Within developmental psychology, pointing gestures have received a great deal of attention, while ostensive gestures have been overlooked in terms of their emergence and intentionality. In a longitudinal and micro-genetic study with six children at 9, 11, and 13 months of age, we codified gesture production of children within second-by-second data…

This article presents data on lexical development of 881 Israeli Hebrew-speaking monolingual toddlers ages 1;0 to 2;0. A Web-based version of the Hebrew MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (H-MB-CDI) was used for data collection. Growth curves for expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, actions and gestures were…

Two independent cohorts (N = 155, N = 126) of infants at high and low risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were followed prospectively between 6 and 36 months of age, when n = 46 were diagnosed with ASD. Gaze to adult faces was coded--during a developmental assessment (Cohort 1) or a play interaction (Cohort 2). Across both cohorts, most…

Children with autism use hand taking and hand leading gestures to interact with others. This is traditionally considered to be an example of atypical behaviour illustrating the lack of intersubjective understanding in autism. However the assumption that these gestures are atypical is based upon scarce empirical evidence. In this paper I present…

Given the dependent nature of parent-infant interactions necessary for language development, it is important to understand how context may influence these interactions. This study examines how contextual variables influence communicative, cognitive and social measures of parent-infant interactions. Specifically, how do feedback toys and…

Here we describe the performance of children with autism, their siblings, and typically developing children using the Florida Apraxia Battery. Children with autism showed the lowest performance in all sections of the test. They were mostly impaired in pantomime actions execution on imitation and on verbal command, and in imitation of meaningless…

Infants' understanding of a pointing gesture represents a major milestone in their communicative development. The current consensus is that infants are not capable of following a pointing gesture until 9-12 months of age. In this article, we present evidence from 4- and 6-month-old infants challenging this conclusion. Infants were tested with…

Purpose: The authors aimed to compare gesture use in infants with autism with gesture use in infants with other developmental disabilities (DD) or typical development (TD). Method: Children with autism (n = 43), DD (n = 30), and TD (n = 36) were recruited at ages 2 to 7 years. Parents provided home videotapes of children in infancy. Staff compiled…

Background: It is unclear why children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tend to be inattentive to, or even avoid eye contact. The goal of this study was to investigate affective-motivational brain responses to direct gaze in children with ASD. To this end, we combined two measurements: skin conductance responses (SCR), a robust arousal…

Adults use eye contact as a cue to the mental and emotional states of others. Here, we examined developmental changes in the ability to discriminate between eye contact and averted gaze. Children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults (n=18/age) viewed photographs of a model fixating the center of a camera lens and a series of positions to the…

Communication spontaneously initiated by infants at heightened risk (HR; n = 15) for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is compared with that in low-risk (LR; n = 15) infants at 13 and 18 months of age. Infants were observed longitudinally during naturalistic in-home interaction and semistructured play with caregivers. At both ages, HR infants…

We explored the perceptual structure of facial expressions of six basic emotions, varying systematically in intensity, in adults and children aged 7 and 14 years. Multidimensional scaling suggested that three- or four-dimensional structures were optimal for all groups. Two groups of adults demonstrated nearly identical structure, which had…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to examine functional anatomy of attention to social (eye gaze) and nonsocial (arrow) communicative stimuli in late childhood and in a disorder defined by atypical processing of social stimuli, Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Children responded to a target word ("LEFT"/"RIGHT") in the context of a…

Distress emotions in very young children are manifest in vocal, facial, and bodily cues. Moreover, children with different developmental conditions (i.e. autistic disorder, AD; developmental delay, DD; typically developing, TD) appear to manifest their distress emotions via different channels. To decompose channel of emotional distress display by…

To examine the neurobiological consequences of early institutionalization, the authors recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 3 groups of Romanian children--currently institutionalized, previously institutionalized but randomly assigned to foster care, and family-reared children--in response to pictures of happy, angry, fearful, and sad…