Maternal responsiveness and infant intentional communication: implications for the early communicative and linguistic development

Leila Paavola · Sari Kunnari · I. Moilanen

97 citations0/0 files storedChild Care Health and Development

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Hearing Impairment and Communication Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Maternal responsiveness has been found to have an important role in early language acquisition. From early on, children can also be regarded as active participants in interaction who demonstrate increasing competence in conveying messages to their interactive partners. Hence, in order to demonstrate consistent effects of maternal responses, it is important to take into account individual differences among children. In the present study, the relation between the frequencies of maternal responses and infant intentional communicative acts as well as their predictive validity to subsequent early communicative and linguistic skills was examined. METHODS: The participants were 27 Finnish-speaking mothers and their healthy firstborn infants. Maternal and infant interactive behaviour was analysed from 20-min samples of free play collected during home visits at the infants' age of 10 months. At 12 months the children were assessed for their communicative and linguistic skills by using the Finnish version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories and the Communication and Symbolic Behaviour Scales. RESULTS: The frequencies of maternal responses and infant intentional communicative acts were not intercorrelated. As for subsequent communicative and linguistic skills, the results of regression analyses indicated that both maternal responsiveness and infant intentional communication predict early comprehensive skills, whereas expressive skills--the use of both verbal and gestural communicative means--are predicted only by infant intentional communication. CONCLUSION: The results of the present study suggest that maternal responsiveness during the prelinguistic stage is not necessarily dependent on children's communicative competence. As predictors of early communicative and linguistic skills, both maternal responsiveness and infant intentional communication make a distinctive contribution.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 97 citations exist upstream.

References

1978Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation 1994Variability in Early Communicative Development 1967The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment 1985Child's Talk: Learning to Use Language 2001Infant Intersubjectivity: Research, Theory, and Clinical Applications 2001Maternal Responsiveness and Children's Achievement of Language Milestones 1977The development of conversation between mothers and babies 1981The social context of language acquisition

Cited by

2014Caregivers provide more labeling responses to infants' pointing than to infants' object-directed vocalizations 2020What Impacts Early Language Skills? Effects of Social Disparities and Different Process Characteristics of the Home Learning Environment in the First 2 Years 2007Clinical pragmatics: A field in search of phenomena?2006Maternal sensitivity, infant co-operation and early linguistic development: Some predictive relations

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.