Referential and expressive language: a study of two mother-child dyads

Abstract

The relationship between object and social attention, maternal language, and referential and expressive speech was examined for two children who represent lexical extremes in a study of early word learning. Children were videotaped at play in the home at 12, 15, and 18 months; mothers kept a record of the first 50 words. The child who acquired a highly referential lexicon was more sociable and engaged in less toy play and exploration than the child with a highly social- expressive lexicon. However, the child with more object labels more often initiated episodes of joint attention by showing and giving toys, and heard more maternal talk which labelled and described toys. More personal-social speech in the second child was associated with more nontoy-mediated social attention, and more socially expressive maternal language.