Parents play an important role in children's language development. To our knowledge, no studies have compared fathers' and mothers' use of gestural and verbal communication in dyadic versus triadic contexts. This study aimed at analyzing similarities and differences in the bimodal communication of parents when they play alone with their infant and…

The present study examined continuity/discontinuity and stability/instability of noun and verb production measures in 30 child-mother dyads observed at 16 and 20 months, and predictive relations with the acquisition of nouns and verbs at 24 months. Children exhibited significant discontinuity and robust stability in the frequency of nouns and…

Examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech of Italian middle class mothers to determine which patterns characterize linguistic input to infants. Because Italian is a pro-drop language, adult-to-child speech revealed bias toward more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns, and verbs will likely occupy…