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The current study examined how mothers’ production of four types of internal state words at multiple ages across the second year in a free play context was related to their infants’ acquisition of ...

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.

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.

Mother–infant interactions are important to infant development because they are predictive of infants’ social, cognitive, and language development (Lamb, Bornstein, & Teti, 2002; Tamis-LeMonda, Bornstein, & Baumwell, 2001). Because maternal responsive and directive behaviors are associated with differential infant outcomes, it is important to investigate influences on mothers’ provision of responsive and directive behaviors. Yet, the dyadic interaction literature is predominantly unidirectional from maternal behavior to infant outcomes. Therefore, the current study examined infant initiating behaviors and consequent maternal responses in a sample of 26 13-month-old infants and their mothers, videotaped during 5 min of free-play. Findings revealed that infants produced a variety of initiatives, and that these different infant initiatives prompted differential patterns of maternal responsive versus directive behaviors. Further, results of analyses of divergent types of maternal directive behaviors – Responsive Directives, ReDirectives, and Intrusive Directives – also may help clarify major discrepancies in the current literature regarding the positive and negative effects of maternal directiveness.

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.

Forty-eight middle-class mothers answered questionnaires about their 11-through 18-month-old infants' typical television watching and interest, the frequency and duration of their independent play with toys and dyadic play with and without toys, and whether the television was typically on or not on in the room at the time. Mothers reported that most infants had little interest in and spent little time actively watching television. However, mothers reported the television was typically turned on in the room at least half the time during independent play with toys for 44% of infants and during dyadic play with toys for 53% of infants. These findings provide evidence relevant to researchers' and practitioners' concerns regarding the potential negative impact of television's presence on infant development, mother–child interaction, and the ecological validity of observational research methods involving play or interactions in the absence of a television.

Twenty mothers' provision of responsive, supportive behavioural directive, and intrusive behavioural and attentional directive speech was investigated during interactions with their children at ages 0 ; 10, 1 ; 1, 1 ; 5 and 1 ; 9 in two natural contexts, free play and bathtime. Issues examined included developmental change, contextual differences, consistency across contexts and stability over time. Analyses revealed increases in frequencies of maternal responsive and supportive directive utterances and decreases in maternal intrusive directives with age. Differences between contexts included more speech and supportive directiveness during play than bath. Responsiveness and intrusive attentional directiveness demonstrated considerable consistency and stability. Mothers provided greater responsiveness to girls than to boys, but more intrusive directives to boys than to girls. Mothers' production of supportive and intrusive directives was unrelated, and their rates of responsive speech were inversely associated with their rates of intrusive directive speech, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between supportive and intrusive directiveness.

Predictive relations were examined between measures of 20 mothers' behavioural and verbal general and specific responsiveness and intrusive and supportive directiveness and their children's subsequent expressive vocabularies during three developmental periods with endpoints at the beginning, middle, and end of the second year: 0;10 to 1;1, 1;1 to 1;5, and 1;5 to 1;9. Regression analyses, controlling for mothers' utterance frequencies and children's initial lexicons, revealed considerable consistency between reported and observed lexicons but changing patterns of predictive relations with development. During the first period, behavioural, but not verbal, measures of maternal responsiveness and supportive directiveness were positively predictive. In period two, verbal, but not behavioural, measures predicted children's vocabularies, with specific responsiveness and supportive directiveness as positive predictors and intrusive directiveness as a negative predictor. During the final period, mothers' behavioural and verbal responsiveness and behavioural supportive directiveness positively predicted and their verbal intrusive directiveness negatively predicted children's lexical growth.

Intrapersonal versus interpersonal factors were examined as predictors of verbal and action imitation during free play interactions by 20 mothers and their infants at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months. Participants’ conversational utterances and object play indicated their intrapersonal dispositions to engage in those behaviors spontaneously and provided measures of interpersonal opportunities for partner imitation. Analyses of predictive relations, including partial correlations controlling for the influence of partner modeling of imitation as well as the factors of disposition and opportunity alternately, yielded relative consistency across verbal and action domains, but distinctive patterns by partner. Infants’ imitation was more strongly predicted by disposition than by opportunity. In contrast, mothers’ imitation was more strongly predicted by opportunity, although mothers’ disposition also predicted their verbal imitation late in the second year. These results highlight the need to consider both dispositional and interpersonal influences on children's and mothers’ imitation.

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

This paper examines four mothers' responses to three object-related gestures (pointing, extending objects, and open-handed reaching) by their first-born infants from 0; 9 to 1; 6, and the impact of their responses on the children's transition from gestural to verbal communication. Analysis revealed that the mothers responded differentially to their children's pointing gestures, reciprocating to a greater degree with labels of the indicated objects. The children, in turn, produced more object-labelling words with pointing than with other gestures. In addition, the mothers' labelling responses to pointing significantly predicted the extent of their children's object-naming vocabularies.