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)

This article reviews research on children's development of cognition, memory, and language; development of knowledge about the legal system; developmental and motivational factors influencing children's willingness to make sexual abuse reports in legal settings; reports of abusive touch; and strategies used to prepare children for medical…

This article reviews literature and research on otitis media, focusing on definitions; occurrence, including such influences as age, socioeconomic status, genetics, child care situation, feeding techniques, and sex; fluctuating hearing loss; psychological, linguistic, and cognitive development; and developmental deficits in speech, language,…

Linguistic and cognitive development of 26 premature and 27 full-term infants was studied longitudinally over the first 3 years of life. Patterns of lexical and cognitive development did not differ substantially between groups, nor did standard language test measures indicate differences at the study's end except with very low birthweight…

This case study describes a 25-year-old Swedish woman with hereditary moderate hearing loss since birth who acquired both sign language and spoken language in her early preschool years and reached normal developmental milestones in each. Analysis revealed that her speech reading expertise is associated with cognitive functions such as high…

Fatherchild and motherchild engagements were examined longitudinally in relation to children's language and cognitive development at 24 and 36 months. The study involved a raciallyethnically diverse sample of low-income, resident fathers (and their partners) from the National Early Head Start evaluation study (n290). Fatherchild and motherchild…

The article considers nursery rhymes as the foundation for learning. It is said that nursery rhymes carry all the parts of language that lead to speaking and reading. Because rhymes are short, they are easy for children to repeat, and become some of the first sentences children utter. The rhymes expand vocabulary, exposing children to words they…

Main and interactive effects of child care quality, stability, and multiplicity on infants' attachment security, language comprehension, language production, and cognitive development at 15 months were examined using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care. Thirty-nine percent of the…

The aim of this article is to introduce readers to an alternative way of applying U-shaped functions to understand development, especially cognitive development. In classical developmental applications, age is the abscissa; that is, in the fundamental equation B = f(A), some behavioral variable (B) plots as a U-shaped or inverted U-shaped function…

The articles in this collection consider one very interesting puzzle of development: U-shaped developmental functions. At some point during development, an organism might exhibit what seems like a regression from its expected developmental trajectory and, according to continuity models of development, this is aberrant. In this special issue,…

Researchers in the fields of cognitive and language development have made less use of large-scale longitudinal designs and of person-centered approaches to data analysis than have researchers in the fields of social and personality development. It is argued that differences among domains of developmental psychology in the research methods employed…

Based on intense observations of one child's development from 1 to 3 years of age, this book describes how children acquire the knowledge they need to become persons. The book has 13 chapters, divided chronologically. Topics covered include: (1) personhood and social identity, and methodological issues; (2) 15-16 months, doing a lot with a little,…

A discussion of the biological and developmental issues in early second language learning first looks at psycholinguistic research on brain growth patterns and the relationship of first and second language learning. Focus is on three phenomena observed in the self-organization of living systems: selection of input data; organization of specialized…

Following an introduction by Anthony Liddicoat on the general nature of bilingualism, three papers on the characteristics, development, and advantages of bilingualism are presented. "Psycholinguistic Aspects of Bilingualism" by Susanne Dopke, Tim Macnamara, and Terry Quinn considers the linguistic, cognitive, emotional, and educational…

In November 1997, Washington University and the Parents as Teachers National Center hosted a forum on how to apply neuroscience research to the field of education. The forum focused primarily on language acquisition in young children, which is fundamental to early learning and development and to later school success. The 110 participants included…