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Verbal response latency in turn-taking as a measure of language processing in mother-child dialogue
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Verbal response latency in turn-taking as a measure of language processing in mother-child dialogue

Nicholas A. Smith, Rylan N. Batten, Elizabeth S. Kelley, Jean M. Ispa and Bob McMurray
Language learning and development, Vol.22(2), pp.142-151
04/2026
DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2025.2510223

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Abstract

The latency of turn-taking responses in dialogue is quick and precisely coordinated across the interacting dyad. This is challenging because the processing time required to conceptualize, formulate, and generate a response can be longer than the typical response latency. Producing timely responses is likely a greater challenge for children, whose immature language abilities are still developing. This study examined how the millisecond latency of responses in mother-child dialogue varies as a function of the complexity (number of morphemes) of the utterance produced and the utterance responded to. The language complexity and the latency of utterances were measured in dialogue between 54 mothers and their 3-year-old children. Children were significantly slower to respond to their mothers, than were mothers to their children. Across individual utterances, a significant effect of complexity was found, with steeper slopes for children (79 milliseconds per morpheme) than for mothers (37 milliseconds per morpheme), suggesting that producing more complex utterances places a larger processing burden (indexed here as response latency) on children than on mothers. No effect was found for the complexity of the previous utterance to which the child was responding. No effect of the child’s average utterance complexity (i.e. mean length of utterance; MLU) was found, though children with higher vocabulary scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-3) had significantly slower latencies.

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