The Longitudinal Relationship Between Conversational Turn-Taking and Vocabulary Growth in Early Language Development

Abstract

Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a lon-gitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabu-lary growth in English-acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audiorecordings obtained every 3 months provided several indices of the language environment, including thenumber of adult words children heard in their environment and their number of conversational turns. Vocab-ulary was measured independently via parental report. Growth curve analyses revealed a bidirectional rela-tionship between conversational turns and vocabulary growth, controlling for the amount of words inchildren’s environments. The results are consistent with theoretical approaches that identify social interactionas a core component of early language acquisition. Show more