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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2015
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.
Portions of the results were presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, April, 2013. The authors thank Emily Block and Grace Wybourn for assistance coding; Jihee Hong, Carrie Lloyd, Leigh Mangun, Sarah Nichols, Brittney Wyatt, and Trish Schnell for assistance collecting and managing data; and the participating children and mothers.