Temporal Responsiveness in Mother-Child Dialogue: A Longitudinal Analysis of Children with Normal Hearing and Hearing Loss.

Dialogue between conversational partners, including mothers and their children, is precisely timed. The predictability of this timing is important for establishing and maintaining interaction, communication, and learning. This longitudinal study examines changes in the response latency of utterances in dialogue between mothers and their normal hearing and hearing impaired children between 4 and 60 months of age. Mothers and their children showed parallel developmental trends, responding to each other more quickly at older ages. Beyond these age-related group effects, significant dyadic effects were found in which individual children's latencies were related to those of their mothers, and vice versa. Developmental patterns did not significantly differ across hearing status groups, which may reflect the role of early identification and intervention in promoting positive developmental outcomes.