title: Mothers respond differently to infants' familiar versus non-familiar verbal imitations.
abstract: Mothers' verbal responses to their infants' spontaneous imitations of familiar and non-familiar words during naturally occurring interactions were examined in a longitudinal sample observed at 1 ; 1, 1 ; 5 and 1 ; 9. Maternal responses to both familiar and non-familiar imitations exhibited structural characteristics likely to be facilitative of early word learning, including shorter and single-word utterances and reproductions of imitated words in sentence-final position. Mothers also responded differentially to infants' non-familiar versus familiar imitations. Mothers produced more return imitations and more exact repetitions, providing an extra exemplar, following infants' imitations of non-familiar words. The familiar words infants imitated were more likely to receive the more complex expanded and reduced+expanded return imitations. Results suggest mothers' responses to infants' verbal imitations could serve as a mechanism for facilitating language acquisition.
authors.affiliation: Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA. janet@niu.edu
authors.forename: Janet
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Olson
authors.forename: Elise Frank
authors.initials: EF
authors.lastname: Masur
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008425:Maternal Behavior; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014743:Videotape Recording; D014825:Vocabulary