Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential…

Young infants are sensitive to self-directed social actions, but do they appreciate the intentional, target-directed nature of such behaviors? The authors addressed this question by investigating infants' understanding of social gaze in third-party interactions (N = 104). Ten-month-old infants discriminated between 2 people in mutual versus…

When not socially engaged, children showed a significantly greater percentage of reoriented attention during vocalizing than nonvocalizing periods. Findings confirm the existence of an attention/vocalization relation and are consonant with Greenfield's predictions about the nature of this relation. The relation held equally for prelinguistic and…

Results of two experiments indicate that dimensions of the social situation in which social behaviors are modeled influence eight-month-old children's tendency to imitate and their choice of recipients for their imitation. (Author/RH)

Compared effects of contingent and noncontingent adult-infant social interactions on subsequent infant-controlled habituation and choice tasks of 26 infants of 3 months. Infants who experienced a prior noncontingent social interaction tended to adopt response strategies that reduced the density of stimulation during subsequent nonsocial tasks.…

An exploratory study was made of the emotional and social functioning of young children having one manic-depressive parent. Semi-naturalistic observations and experimental manipulations of the affective environment were used to assess two-year-olds' regulation of emotion, as well as their aggression, altruism, and affiliative interactions.…

Examined the relation between infant-sibling affective involvement and the attachment security of 1-7-year-old children of 53 mothers. Secure infants reacted less negatively than insecure infants when mothers turned their attention to an older child. (RJC)

Three questions are addressed: (1) Are infants as young as six months capable of interacting with a peer? (2) What type of social acts are used during these early encounters? and (3) Do toys facilitate the interactions? (Author/MP)

A total of 87 infants 10 months of age received, either directly or indirectly, a positive nonverbal message, a neutral nonverbal message, or no message about a stranger. Infants, especially those with easy temperaments, were friendlier to the stranger when mothers had spoken positively, but only when the message was directly communicated.…

Examines the effect of changes in the social and motor capabilities of infants on their daily social encounters. Home observations were made of the social interactions of 14 infants and their mothers when the infants were 6, 8, and 12 months of age. (CM)

Qualitatively, the more suppressive and critical the mother, the less responsive the baby was in social play with her. The more the baby responded to his mother, the less he responded to a stranger. (Author)

Discusses observations of sets of infant twins, aged 6 to 24 months, as they interacted with one another and with an unfamiliar peer. Assesses quality of infant-mother attachment. Finds twins are more likely to react with one another than with a peer. Results are discussed in relation to early peer relationships and attachment. (Author/RWB)

To test the inversion of intensity interpretation based on negative relations between newborn and pre-school intensity behaviors, 106 normal children were examined at the neonatal and pre-school periods. Interpretations of intensity behaviors at both periods and their longitudinal relations are discussed. (Author/SB)

Individual differences in the social behavior of young siblings were studied in 40 sibling pairs observed at home, when the second child was 8 months old and 14 months old. Differences between same-sex and different-sex sibling pairs were marked by the second observation. More positive social behavior characterized same-sex pairs; more negative…

Factor analysis of 25 rating scales from Bayley's infant behavior record were performed for a sample of about 300-400 infant twins tested one or more times between 3 and 24 months of age. The analyses provided five major and two minor factors that were considerably consistent at all ages. (Author/DB)