The period solidified a social-pragmatic framework for early language development, shifting emphasis from formal speech structures to communicative intent and interactive contexts. Researchers foregrounded preverbal and prelinguistic signaling, caregiver–child turn-taking, and naturally occurring opportunities such as play and picture-book dialogue as engines of growth. Methodologies blended naturalistic observation, longitudinal dialogue analyses, and pragmatic experiments to trace how joint activity and incidental opportunities foster early labeling and vocabulary comprehension alongside early comprehension-before-production patterns. This synthesis laid groundwork for subsequent emphasis on pragmatics, interactional routines, and environment-mediated language growth.