Teaching or Learning from Baby: Inducing Explicit Parenting Goals Influences Caregiver Intrusiveness

Parents’ goals influence their interactions with their children. In this pre-registered study, we examined whether directing parents to teach their baby versus learn from their baby influences the extent to which they engage in intrusive caregiving behavior. Mother¬s and their 6-month-old infants (N=66; 32 female infants) participated in a 10-minute “free play” interaction, coded in 2-minute epochs for degree of maternal intrusiveness. Prior to the final epoch, mothers were randomly assigned to receive instructions to focus on 1) teaching something to their infant; or 2) learning something from their infant. Analyses of within-person changes in intrusiveness from before to after receiving these instructions indicated that mothers assigned to teach their infant increased in intrusiveness, whereas mothers assigned to learn from their infant decreased in intrusiveness. Parents’ explicit goals regarding infant learning can lead to controlling and adult-centered caregiving behavior.

‘What? Olaf is the taxi driver?’

While children’s remarkable ability to co-construct spontaneous fantasy narratives in pretend play interaction has been noted, sequential organization embedded in the collaborative construction of narratives have received little research attention. Drawing on an ethnomethodological and conversation analysis perspective, the current study examines the sequential organization of pretend play narratives co-constructed in children’s play interaction. Close sequential analysis based on 30 hours of audio and video recordings reveals an array of resources and interactional practices used to construct and maintain the spontaneous narratives. Sequential analysis allows to observe sense-making procedures embedded in the way participating children respond to and develop the storyline. The paper concludes with a reflection on how real-world knowledge informs and regulates the co-constructional process of fantasy narratives.

Contrasting lexical biases in bilingual English–Mandarin speech: Verb-biased mothers, but noun-biased toddlers

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English–Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers’ speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book reading and toy playing. In contrast, their mothers’ speech contained more verbs than nouns in both English and Mandarin but differed depending on the context of the interaction. Although toddlers demonstrated a noun bias for both languages, the noun bias was more pronounced in English than in Mandarin. Together, these findings support early noun dominance as a widespread phenomenon in the lexical acquisition debate but also provide evidence that language specificity also plays a minor role in children's early lexical development.