• The Korean Journal of Community Living Science
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.3-14
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• 2006

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between conversational function and question type in mothers' utterances and their infant's language development. The subjects were 20 infants from 1;07 to 1;11 years of age in Yanji, China. Each child's spontaneous natural speech during interaction with his/her mother was videotaped for about 30 minutes. The children and their mother's spontaneous utterances were transcribed and coded for the number of type and token of word, grammatical morpheme conversational function and type of question in mother's language input to her child. The result showed that mothers used questions as the most frequent conversational function with their infants. The number of questions in conversational function in mothers' utterances positively correlated with the type of word, type of morpheme and grammatical morpheme in infants' utterance. However, there was no correlation between mothers' language input and infant early language development.