We examined the relation between maternal responsiveness and children's acquisition of mental and non-mental state vocabulary in 59 pairs of mothers and children aged 10 to 26 months as they engaged in a free-play episode. Children wore a head camera and responsiveness was defined as maternal talk that commented on the child's actions (e.g., when…

A phenomenon called "pragmatic variation" is discussed as a child's individual system of behavior in response to a question the child doesn't understand but realizes that he must verbalize an answer to. (NCR)

Twenty mothers' provision of responsive, supportive behavioural directive, and intrusive behavioural and attentional directive speech was investigated during interactions with their children at ages 0 ; 10, 1 ; 1, 1 ; 5 and 1 ; 9 in two natural contexts, free play and bathtime. Issues examined included developmental change, contextual differences,…

The fundamental frequencies (Fo) of infant cries were analyzed to determine if mean cry Fo differed as a function of the infant's sex or due to the stimulus evoking the cry. Results indicate no significant differences in either; however, males exhibited a tendency to have higher mean Fo. (Author/KM)

Predictive relations were examined between measures of 20 mothers' behavioural and verbal general and specific responsiveness and intrusive and supportive directiveness and their children's subsequent expressive vocabularies during three developmental periods with endpoints at the beginning, middle, and end of the second year: 0;10 to 1;1, 1;1 to…

This work investigated the young child's ability to respond appropriately to the intended, as opposed to the literal, meaning of one class of such utterances, requests for action. An action-based response heuristic is proposed to explain the apparent ability of two-year-olds to deal with indirect speech acts. (Author/SW)