This doctoral study examined the function of baby massage in supporting early infant-carer attachment relationships among families facing stressful life experiences. It was designed in response to Bennett, Underdown and Barlow's [Bennett, C., A. Underdown, and J. Barlow. 2013. "Massage for Promoting Mental and Physical Health in Typically…

Grounded in Froebelian Principles, infused with Bakhtin's Dialogism, this paper draws from a larger ethnographic doctoral study to illuminate the way seven Early Childhood Educators based in England reflect on, and reconceptualise the voices of babies through engagement with a new reflective model, Video Interaction Dialogue (VID). Through a…

We compared maternal speech in interactions of mothers with their firstborn dizygotic twin and singleton infants. Nine twins and nine singletons were video-recorded at home in spontaneous face-to-face interactions with their mothers, from the 2nd to the 6th month. Continuous micro-analysis revealed that there are more quantitative and qualitative…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is characterized by a range of register-typical characteristics. Many of those can be objectively measured, such as acoustic-prosodic and structural-linguistic modifications. Perceived vocal affect, however, is a socio-emotional IDS characteristic and is subjectively assessed. Vocal affect goes beyond acoustic-prosodic…

Undertaking infant-toddler practicum during initial teacher education is critical to ensuring preservice teachers (PSTs) are well prepared for their future role as early childhood teachers. PSTs, however, can face challenges in infant-toddler practicum given the demands of this unique teaching and learning context. A knowledgeable, experienced…

Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants' initial…

From early in life, infants synchronize with others on a physiological level, a process thought to underlie social connections and group cohesion. This synchronization is seen, for example, when their pupils dilate in response to observing another person with dilated pupils -- known as "pupillary contagion." There is mixed evidence on…

An expansive view of care is vital to understanding children's sense-making of their care experiences in early childhood education. Yet, scant literature explores how toddlers enact and express understandings of care in their play with objects and others. This article identifies play situations where toddlers enact and express understandings, and…

In this article, we present a dynamic systems theoretical and methodological approach to investigating joint attention in early childhood (EC) centres. Joint attention, defined as a social interaction in which child and caregiver share a common focus of attention, is an important interactive context for collaborative learning. We overview the…

This longitudinal study aimed to investigate infants' spontaneous object interactions during naturalistic longitudinal observations in a day care centre in Japan. Infants' and caregivers' interactions during free play time were videotaped. The main focus related to how infants' object interactions changed during locomotor development. Observations…

Fourteen-month-olds selectively imitated a sub-efficient means (illuminating a lightbox by a head-touch) when this was modeled by linguistic ingroup members in video-demonstrations. A follow-up study with slightly older infants, however, could replicate this effect only in a video-demonstration context. Hence it still remains unclear whether…

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…

Infants are born highly sensitive to the natural patterns found in languages. They use their perceptual sensitivity to acquire detailed information about the structure of languages in their environment. To date, most studies of infant perception and early language acquisition have investigated spoken/auditory languages and hearing infants (e.g.…

The aim of the article is to analyse aesthetic encounters in Danish early childhood and care (ECEC) centres and create knowledge of and a language for aesthetics as sensitive encounters and vibrant matters between humans and the world. The article thus challenges traditional assumptions about and understandings of aesthetics as simply impression,…

The study examined the effectiveness of PRERAYMI (Promoting Responsiveness Emotion Regulation and Attachment in Young Mothers and Infants) attachment-based intervention programme aimed at adolescent mother-infant dyads. The intervention used video-feedback and developmental guidance to promote maternal mind-mindedness and sensitivity. 32…