Predictors of early person reference development: Maternal language input, attachment and neurodevelopmental markers

• Published in: Infant behavior & development Vol. 36; no. 4; pp. 575 - 582
• Main Authors: Lemche, Erwin, Joraschky, Peter, Klann-Delius, Gisela
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01.12.2013; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adult; Apgar score; Attachment organization; Bayley Scales; Biological and medical sciences; Birth weight; Child development; Child, Preschool; Cohort studies; Developmental psychology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Germany; Humans; Infancy; Infant; Language Development; Longitudinal design; Longitudinal Studies; Male; Maternal verbal input; Mother-Child Relations - psychology; Mothers; Newborn. Infant; Object Attachment; Person referents; Play and Playthings - psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Toddlerhood; Germany; Maternal verbal input; Infancy; Attachment organization; Person referents; Bayley Scales; Cohort studies; Language development; Apgar score; Birth weight; Longitudinal design; Toddlerhood; Human; Affect affectivity; Parental behavior; Infant; Mother child relation; Maternal behavior; Language; Affective attachment; Social interaction; Follow up study; Cohort study; Family environment; Predictive factor
• ISSN: 0163-6383; 1879-0453; 1934-8800
• DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2013.05.005

•Normative longitudinal sample of natural language development in German.•Phonological transcriptions of utterances of children and mothers were used.•Quantitative study of person reference, reference to dyads and things.•Compares effects of verbal input, attachment organization, and biological markers.•Input effects are strongest at 17 and 36 months, attachment explains up to 10%. In a longitudinal natural language development study in Germany, the acquisition of verbal symbols for present persons, absent persons, inanimate things and the mother–toddler dyad was investigated. Following the notion that verbal referent use is more developed in ostensive contexts, symbolic play situations were coded for verbal person reference by means of noun and pronoun use. Depending on attachment classifications at twelve months of age, effects of attachment classification and maternal language input were studied up to 36 months in four time points. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that, except for mother absence, maternal verbal referent input rates at 17 and 36 months were stronger predictors for all referent types than any of the attachment organizations, or any other social or biological predictor variable. Attachment effects accounted for up to 9.8% of unique variance proportions in the person reference variables. Perinatal and familial measures predicted person references dependent on reference type. The results of this investigation indicate that mother-reference, self-reference and thing-reference develop in similar quantities measured from the 17-month time point, but are dependent of attachment quality.