A corpus of nearly 150,000 maternal word-tokens used by 53 low-income mothers in 263 mother-child conversations in 5 settings (e.g., play, mealtime, and book readings) was studied. Ninety-nine percent of maternal lexical input consisted of the 3,000 most frequent words. Children's vocabulary performance in kindergarten and later in 2nd grade related more to the occurrence of sophisticated lexical items than to quantity of lexical input overall. Density of sophisticated words heard and the density with which such words were embedded in helpful or instructive interactions, at age 5 at home, independently predicted over a third of the variance in children's vocabulary performance in both kindergarten and 2nd grade. These two variables, with controls for maternal education, child nonverbal IQ, and amount of child's talk produced during the interactive settings, at age 5, predicted 50% of the variance in children's 2nd-grade vocabulary.

The speech of two mothers to their infants at several points between three and eighteen months of age was analysed. Simplicity of the speech, as measured by MLU, was about the same at all ages, and none of the other features of the mothers' speech style showed any abrupt change at the time the children started to talk. The changes that did occur started much earlier, at about seven months. These findings are incompatible with the explanation that mothers speak simply and redundantly in response to cues of attention and comprehension from the child listener. It is suggested that the mothers interacted with their infants using a conversational model, and that the changes in the mothers' speech reflect their children's growing ability to function as conversational partners.

Drawing upon recent research findings and upon a case study of a child learning to talk and to read, Catherine Snow outlines the important similarities in the development of both language and literacy. The characteristics of parent-child interaction which support language acquisition—semantic contingency, scaffolding, accountability procedures,and the use of routines—also facilitate early reading and writing development. The author dismisses the explanation that variations in the level of literacy in the home are responsible for social class differences in school achievement. To explain such differences,Snow emphasizes distinctive ways in which middle-class families prepare preschoolers to understand and produce decontextualized language.

This study investigated predictors of growth in toddlers' vocabulary production between the ages of 1 and 3 years by analyzing mother–child communication in 108 low‐income families. Individual growth modeling was used to describe patterns of growth in children's observed vocabulary production and predictors of initial status and between‐person change. Results indicate large variation in growth across children. Observed variation was positively related to diversity of maternal lexical input and maternal language and literacy skills, and negatively related to maternal depression. Maternal talkativeness was not related to growth in children's vocabulary production in this sample. Implications of the examination of longitudinal data from this relatively large sample of low‐income families are discussed.

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