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.
Karadağ et al. (Sun,) studied this question.