Growing Communicators: A Fine‐Grained Analysis of Toddlers' Communicative Intentions From Requestive and Expressive, to Information Seeking and Giving

Children readily respond to others' bids for communicative interactions from early childhood and actively initiate these themselves. However, the extent and variety of early child-initiated communicative intentions is poorly understood, with theoretically derived intentions lacking systematic empirical support from naturalistic observations. This study, using a cross-sectional data set, provides a fine-grained characterization of communicative behaviors across three time points in the second year of life (13, 18, and 23 months, N = 47). We coded one-hour-long video recordings of home observations using a novel coding scheme to document the type of interactions toddlers initiated using four deictic gestures (reach, point, give, hold out) to meet a range of communicative goals, such as sharing interest, attention, or emotion, requesting an object or an action, seeking information or help, and giving information. Expressive interactions accounted for 49.9% of events, followed by requestive (40%), information/help seeking (8.3%), and information giving intentions (1.7%). These findings characterize early communicative toddler-caregiver interactions and provide insights into the age-related patterns of toddlers' propensity to seek and transmit information which emerge increasingly as part of toddlers' communicative repertoire.