words at each age were calculated from transcripts of play interactions with no television present. Greater exposure to background television during dyadic play negatively predicted infants’ vocabularies and mothers’ speech quantity and lexical diversity at 17 months. Moreover, these maternal speech characteristics fully mediated the association between exposure to background television during dyadic play and infants’ expressive vocabulary acquisition.

To investigate possible influences on and consequences of mothers’ speech, specific infant behaviors preceding and following four pragmatic categories of mothers’ utterances – responsive utterances, supportive behavioral directives, intrusive behavioral directives, and intrusive attentional directives – were examined longitudinally during dyadic free play at ages 13, 17, and 21 months. Analyses revealed developmental increases in children’s positive social and object-directed behaviors before and after maternal speech. Responsive utterances were the most likely to be preceded by social and object initiatives and more likely than intrusive directives to occur following high toy interest. Although mothers’ intrusive behavioral and attentional directives were often preceded by infants’ disengagement from play and toys, they were followed by infants’ greater levels of toy interest. Infants’ rates of compliance were substantial following all directives. The findings reveal differential behavioral circumstances preceding and following mothers’ responsive versus directive speech and their supportive directive versus intrusive directive utterances.

Thirty infants at 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while playing for 18 minutes. Experimental stimuli were presented in three communicative intent contexts – proto-declarative, proto-imperative, and ambiguous – to elicit infant communicative bids that did and did not contain gestures. Mothers’ responses were analyzed, and their verbal responses were further coded as object labels, action labels, internal state labels, and nonlabeling utterances. Results demonstrated differential responses to infants’ gestural and nongestural bids. Mothers responded more often and were more likely to provide a verbal response in all contexts when infants’ communicative bids included gestures. They were also more likely to provide an object label and less likely to provide nonlabeling utterances to gestural than nongestural bids in the proto-declarative and ambiguous contexts. The privileged responses following infants’ gestures may serve as a mechanism for vocabulary acquisition.