Maternal directiveness, assessed by the mother's use of prescriptives, is correlated with slow vocabulary development. As prescriptives are most often used to redirect a child's attention to a different object or activity, it is hypothesized that attentional regulation underlies this negative relationship. In the present study, twelve mothers were videotaped interacting with their children aged 1;1, and 100 maternal utterances were coded for pragmatic intent. Prescriptives were coded as either changing (LEADING) or FOLLOWING the child's focus of attention. Only the frequency of mothers' FOLLOW-prescriptives correlated significantly with a productive vocabulary measure taken at 1;10. This correlation was high and positive, indicating that, given joint focus, directing a 13-month-old's behaviour can have beneficial effects on subsequent vocabulary development.
Two groups of 18-month-old infants were observed during a relatively natural play session with an adult experimenter and several toys. A novel object associated with one of the toys was labeled a dodo by the experimenter using either an attention-following strategy (i.e., introducing the label when the infant was focused on the dodo object) or an attention-switching strategy (i.e., introducing the label when the infant was focused on an alternative object). With factors such as frequency of exposure to the object label and infant compliance equivalent across the groups, infants in the attention-following procedure were more likely to correctly identify the dodo object in a subsequent comprehension task. These experimental data corroborate previous correlational observations suggesting that early lexical development is facilitated during interactions in which the caregiver is following rather than leading the infant's focus of attention.
20 3-month-old infants participated in a nonsocial contingency task immediately following a social interaction with their mothers. A measure of the time the dyads spent in a state of vocal turn-taking predicted individual differences in the infants' subsequent performance on the contingency task. These results parallel the social transfer effects we reported earlier in which the turn-taking dimension of social structure was experimentally manipulated to assess its effect on a subsequent nonsocial contingency task.
Individual differences in children's conceptual strategies at 3 years were predicted by several aspects of children's behavior and language at 13 and 24 months of age. Production of pointing gestures at 13 months and production of nouns and attributive adjectives at 24 months were positively associated with the use of a taxonomic matching strategy at 3 years of age. Alternatively, an early interest in functional-relational play behavior at 13 months and the production of relational terms at 24 months were positively associated with the tendency to use a thematic conceptual strategy at 3 years of age. Individual perceptual-cognitive processing styles are tentatively proposed as a persisting epigenetic mechanism underlying these individual differences across early sensorimotor, language, and conceptual development.
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