title: Maternal responsive and directive behaviours and utterances as predictors of children's lexical development.
abstract: Predictive relations were examined between measures of 20 mothers' behavioural and verbal general and specific responsiveness and intrusive and supportive directiveness and their children's subsequent expressive vocabularies during three developmental periods with endpoints at the beginning, middle, and end of the second year: 0; 10 to 1; 1, 1 ; 1 to 1; 5, and 1;5 to 1;9. Regression analyses, controlling for mothers' utterance frequencies and children's initial lexicons, revealed considerable consistency between reported and observed lexicons but changing patterns of predictive relations with development. During the first period, behavioural, but not verbal, measures of maternal responsiveness and supportive directiveness were positively predictive. In period two, verbal, but not behavioural, measures predicted children's vocabularies, with specific responsiveness and supportive directiveness as positive predictors and intrusive directiveness as a negative predictor. During the final period, mothers' behavioural and verbal responsiveness and behavioural supportive directiveness positively predicted and their verbal intrusive directiveness negatively predicted children's lexical growth.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60105, USA. efmasur@niu.edu
authors.forename: Elise Frank
authors.initials: EF
authors.lastname: Masur
authors.forename: Valerie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Flynn
authors.forename: Doreen L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Eichorst
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D009035:Mothers; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D010700:Phonetics; D012044:Regression Analysis; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014743:Videotape Recording