Person:

Pan, Barbara

This study investigated predictors of growth in toddlers’ vocabulary production between the ages of 1 and 3 years by analyzing mother – child communication in 108 low-income families. Individual growth modeling was used to describe patterns of growth in children’s observed vocabulary production and predictors of initial status and between-person change. Results indicate large variation in growth across children. Observed variation was positively related to diversity of maternal lexical input and maternal language and literacy skills, and negatively related to maternal depression. Maternal talkativeness was not related to growth in children’s vocabulary production in this sample. Implications of the examination of longitudinal data from this relatively large sample of low-income families are discussed.

Although much attention has been devoted to lexical, grammatical, and semantic aspects of child-directed speech, less is known about its pragmatics. This paper describes a longitudinal study of the communicative intents used by parents in interaction with their 14-, 20-, and 32-month-olds (n = 52). With 14-month-olds, parents used a small core set of communicative intents. This set grew in size and sophistication with increasing child age. Comparison with children's intents showed that some commonly used parental communicative intents were rare in children's language at all three ages. As children grew older, parental use of directive intents declined and child-centered acts increased. These findings suggest that child-directed parental speech is simplified pragmatically as well as grammatically and semantically.