Why Is Infant Language Learning Facilitated by Parental Responsiveness?
Abstract
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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Infants can immediately learn from the verbal contents of the response if the response is semantically and temporally contingent on the infants' behavior.
“It has been hypothesised that infants can immediately learn from the verbal contents of the response if the response is semantically and temporally contingent on the infants' behavior (see Tamis‐LeMonda et al., 2014).”
From The role of dyadic combinations of infants' behaviors and caregivers' verbal and multimodal responses in predicting vocabulary outcomes (2025) · cites this paper as Tamis‐LeMonda et al., 2014
Cites
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Social Feedback to Infants’ Babbling Facilitates Rapid Phonological Learning
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The contribution of early communication quality to low-income children’s language success
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Adamson, L. B., Bakeman, R., Owen, M. T., Golinkoff, R. M., Pace, A., Yust, P. K. S., & Suma, K. (2015) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/0956797615581493 · Cited by 784 · see citing works
Edmunds, S. R., Kover, S. T., & Stone, W. L. (2019) · Autism Research · doi:10.1002/aur.2100 · Cited by 93 · see citing works
Raby, K. L., Freedman, E., Yarger, H. A., Lind, T., & Dozier, M. (2019) · Developmental Science · doi:10.1111/desc.12753 · Cited by 67 · see citing works
Comparing Automatic and Manual Measures of Parent–Infant Conversational Turns: A Word of Caution
Ramírez, N. F., Hippe, D. S., & Kuhl, P. K. (2021) · Child Development · doi:10.1111/cdev.13495 · Cited by 62 · see citing works
Corkin, M. T., Henderson, A. M. E., Peterson, E. R., Kennedy- Costantini, S., Sharplin, H. S., & Morrison, S. (2021) · Infant Behavior and Development · doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101611 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
van der Klis, A., Junge, C., Adriaans, F., & Kager, R. (2025) · Infancy · doi:10.1111/infa.12626 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
“It has been hypothesised that infants can immediately learn from the verbal contents of the response if the response is semantically and temporally contingent on the infants' behavior (see Tamis‐LeMonda et al., 2014).”
- Authors
- Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Kuchirko, Y., & Song, L.
- Affiliations
- Department of Applied Psychology, New York University, City University of New York
- Department of Early Childhood Education/Art Education, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
- Venue
- Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-04
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 121-126
- ISSN
- 0963-7214
- 1467-8721
- Cited by
- 459
- References
- 4
- Language
- en
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