Conversational Turns at Early Childhood Predicts Socioemotional Development at School Age

ABSTRACT Conversational turns are an important predictor of cognitive and language development, but little is known about their relationship with socioemotional development. In a previous study using LENA technology, Gómez and Strasser (2021) found that conversational turns assessed with 43 infants at 18 months predicted socioemotional competencies at 30 months, controlling for initial levels, child vocalizations, mother's warmth, and cumulative social risk, and that the direction of the relation was more likely to go from turns to socioemotional competencies than the opposite. The present study follows a subsample of 33 children up to 77 months, to determine whether this predictive ability is stable into the school age. Thirty‐three participants in the original study were assessed at 77 months of age, using both observational and self‐report measures, to estimate the contribution of conversational turns at 30 months to socioemotional development at 77 months. Conversational turns at 30 months explained between 14.4% and 20.3% of the variance in socioemotional competencies at 77 months. A dialogic, responsive linguistic environment at an early age may be critical for the development of socioemotional competencies. Conversations, and especially conversational turns, may offer opportunities to rehearse, test, and consolidate emerging socioemotional skills. Thus, interventions to support such environments both at home and in the early childhood classroom may be positive not only for language and cognitive development, but for socioemotional development as well.