title: Mothers' labeling responses to infants' gestures predict vocabulary outcomes.
abstract: Twenty-nine infants aged 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while interacting with toys for 18 minutes. Six experimental stimuli were presented to elicit infant communicative bids in two communicative intent contexts - proto-declarative and proto-imperative. Mothers' verbal responses to infants' gestural and non-gestural communicative bids were coded for object and action labels. Relations between maternal labeling responses and infants' vocabularies at 1;1 and 1;5 were examined. Mothers' labeling responses to infants' gestural communicative bids were concurrently and predictively related to infants' vocabularies, whereas responses to non-gestural communicative bids were not. Mothers' object labeling following gestures in the proto-declarative context mediated the association from infants' gesturing in the proto-declarative context to concurrent noun lexicons and was the strongest predictor of subsequent noun lexicons. Mothers' action labeling after infants' gestural bids in the proto-imperative context predicted infants' acquisition of action words at 1;5. Findings show that mothers' responsive labeling explain specific relations between infants' gestures and their vocabulary development.
authors: Northern Illinois University,USA.
authors: Janet
authors: J
authors: Olson
authors: Northern Illinois University,USA.
authors: Elise Frank
authors: EF
authors: Masur
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D014825:Vocabulary