Research on the acquisition of Mayan languages has shown child-directed communication (CDC) to be low in frequency. Nevertheless, long-term linguistic-anthropological research with the Tsotsil Mayan in Southern Mexico has documented episodes in family life when children engage in interactional routines or interactional formats (IFs) with their…

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime across…

This study investigated whether parents and kindergarten children show concurrent and time-lagged physiological synchrony during dyadic interaction. Further, we tested whether parent-child behavioral co-regulation was associated with concurrent and time-lagged synchrony, and whether synchrony varied by the type of interaction task. Participants…

In this paper, I address the question of how interactions with deaf youth and their hearing interlocutors are able to unfold in economical and fluid ways despite the existence of sensory and communicative asymmetries. Bringing together ethnographic insights from two years of fieldwork in Iquitos, Peru with the microanalysis of moments of situated…

Before they are 3;0-3;6, children typically do not engage with peers in focused interaction, although they do with adults. With parents, children interact around the "here-and-now". We hypothesize that young peers do not attempt to establish joint attention to present objects. Using the CHILDES database, we compared attention-directives…

Maternal responsive and directive speech to children at ages 0;10 and 2;0 was investigated by applying a procedure frst introduced by Flynn and Masur (2007) to a new language community (Finnish). The issues examined were consistency and stability over time, and also the role of responsiveness and directiveness in child linguistic development at…

Principles of a dynamic, dyadic systems view of mother-infant face-to-face communication, which considers self- and interactive processes in relation to one another, were tested. The process of interaction across time in a large low-risk community sample at infant age 4 months was examined. Split-screen videotape was coded on a 1-s time base for…

Promoting family learning around science represents an important opportunity to reinforce science learning during out-of-school time. Evidence suggests that parent-child discourse around science can promote inferential thinking by children and help solidify their understanding of science concepts. While teacher professional development that…

Ethnographic methods are used to investigate infant--toddlers relationships in an early childhood setting. The metaphorical and emotionally based concepts of holding [Winnicott, D. W. (1960). "The theory of the parent-infant relationship." "International Journal of Psychoanalysis," 41, 585-595.] and container: contained [Bion,…

This study documents the relation between an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis, increases in intervention, and changes in parent-child interaction quality. Information about intervention and observations of interaction were collected before diagnosis and a half year after diagnosis for 79 low-risk toddlers who had screened positive for ASD…

Background: Identifying risk and protective factors for language development informs interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Maternal responsive and intrusive communicative behaviours are associated with language development. Mother-child interaction quality may influence how children use these behaviours in language…

The data for this article were derived from a larger three-year study enquiring into how immigrant preschool teachers, and the families and children with whom they work, explore their bicultural identities through aesthetic representations of their sense of place. Eleven first generation immigrant parents and their young children attending a…

One hundred dyads of low-income, Spanish-speaking mothers and their bilingual children (age = 12-18; M = 14.12, SD = 1.89) who have language brokered for the mother (i.e., culturally or linguistically mediated between the mother and English speakers) were surveyed. Multiple goals theory posits that mothers and children who do not recognize and…

The concept of bidirectionality represents a process of mutual influence between parent and child, whereby each influences the other as well as the dyadic relationship. Despite the widespread acceptance of bidirectional models of influence, there is still a lack of integration of such models in current research designs. Research on…

Notably absent from the intervention literature are parent training programs targeting school-aged children with autism who have limited communication skills (Tager-Flusberg and Kasari in "Autism Res" 6:468-478, 2013). Sixty-one children with autism age 5-8 with minimal spontaneous communication received a 6-month social communication…