Early vocabulary development: Relationships with prelinguistic skills and early social-emotional/behavioral problems and competencies.

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate early vocabulary development and its relationships with prelinguistic communication skills and social-emotional/behavioral (SEB) problems and competencies. The participants were 58 healthy Finnish-speaking children (30 girls, 28 boys). First, the concurrent relationships were investigated at the age of 18 months.

Maternal verbal responsiveness and directiveness: consistency, stability, and relations to child early linguistic development.

Maternal responsive and directive speech to children at ages 0;10 and 2;0 was investigated by applying a procedure first introduced by Flynn and Masur (2007) to a new language community (Finnish). The issues examined were consistency and stability over time, and also the role of responsiveness and directiveness in child linguistic development at 1;0 and 2;6. The measures of maternal speech from each age were used to predict the results of the subsequent linguistic assessment.