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Twenty working-class mother-toddler dyads were videorecorded during three joint book-reading activities. Ten of the dyads were white, and 10 were African American, balanced for parent educational level, family income, and parental occupation. The children ranged in age from 18 to 30 months and were normally developing. The parents read an experimental book to their child two times and a favorite book they brought from home one time. Videotapes of the joint book-readings were analyzed to determine cultural differences and the effects of book familiarity on the occurrence of maternal and child communication behaviors. The results show many similarities between the cultural groups in joint book-reading behaviors. However, statistical analyses revealed a significant difference between the cultural groups in the use of questions. African American mothers used significantly fewer questioning behaviors compared to the white mothers. White children produced more question-related communications, and African American children produced more spontaneous verbalizations. Several effects of familiarity were also found. The findings are compared to anthropological reports on caretaker-child interaction in African American families and implications are discussed.

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Twelve African American and twelve Caucasian preschool children were administered items from the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument (PLAI) under standard conditions and in thematic interactions (PLAI-T) to determine if task variability had an effect on language test scores. The African American group earned significantly higher test scores when the items were administered in the thematic mode as compared to the standardized test format, with the major score increases tending to occur on the more complex and difficult items. Clinical implications of considering task effects and dynamic assessment in multicultural assessment are discussed.

This study was designed to determine if certain types of gesture-speech combinations act as transitional phenomena preceding production of 2-word utterances. Ten normally developing children with a mean age of 15 months at the beginning of the study participated in this research. The children were sampled longitudinally at monthly intervals as they approached the onset of early multiword utterances. Temporally synchronized gesture-speech combinations were analyzed over a 6-month period to describe whether they encoded 1 semantic element (pointing to a car and saying "car") or 2 semantic elements (pointing to a car and saying "big"). These gesture-speech combinations were examined in terms of their onset in relation to early multiword combinations. It was found that there was a significant increase in gesture-speech combinations encoding 2 semantic elements during the 6-month period and that the onset of these combinations preceded or co-occurred with the 1st productions of multiword utterances. This finding, coupled with prior studies on smaller numbers of participants, suggests that gesture-speech combinations encoding 2 elements may be a transitional element between single-word communication and the onset of multiword combinations.