Specificity in mother-toddler language-play relations across the second year

Relations among specific aspects of language (comprehension and production, semantics and utter-ance length) and relations between language and symbolic play were evaluated when children were 13 and 20 months of age. The contributions of maternal stimulation to toddler performance and whether associations among toddler abilities might be explained by maternal behaviors were also examined. Although measures of toddler language covaried, language-play associations in toddlers were specific to semantic aspects of language. Associations between mother and toddler behaviors emerged and tended to be specific: Maternal language related to toddler language, and maternal play related to toddler play. Moreover, relations among toddler abilities maintained after maternal influences were partialed. The multidimensional structure of language and specificities in language-play associations were discussed with reference to models of early representational development. Developmental psycholinguists theorize that nonlinguistic representations of the world contribute to, as well as constrain, the structure of child language and the course of its development (e.g., Bloom, 1973; Brown, 1973; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1992). This cognitive model of language acquisition evolved from Piaget's (1962) claim that language emerges out of nonlin-guistic sensorimotor intelligence and is one of several manifes-tations of a general underlying symbolic capacity. However, em-pirical investigation has not supported the strong cognitive claim that sensorimotor intelligence is prerequisite to all aspect