This empirical tracking case study explores the content and quality of an infant's home musical environment and family member-infant musical interactions. To this end, this study tracked and analyzed audio recordings of an infant girl's family life between the ages of seven and thirteen months and follow-up interviews with her parents. The…

The choice of cortisol sampling times in early childhood studies varies widely. Given that recommendations on sampling protocols are largely based on adults, the present study aimed to broaden current knowledge by examining how reliably cortisol measures obtained at different daytimes would reveal between-individual differences in toddlers'…

The present study used a novel, well-controlled paradigm to investigate the development of cool, hot-positive, and hot-negative inhibitory control in a sample of children (6- to 11-year-old; N = 38, 21 females), adolescents (12- to 18-year-old; N = 38, 24 females), and adults (19- to 38-year-old; N = 38, 28 females; sample location: United…

Children with special educational needs (CSEN) in the early years have been identified as vulnerable to the pandemic restrictions. This study explored the lived experiences of educators teaching CSEN online in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 school closures. Semi-structured interviews with 21 educators revealed that educators perceived the prolonged…

Background: Although research clearly demonstrates the importance of motivation in mathematics learning, relatively little is known about the developmental dynamics between different facets of mathematics motivation and performance, especially in the early years of schooling. Aims: In a longitudinal setting, we examined (1) how children's ability…

There are multivariate influences on the development of children's executive function throughout the lifespan and substantial individual differences can be seen as early as when children are 1 and 2 years of age. These individual differences are moderately stable throughout early childhood, but more research is needed to better understand their…

The goal of this intensive longitudinal study was to trace the developmental trajectories of infant pointing production, through consideration of the modality (i.e. pointing alone vs pointing-vocal coupling) and the communicative intention (i.e. imperative vs declarative). Multilevel analysis was used to model the normative trend and the…

There is no relationship more vital than the one a child shares with their primary caregivers early in development. Yet many children worldwide are raised in settings that lack the warmth, connection, and stimulation provided by a responsive primary caregiver. In this study, we used data from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), a…

Learning to descend stairs requires motor and cognitive capacities on the part of infants and opportunities for practice and assurance of safety offered by caregivers. The American Academy of Pediatrics prescribes the age strategy to teach toddlers to safely descend stairs but without much consideration for individual differences in infants'…

We investigated the continuity and stability of imitative episodes (IMEs) to shed light on the nature of early infant imitative ability. We observed and analyzed interactions of 27 mother-infant pairs as they played in their homes at one and 10 months. We coded the initiator, frequency, duration, kind, structure, and affect of IMEs. At 10 months,…

Stability is an important underlying assumption in any form of assessment-supported decision-making. Since early years development is frequently described as unstable, the concept plays a central role in the discussion surrounding early years assessment. This paper describes stability as a set of assumptions about the way individual scores change…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to caregivers' proclivity to treat a child as having an active and autonomous mental life. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to mitigate the impact of risk conditions. However, longitudinal studies on MM reporting changes over time and individual differences among mothers…

Crosslinguistic research into language development reveals that typological features determine children's developmental patterns to a large extent. The present study examines the early morphological development in the verb inflectional paradigm in Bangla. Data from the first 6 months since the emergence of two-word combinations were collected from…

The current research aims at constructing a developmentally sensitive mindreading scale (i.e., a battery of tasks measuring different aspects of mindreading ability in children from 1 to 3.5 years of age). Over 300 Polish children were tested at six-month intervals with 48 different tasks designed to measure mindreading ability (for a total of six…

Prediction from early development to later achievement has the potential to improve clinical and educational service delivery as well as to inform developmental theory. In this longitudinal study, we asked how well can educational achievement measured in the final year (Grade 9, age 15) of compulsory education--both overall and for outcomes in the…