Conversational contingency and its relationship to other developmental features during first language acquisition

To maintain a conversation, a child must practice conversational contingency (i.e. providing information which is relevant to, and further, the topic of the conversation). We conducted three studies, with a longitudinal sample of 40 Swedish-speaking 5 year olds, investigating which external and internal factors to the child were the best predictors of children’s conversational behavior. Study 1 investigated which concurrent linguistic and cognitive measures were the best predictors of appropriate conversation responses and found that only receptive vocabulary was related. Study 2 investigated which environmental factors were related to children’s conversation skills and found that later preschool entry was positively related to children’s conversational contingency. Finally, Study 3 investigated which social and cognitive factors measured in early development predicted the children’s conversation skills four years later and found that action imitation in infancy – generally considered a measure of socio-cognitive development – was a negative predictor for the children’s non-contingent responses. Together, our findings suggest a multi-pathway route to the development of conversational contingency.