Maternal responsiveness and directiveness in speech to 2-year-olds: Relationships with children’s concurrent and later vocabulary

This study investigated responsive and directive speech from 60 Finnish mothers to their 2-year-old children, as well as correlations with concurrent and later vocabulary. Possible gender differences with regard to both maternal speech and children’s vocabulary skills were considered. There were no gender differences in maternal utterance frequencies or in maternal utterance types. Girls scored statistically significantly higher in receptive and...