Social interactional behaviors and symbolic play competence as predictors of language development and their associations with maternal attention-directing strategies

Children’s early social interactional behaviors and symbolic play competence were studied at 14 months in a sample of 111 mother-infant pairs. The categories of social interactional behaviors, joint visual attention, socially coordinated and object oriented interactions were assessed via observations of mother-infant joint play. An index of symbolic play was derived from the child’s solitary play, which was assessed independently. We examined both the interrelations of these two types of early language predictors, and their relation to children’s language skills and maternal attention-directing strategies. Measures of children’s language comprehension and production were obtained using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories at 14 months, and Reynell Developmental Language Scales at 18 and 30 months. We found that at 14 months, social interactional behaviors and symbolic play competence were not statistically significantly related to each other. In line with our hypotheses, social interactional skills were associated more strongly with language production, and symbolic play competence more strongly with language comprehension. Maternal attention-directing strategies were strongly related to both children’s social interactional behaviors and symbolic play competence. Our findings indicated that maternal strategies that expanded the infant’s level of functioning were more effective in stimulating the children’s language development than were the other types of strategies.