TY - JOUR
T1 - Why Is Infant Language Learning Facilitated by Parental Responsiveness?
AU - Tamis-LeMonda, Catherine S.
AU - Kuchirko, Yana
AU - Song, Lulu
PY - 2014/4
Y1 - 2014/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - infancy
KW - language development
KW - parenting
KW - responsiveness
KW - word learning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84898680111&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84898680111&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0963721414522813
DO - 10.1177/0963721414522813
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84898680111
VL - 23
SP - 121
EP - 126
JO - Current Directions in Psychological Science
JF - Current Directions in Psychological Science
SN - 0963-7214
IS - 2
ER -