2-094 - From Gestures to First Words: How Parents’ Responsiveness Boosts Vocabulary in Typical and Atypical Language Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Previous studies have emphasized how the bidirectional relation between children’s early communicative acts and their closely tailored parental verbal input boost language development. However, key aspects of this process remain relatively unexplored. In this symposium, four interrelated papers provide evidence about how child-driven and context-based factors influence language learning largely through their effects on parental responsiveness. More specifically, Paper 1 and 2 examine how the complexity of children’s communicative acts affects the richness of the parental input, which, in turn, results in more positive outcomes for vocabulary development. These contributions yield evidence that not only parents provide richer verbal input to children’s more advanced communicative acts, but also that this richer input relates more strongly to children’s vocabulary development. Additionally, another key aspect related to language development is explored, namely how the communicative context (requesting vs. commenting) in which children produce their early gestures affects parental responsiveness and language outcomes. Paper 3 provides evidence that parental translations of children’s gestures produced in commenting and requesting contexts relate respectively to the noun and action lexicons of typically developing children, whereas Paper 4 shows that parental translations of young children’s commenting gestures relate to vocabulary development in children with autism and Down syndrome.
These varied findings highlight how essential aspects of children’s gesture production elicit contingent parental responsiveness that optimizes language learning.

Sub Unit

• Language, Communication

Chair

• Nevena Dimitrova, Georgia State University

Individual Presentations

• Infants’ Prelinguistic Communicative Acts and Maternal Responses: Relations to Linguistic Development - Presenting Author: Zhen Wu, University of Iowa; Julie Gros-Louis, University of Iowa

• Early Gesture-Speech Combinations During Parent-Child Interactions in Infants at Heightened Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder - Presenting Author: Meaghan Venezia Parlade, University of Miami; Nina B Leezenbaum, University of Pittsburgh; Jana M Iverson, University of Pittsburgh

• Mothers’ Labeling Responses Mediate the Relation Between Infants’ Gestural Bids and Their Vocabularies - Presenting Author: Janet Olson, Northern Illinois University; Elise Frank Masur, Northern Illinois Univ

• Parent’s Responses to Child Gestures in Commenting but not Requesting Contexts Boost Word Learning in Autism and Down Syndrome - Presenting Author: Nevena Dimitrova, Georgia State University; SEYDA OZCALISKAN, Georgia State University; Lauren B Adamson, Georgia State University