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.

Forty-two single mothers with young infants were given access to a computer-mediated social support (CMSS) network concerned with parenting issues. The network operated 24 hours per day over a period of 6 months. It permitted public message exchanges, private e-mail, and text-based teleconferencing for as many as 8 participants at any one time. During the 6 month intervention, the 42 women accessed the network over 16,670 times. Individual differences in participation were significantly associated with indices of social isolation from peers. A descriptive analyses of the messages exchanged on the network disclosed that 98% of the replies to concerns posted in the public forum provided positive social support. The majority of the supportive replies fell into the category of emotional support, followed in order by informational and tangible support. Both the self-report data following the intervention, and qualitative data extracted from online discussions indicated that close personal relationships and a sense of community developed in this novel social environment. Finally, an analysis of pretest-posttest changes in the level of parenting stress revealed that mothers who participated regularly in this CMSS community were more likely to report a decrease in parenting stress following the intervention.

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.

No abstract

No abstract