Successful language learning in bilinguals requires the differentiation of two language systems. The capacity to discriminate rhythmically close languages has been reported in 4-month-olds using auditory-only stimuli. This research offers a novel perspective on early language discrimination using audiovisual material. Monolingual and bilingual…

Studies showed that individual differences in encoding speed as well as looking behaviour during the encoding of facial stimuli can relate to differences in subsequent face discrimination. Nevertheless, a direct linkage between encoding speed and looking behaviour during the encoding of facial stimuli and the role of these encoding characteristics…

Early in life, infants possess an effective face-processing system which becomes specialized according to the faces present in the environment. Infants are also exposed to the voices and sounds of caregivers. Previous studies have found that face-voice associations become progressively more tuned to the types of association most prevalent in the…

Previous research indicates that monolingual infants have difficulty learning minimal pairs (i.e., words differing by one phoneme) produced by a speaker uncharacteristic of their language environment and that bilinguals might share this difficulty. To clearly reveal infants' underlying phonological representations, we minimized task demands by…

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether temperament and cognitive abilities are related to recognition performance of Caucasian and African faces and of a nonfacial stimulus class, Greebles. Seventy Caucasian infants were tested at 3 months with a habituation/dishabituation paradigm and their temperament and cognitive abilities…

Three studies were conducted to determine whether 7- and 9-month-old infants generalize face identity to a novel pose of the same face when only internal face sections with and without an emotional expression were presented. In Study 1, 7- and 9-month-old infants were habituated to a full frontal or three-quarter pose of a face with neutral facial…

The present study examined the startle reflex as a physiological marker of behavioral inhibition. Participants were 7 to 12-year-old children who had been previously identified as inhibited or uninhibited as part of an ongoing longitudinal study on the role of behavioral inhibition in the development of anxiety disorders. Analysis of their scores…

The present study examined infants' capability of extracting object unity in a stationary two-dimensional rod-and-box display. The infants were habituated to a centre-occluded rod and were afterwards tested with both a broken rod and a complete rod. The looking pattern of both female and male participants aged 8 months did not reveal the ability…