Development of displaced speech in early mother-child conversations

This study documents the development of symbolic, spatial, and temporal displacement of toddler's speech. Fifty-six children and their mothers were observed longitudinally 5 times from 18 to 30 months of age during a staged communication play while they engaged in scenes that encouraged interacting, requesting, and commenting and scenes that explicitly focused on the past and the future. Reliably coded transcripts revealed that toddlers highlighted symbols at a high and stable rate and that over time they became less focused on the here and now and more focused on internal states. The greatest expansion was into the near future. Only in scenes designed to discuss the past and future did conversations turn to the past and expand spatially beyond here.