Infants who experience more adult-initiated conversations have better expressive language in toddlerhood.

ABSTRACT: To understand how infants become engaged in conversations with their caregivers, we examined who tends to initiate conversations between adults and infants, differences between the features of infant- and adult-initiated conversations, and whether individual differences in how much infants engage in infant- or adult-initiated conversations uniquely predict later language development. We analyzed naturalistic adult-infant conversations captured via passive recording of the daily environment in two samples of 6-month-old infants. In Study 1, we found that at age 6 months, infants typically engage in more adult- than infant-initiated conversations and that adult-initiated conversations are, on average, longer and contain more adult words. In Study 2, we replicated these findings and, further,

SUBMITTER: Salo VC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10009899 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature