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…

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…

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…

Background: A trial parent-focused early intervention (PFEI) programme for children with delayed language development is reported in which current research evidence was translated and applied within the constraints of available of clinical resources. The programme, based at a primary school, was run by a speech-language pathologist with…

Twenty preschool children and their mothers were observed interacting verbally in an unstructured situation. Close mutual adaptation of both partners was demonstrated. Correlational patterns allowed the abstraction of primitive and advanced clusters of language-teaching/learning behaviors. (JMB)

Comparison of mother child interactions between two groups of mother child pairs--10 higher functioning verbal autistic children and their mothers and 10 lower functioning nonverbal autistic children and mothers--found that mothers tended to be quite responsive to their children's relative capabilities. (Author/DB)

Comparison of communication between hearing mothers and their deaf or hearing children (n=80) at child-ages 22 months and 3 years found most of the differences in communication by mothers of deaf and hearing children seemed attributable to the deaf children's linguistic delays. Results suggest that intervention efforts should focus on fostering…

This article describes the Language Interaction Intervention Program (LIIP) used in preschool classes for handicapped children in central New Jersey. Covered are the LIIP curriculum rationale, the LIIP model, the original evaluation study, and a replication study showing the program was effectively replicated with mothers appropriately changing…

This longitudinal study looked at how communication developed in seven deaf infants (ages 6-18 months) with either deaf or hearing parents. The children were video- recorded in interactional settings with their parents in their home every second month. A parallel study was conducted with seven blind infants and three severely visually impaired…

Discusses a study of the relationship between context and a mother's speech to her prelinguistic infant and a second phase which involved 48 mothers and their infants. Results are discussed in relation to a hypothesis that assumes that mothers' speech is determined by particular interactive rules operating in the mother-infant dyad. (Author/SED)

Investigation concentrated on verbal and nonverbal variables of child-mother interactions as it pertains to the child's language development. (MB)

A longitudinal study (with data collected at 54 and 83 months of age) was conducted of conversational control in 34 dyads of mothers and their children with severe and profound hearing losses. Results indicated that maternal control was negatively related to the children's developmental levels, and declines in control were not commensurate with…

This study focuses on the significance of specific maternal language teaching techniques in the early language development of the child. A recording was made of the verbal and nonverbal interactions in 20 mother-child dyads during a one-hour session in the home. The linguistic level for each of the children, who ranged from 1.9 to 5.0 years in…

The article describes a high-risk infant program which is designed to facilitate mothers' use of positive communicative interaction strategies. The various components of the Mother-Infant Communication Project model are described, as are the specific communicative strategies targeted by the program, and the intervention techniques utilized.…

Dialogues between hearing mothers and their prelinguistic hearing-impaired (n=3) or normally hearing (n=7) infants were analyzed. Mothers of hearing-impaired infants contributed a greater percent of dyadic topic initiations than did other mothers. No group differences were found in responsiveness of mothers or infants. (Author/DB)