Task-to-Task Vagal Regulation: Relations With Language and Play in 20-Month-Old Children

In this article we report patterns of task-to-task vagal tone change across multiple language and play tasks as well as associations between these patterns of task-to-task vagal tone change and language and play performance in 20-month-old girls and boys. Although initially different in vagal tone suppression during solitary play, girls and boys exhibited similar group patterns of vagal reengagement during successive language and play tasks with their mothers and with an experimenter. In terms of individual differences, vagal suppression during solitary play and vagal reengagement during social interactive tasks predicted language and play performance. Gender differences emerged in patterns of predictive relations: Task-to-task vagal changes predicted primarily play performance in girls and language performance in boys. These findings expose the effects of social context on directional changes in task-to-task vagal tone and speak to the functional role of appropriate vagal regulation in young children's language and play performance.