ArticleCognition2023
The temporal structure of parent talk to toddlers about objects.
Article in Cognition, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Temporal separation of meanings facilitates homophone learning.Cognition · 2026Article
- Theoretical and Methodological Insights From Five Transcribed and Annotated Daylong Audio Recordings of Young Children's Language Environments.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- InCHORRRuS: Infant-Directed Communication Highlights and Organizes Repetition and Redundancy Through Rhythmic Structure.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- A year of nouns from English-learning infants' daily lives: The SEEDLingS-Nouns dataset.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Seeking Meaning: Incorporating Linguistic Information in Cross-Situational Verb Learning.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Infant-directed communication: Examining the many dimensions of everyday caregiver-infant interactions.Developmental science · 2024Article
- Can Infants Retain Statistically Segmented Words and Mappings Across a Delay?Cognitive science · 2024Article
- Word Repetition and Isolation are Intertwined in Children's Early Language Experiences.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Within arms reach: Physical proximity shapes mother-infant language exchanges in real-time.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- Does the public know what researchers know? Perceived task difficulty impacts adults' intuitions about children's early word learning.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- Sampling statistics are like story creation: a network analysis of parent-toddler exploratory play.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Vocal communication is tied to interpersonal arousal coupling in caregiver-infant dyads.eLife · 2022Article
- Parent Speech in Free Play Is Guided by Infant Attention, But Organized by Object Familiarity.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Toddlers learn words in the context of speech from adult social partners. The present studies quantitatively describe the temporal context of parent speech to toddlers about objects in individual real-world interactions. We show that at the temporal scale of a single play episode, parent talk to toddlers about individual objects is predominantly, but not always, clustered. Clustered speech is characterized by repeated references to the same object close in time, interspersed with lulls in speech about the object. Clustered temporal speech patterns mirror temporal patterns observed at longer timescales, and persisted regardless of play context. Moreover, clustered speech about individual novel objects predicted toddlers' learning of those objects' novel names. Clustered talk may be optimal for toddlers' word learning because it exploits domain-general principles of human memory and attention, principles that may have evolved precisely because of the clustered structure of natural events important to humans, including human behavior.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.