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Mothers of 126 infants, 54 lower-socioeconomic status (SES) infants (26 younger, 4–11 months; 28 older, 12–19 months) and 72 middle-SES infants (12–17 months), answered questionnaires about their infants' typical television (TV) watching and interest, the frequency of their independent play with toys and dyadic play with and without toys, and whether or not the TV was typically on in the room at the time. Although infants spent little time actively watching TV, the majority of mothers in all groups reported the TV typically turned on in the room at least half the time during all types of play. Mothers reported middle-SES infants engaged more frequently in individual and dyadic toy play, but lower-SES infants were more often exposed to background TV/video during play. Because play is important to infant development and background TV can disrupt it, these findings raise concerns, particularly for infants residing in lower-SES households.

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

Twenty mother–infant dyads (10 boys, 10 girls) were videotaped longitudinally at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months during in-home free play and bath sessions. Mothers’ and infants’ responses to their partners’ naturally occurring action and vocal/verbal imitations were described, and relations to infants’ imitation rates and vocabularies were examined. Mothers’ response rates were consistently high and unrelated to infants’ imitation rates. As early as 10 months, infants responded to the great majority of maternal imitations, especially action imitations, often with actions. Infants’ return imitations to action matching indicated increasing awareness of being imitated. Infants’ responses to mothers’ vocal/verbal imitation were associated with their later vocabulary levels. Children who would be more lexically advanced at 17 and/or 21 months provided more social responses at 10 months, more socially responsive actions and return verbal imitations at 13 months, and more non-imitative socially responsive words at 17 and 21 months.