Parent Speech in Free Play Is Guided by Infant Attention, but Organised by Object Familiarity

Successful coordination of infant attention and parent speech during free play supports infants' language development. Parents' responsive linguistic input reduces uncertainty in label-referent associations and provides information at moments of infants' increased attention and receptiveness. While infants frequently lead the dyads’ focus of attention, parent speech has been shown to scaffold infants’ attention towards fixated objects. So far, however, little is known about the qualitative characteristics of parent speech during such interactions, and their effects on infants' attention. Here, we analysed the role of the content and communicative intent of caregivers' speech to their 18-month-old infants (N = 31) during free play when infants or parents led an interaction, and when parent speech sustained infant attention. Interactions were most likely to be infant-led, both temporally and topically, and parents' topically aligned, but not misaligned speech sustained infants' attention. Qualitative analysis of speech types revealed mostly object- and play-focused speech in interactions with familiar objects, but a broader range of speech types and more questions in interactions with novel objects. We hypothesize that speech in interactions with familiar objects is structured by shared experience, whereas the lack of common ground with novel objects induces parents to use more varied speech to engage their infants.