Balanced communication in mid-infancy promotes early vocabulary development: effects of play with mother and father in mono- and bilingual families

Abstract

In this longitudinal study on Finnish and Finnish-Russian families, infants’ play interaction at 7 months with each parent was observed during 5-minute play sessions (N = 96) and predictive relations between co-regulated communication in mid-infancy and language development at 14 months were examined. Parental differences in communication were greater within the culturally diverse Finnish-Russian families than within the culturally less diverse Finnish families. Four family-level communication profiles were identified that differed with respect to how balanced, or similar, infants’ co-regulation with each parent appeared. Three of the profiles were equally distributed across the families, whereas one of the unbalanced profiles was typical for the culturally diverse families. Language exposure and balance of the family-level communication profiles in mid-infancy predicted differences in children’s expressive and productive vocabulary size beyond infancy.

Keywords

bilingual co-regulated communication cross-cultural family-level father–infant dyads longitudinal monolingual mother–infant dyads vocabulary

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