This study establishes a sequence of developing mental state understandings in infants. We used three violation-of-expectation paradigms to assess fifty-seven 16-month-olds' ability to (a) infer an actress's intention from her prior repeated approaches to an object, (b) recognize her emotion by watching her facial-emotional display, and (c) deduce…

Examined the development of communicative competence in deaf children and its interactions with use of communicative gestures and/or words. Data indicated (1) the use of communicative gestures increased with age while speech remained constant; and (2) the number of gestures used correlated with communicative accuracy. Difficulty level influenced…

A study of 13 14-month-old and 12 18-month-old children found that the younger infants relied more on gestures and fussing to express their physical wants, whereas the older infants relied more on vocal responses, especially when clarification of their wants was needed. (MDM)