Maternal responsiveness predicts child language at ages 3 and 4 in a community-based sample of slow-to-talk toddlers.

Background: Maternal responsiveness has been shown to predict child language outcomes in clinical samples of children with language delay and non-representative samples of typically developing children. An effective and timely measure of maternal responsiveness for use at the population level has not yet been established.

Aims: To determine whether a global rating of maternal responsiveness at age 2 years predicts language outcomes at ages 3 and 4 in a community sample of slow-to-talk toddlers.