Languages instantiate many different kinds of dependencies, some holding between adjacent elements and others holding between nonadjacent elements. In the domain of phonology-phonotactics, sensitivity to adjacent dependencies has been found to appear between 6 and 10 months. However, no study has directly established the emergence of sensitivity…

We explored the role that exogenous and endogenous competitors for attention play in infants' abilities to encode and retain information over a 6-month period. Sixty-six children visited the laboratory at 15 months, and 32 returned for a second visit at 21 months. Children observed models of conventional- relation and enabling-relation action…

Infant phonetic perception reorganizes in accordance with the native language by 10 months of age. One mechanism that may underlie this perceptual change is distributional learning, a statistical analysis of the distributional frequency of speech sounds. Previous distributional learning studies have tested infants of 6-8 months, an age at which…

Ten dyads were observed biweekly from 10 to 24 months of infant age while playing together at home with a set of toys. The aim was to examine whether mother-infant coregulation changes over the second year of the infant's life and whether there are individual differences in that process. Normative trends as well as variability between and within…

Two-month-old infants (N = 29) participated in face-to-face interactions with their mothers and with strangers. The contingent responsiveness for smiles and vocalizations, while attending to the partner, was assessed for each partner in both interactions. For smiles and for vocalizations, infants were less responsive to the stranger relative to…

Assessing speech discrimination skills in individual infants from clinical populations (e.g., infants with hearing impairment) has important diagnostic value. However, most infant speech discrimination paradigms have been designed to test group effects rather than individual differences. Other procedures suffer from high attrition rates. In this…

Recently, infant researchers have reported sex differences in infants' capacity to map their representation of an occlusion sequence onto a subsequent no-occlusion display. The research reported here sought to identify the extent to which these sex differences are observed in event-mapping tasks and to identify the underlying basis for these…

Six experiments investigated 7-month-old infants' capacity to learn about the self-propelled motion of an object. After observing 1 wind-up toy animal move on its own and a second wind-up toy animal move passively by an experimenter's hand, infants looked reliably longer at the former object during a subsequent stationary test, providing evidence…

Young infants spend most of their waking time looking around, but whether they learn anything about what they see is unknown. We used a sensory preconditioning paradigm and a deferred imitation task to assess if 3-month-olds formed a latent association between 2 objects (S[subscript 1], S[subscript 2]) that they merely saw together. Because…