Adult Conversations with Preschoolers Caregivers' altered
behavior enables infants to engage in successful communication
as early as possible. This process continues in the preschool
years. Mothers provide opportunities for their children to make
verbal contributions, draw them into conversations and provide a
well-cued framework for the exchange, show their children when
to speak, and thereby develop cohesiveness between the speaker
and the listener. Mothers ask children to comment on objects and
events within their experience. They also expand information by
talking about the same object or event in different ways or by
adding new ideas and elaborating on them. These maternal
modifications appear to be correlated with advances in the
child's language abilities. Mothers of 3- to 4-year-olds use
many techniques to encourage communication. For example, they
use twice as many utterance prefixes, such as well and now, as
their children do. These signals, plus varied intonation, are
used with responses and help a