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Mothers' labeling responses to infants' gestures predict vocabulary outcomes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2015

JANET OLSON  and
ELISE FRANK MASUR
JANET OLSON*
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University, USA
ELISE FRANK MASUR
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Janet Olson, School of Allied Health and Communicative Disorders, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115; tel.: 815-753-1401; e-mail: janet@niu.edu
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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.

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Articles
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Journal of Child Language , Volume 42 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 1289 - 1311
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

[*]

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.

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