This study explores vocal development as an early marker of autism, focusing on canonical babbling rate and onset, typically established by 7 months. Previous reports suggested delayed or reduced canonical babbling in infants later diagnosed with autism, but the story may be complicated. We present a prospective study on 44 infants later diagnosed…

Purpose: To investigate the language environments experienced by preterm-born infants, this study compared the linguistic and interactive features of parent--infant conversations involving 2-year-old preterm- and term-born infants. The study also explored how mother-infant and father-infant conversations may be differentially affected by…

According to the Ecological Model, positive parenting depends on three factors: psychosocial context, the children's needs and parental competences. This cross-sectional study analyzes parental competences, perception of efficacy and parenting satisfaction, among Spanish fathers and mothers with young children aged 0-3 years, and examines their…

Growing up with multiple siblings might negatively affect language development. This study examined the associations between birth order, sibling characteristics and parent-reported vocabulary size in 6163 Norwegian 8- to 36-month-old children (51.4% female). Results confirmed that birth order was negatively associated with vocabulary, yet…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate infants' neural responses to changes in emotional prosody in spoken words. The focus was on understanding developmental changes and potential sex differences, aspects that were not consistently observed in previous behavioral studies. Method: A modified multifeature oddball paradigm was used with emotional…

Early detection of autism spectrum condition is crucial for children to maximally benefit from early intervention. The study examined a machine learning model predicting the increased likelihood for autism from wellness records from 0 to 24 months. The study included 591,989 non-autistic and 12,846 autistic children. A gradient boosting model with…

Research suggests that girls acquire language faster than boys, with gender differences most pronounced in vocabulary acquisition during early childhood. This study examines the role of gender in the acquisition of vocabulary and morphosyntax in Palestinian Arabic-speaking children aged 18 to 36 months. Using the Palestinian Arabic Communicative…

With the explosive growth in time spent on YouTube by babies and toddlers, it's important to analyze what they're watching on YouTube. Indexes that evaluate the contents of YouTube channels for infants and toddlers have been developed, but since those were evaluation-based indexes of educators and parents, it is difficult to find out what content…

This study aimed to identify whether appetitive traits predict exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) duration for the first 6 months of life and to assess other predictors of its duration. 186 six- month-old term infants were included. Appetitive traits were assessed at 3-4 months of age. EBF duration, feeding practices, sex, maternal age and education,…

Data from 83,423 parent reports of temperament (surgency, negative affectivity, and regulatory capacity) in infants, toddlers, and children from 341 samples gathered in 59 countries were used to investigate the relations among culture, gender, and temperament. Between-nation differences in temperament were larger than those obtained in similar…

Children's speech is influenced by the speech they hear, in particular by the parental speech addressed directly to them. The aim of this study was to analyse toddlers' speech with their parents and to investigate the influence of specific characteristics of child-directed speech on child speech in real time during mother-child and father-child…

Despite growing interest in placental epigenetics, the combined impact of prenatal stress and socioeconomic status on placental methylation is still largely understudied. We conducted a study to examine the associations of prenatal stress and socioeconomic factors (household income, Hollingshead socioeconomic index) with placental methylation.…

Purpose: Assessing early language skills through parental report is a cost-effective way to screen for language delays when resources are scarce. A pan-Arabic lexeme approach was tested by extending the Egyptian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) to Jordan and Palestine in infants aged 8-30 months (Arabic…

This study examined longitudinal associations between parental psychological distress (stress and depression) when the child was 2 to 4 years and a child's emotional and behavioural problems at ages 3 to 4, and social functioning (loneliness and social competence) at age 11 in very preterm born children. The participants were Finnish families of…

Unintentional injury represents a significant health threat to children, and infancy marks a particularly vulnerable stage. This multi-method study (questionnaire, diary) measured parents' (N = 143) use of three popular home-safety practices (teaching about safety, environment modification to reduce access to hazards, supervision) and child injury…