Purpose: Differences between child-directed speech (CDS) by women and men are generally explained by either biological-evolutionary or gender-social theories. It is difficult to tease these two explanations apart for different-sex-parent families because women are usually also the main caregivers. Thus, this study aims to examine the influence of…

Attachment studies mostly follow the Western middle-class model in theory and methods. To demonstrate that the assessment of children's caregiving context is an often neglected, but crucial prerequisite for attachment studies, we (a) conducted a literature analysis of attachment research in non-Western contexts and (b) empirically investigated the…

Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0-36…

A body of studies, which are mostly based on parental reports, have documented gender differences in early language proficiency, and girls tend to outperform boys in both language production and language comprehension. In this study, staff in Norwegian Early Childhood Education and Care institutions observed language comprehension, word…

This study examined whether poor pointing gestures and imitative actions at 18 months of age uniquely predicted late language production at 36 months, beyond the role of poor language at 18 months of age. Data from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study were utilized. Maternal reports of the children's nonverbal skills and language were…

This study investigated the normative use and developmental course of physical aggression (PA), defined as use of physical force such as hitting, biting, and kicking, from 8 to 26 months and predictors thereof. We used data from the Behavior Outlook Norwegian Developmental Study, comprising 1,159 children (559 girls and 600 boys). Both mothers and…