Parental attitudes shape play opportunities afforded to children in home, community, and school settings. This study presents evaluation of an intervention designed to enrich parent's conception of play and its relationship with socially valued skills and capacities. On the basis of data from 291 racially and ethnically diverse parents/caregivers…

Focused on community play memories, the goals of this project were to: (1) uncover the variety and degree of playful learning memories; (2) ascertain whether community members would spontaneously share memories of play; and (3) appraise whether memories differed between low-income and mixed-income communities. Results indicated that although…

Sperry, Sperry, and Miller (2018) aim to debunk what is called the 30-million-word gap by claiming that children from lower income households hear more speech than Hart and Risley ([Hart, B., 1995]) reported. We address why the 30-million-word gap should not be abandoned, and the importance of retaining focus on the vital ingredient to language…

Sperry, Sperry, and Miller (2018) aim to debunk what is called the 30-million-word gap by claiming that children from lower income households hear more speech than Hart and Risley (1995) reported. We address why the 30-million-word gap should not be abandoned, and the importance of retaining focus on the vital ingredient to language…

How can we transform places where people gather or wait into hubs for interaction and playful learning? Bus stops offer one setting in which to test this idea. Urban Thinkscape reimagines an everyday bus stop in an under-resourced area as an interaction zone instead of merely a place to wait for a ride. Results suggest that embedding playful…

Various theorists have argued for the importance of a developmental approach to studying typical development (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998; Lerner, 1996; Lerner & Hood, 1986; Masten & Cicchetti, 2010; Overton, 2014; Overton & Lerner, 2012, 2014), and there are reasons to believe that this issue is even more critical to the study of…

Infants from low-socioeconomic status (SES) households hear a projected 30 million fewer words than their higher-SES peers. In a recent study, Hirsh-Pasek et al. (Psychological Science, 2015; 26: 1071) found that in a low-income sample, fluency and connectedness in exchanges between caregivers and toddlers predicted child language a year later…

Children from under-resourced communities regularly enter formal schooling lagging behind their peers. These deficits in areas such as language development, reading readiness, and even in the kind of spatial skills that predict later mathematical knowledge, may persist throughout their lifespan. To address such gaps, policymakers have focused…

Children from under-resourced communities regularly enter formal schooling lagging behind their peers. These deficits in areas such as language development, reading readiness, and even in the kind of spatial skills that predict later mathematical knowledge, may persist throughout their lifespan. To address such gaps, policymakers have focused…

Lillard et al. (2013) concluded that pretend play is not causally related to child outcomes and charged that the field is subject to a "play ethos", whereby research is tainted by a bias to find positive effects of play on child development. In this commentary, we embrace their call for a more solidly scientific approach to questions in this…

The world's languages draw on a common set of event components for their verb systems. Yet, these components are differentially distributed across languages. At what age do children begin to use language-specific patterns to narrow possible verb meanings? English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking adults, toddlers, and preschoolers were shown…

Do 14- to 17-month-olds notice the paths and manners of motion events? English- and Spanish-learning infants were habituated to an animated motion event including a manner (e.g., spinning) and a path (e.g., over). They were then tested on four types of events that changed either the manner, the path, both, or neither component. Both English- and…

Two studies examined U.S. mothers' (N=1130) and child development professionals' (N=99) beliefs about the relationship between play and learning. Study 1 investigated relationships among maternal conceptualizations of play, perceived learning value, and frequency of children's play behaviors. All Play mothers viewed activities ranging from…

One of the most prominent theories for why children struggle to learn verbs is that verb learning requires the abstraction of relations between an object and its action (Gentner, 2003). Two hypotheses suggest how children extract relations to extend a novel verb: (1) seeing "many different" exemplars allows children to detect the invariant…

Cognitive categories in infants that have relevance for linguistic development were investigated. "Agent" and "recipient," the categories chosen, are relational categories which by definition involve action. This experiment explored infants' (48 males, 14-24 months of age) sensitivity to certain "action parameters" of events. The question of…