Mothers respond differently to infants' familiar versus non­familiar verbal imitations

ABSTRACT Mothers’ verbal responses to their infants’ spontaneous imitations offamiliar and non-familiar words during naturally occurring interactionswere examined in a longitudinal sample observed at 1;1, 1;5 and 1;9.Maternal responses to both familiar and non-familiar imitationsexhibited structural characteristics likely to be facilitative of earlyword learning, including shorter and single-word utterances andreproductions of imitated words in sentence-final position. Mothersalso responded differentially to infants’ non-familiar versus familiarimitations. Mothers produced more return imitations and more exactrepetitions, providing an extra exemplar, following infants’ imitations ofnon-familiar words. The familiar words infants imitated were morelikely to receive the more complex expanded and reduced+expandedreturn imitations. Results suggest mothers’ responses to infants’verbal imitations could serve as a mechanism for facilitating languageacquisition.Vocal/verbal imitation in early infancy has been repeatedly linked withvocabulary acquisition. During the second year, infants who imitate morefrequently have larger vocabularies concurrently and predictively (Bates,Bretherton & Snyder, 1988; Charman, Baron-Cohen, Swettenham, Baird,Cox & Drew, 2000; Folger & Chapman, 1978; Masur, 1995; Masur E Nelson, Baker, Denninger, Bonvillian & Kaplan, 1985;Snow, 1989; Stone & Yoder, 2001). In particular, infants’ novel wordimitation, replication of words not present in their spontaneous productive