Journal
CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 23, Issue 2, Pages 121-126Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0963721414522813
Keywords
language development; infancy; word learning; responsiveness; parenting
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Parents' responsiveness to infants' exploratory and communicative behaviors predicts infant word learning during early periods of language development. We examine the processes that might explain why this association exists. We suggest that responsiveness supports infants' growing pragmatic understanding that language is a tool that enables intentions to be socially shared. Additionally, several features of responsiveness-namely, its temporal contiguity, contingency, and multimodal and didactic content-facilitate infants' mapping of words to their referents and, in turn, growth in vocabulary. We close by examining the generalizability of these processes to infants from diverse cultural communities.
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