Abstract
The Toy Talk（TT）method was developed to increase the diversity of lexical noun phrase subjects in parents’ input in order to accelerate their children’s grammatical development. Our study examined whether this type of training can enhance sentence diversity among Japanese mothers and whether mother-implemented intervention can improve the language performance of their two-to four-year-old children with language problems. The mothers received individual TT instruction on language modeling strategies, such as（a）talking about the toys that her child plays with, and（b）using sentences with a verb indicating movement, for 60 minutes once a month for about three months. The Japanese version of the TT method requires mothers to focus on verbs rather than nouns because Japanese signals and diverse sentences are based on verbs. Following the TT instruction, the mothers and their children displayed increased sentence diversity in their utterances within a short period, indicating that TT can change parents’ input and enhance their children’s sentence development. We discuss the clinical implications and future research directions.
