This study presents data on the effectiveness of participatory training, called 'Improvement Groups', voluntarily adopted in four nurseries in Northern Italy to prevent episodes of violence by staff toward children. The interventions provided for the representation of problematic cases, experienced by participants, relating to factors of work…

Background: Variability in the vocabulary outcomes of children with cochlear implants (CIs) is partially explained by child-directed speech (CDS) characteristics. Yet, relatively little is known about whether and how mothers adapt their lexical and prosodic characteristics to the child's hearing status (before and after implantation, and compared…

From their origins, Italian early childhood services paid attention to the transition from family to childcare centre, explicitly referring to attachment theory. In the present study, the "Parent Attachment Diary" was adapted and applied within a childcare centre context to examine the development of infants' relationship with their…

Eighty-one adolescent and young mother-infant dyads have been divided into two groups with/without traumatic experiences in maternal history to examine the effect of maternal traumatic experiences on the quality of mother-infant relationship. At infant 3 months, mother-infant interaction was video-recorded. Results showed that adolescent and young…

This research investigated whether the perception of social-causal relation alone triggers both infants' evaluation processes and expectations about the social preferences of informed third parties. Three experiments were carried out, using the violation of expectation (VoE) paradigm. During the familiarization phase, infants saw events in which…

This study aims to evaluate the influence of fathers' negative feelings, parenting stress and post-traumatic symptomatology experienced after the premature birth of their infant on mother-child interaction and on infant's development in the perinatal period. Forty-five fathers and 45 mothers of preterm infants (GA = 30.25 ± 2.95; birth weight =…

We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical…

Feeding/behavior problems are highly prevalent in autistic children. This study aimed to explore the interplay between autistic features, sensory processing patterns, emotional/behavioral difficulties, and feeding problems in children with a clinical diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Ninety-nine children aged 1.5-5 years were assessed using…

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…

The present study examined maternal responses to infants' spontaneous communicative behaviors in a sample of 20 extremely-low-gestational-age (ELGA) infants and 20 full-term (FT) infants during 30 minutes of play interaction when infants were 12 months of age. Relations between maternal responses and infants' communication skills at 12 and 24…

The study evaluated the relationship between maternal anxiety, depression and parenting stress, and maternal mind-mindedness, styles of interaction, and mother-infant emotion regulation. At infant age 3 months, EPDS, STAI, and PSI-SF were administered to 73 mothers to respectively assess depression, anxiety, and parenting stress; mother-infant…

The present study aimed to investigate the communicative characteristics of children with cochlear implants (CIs) and their mothers in interaction, whether and how they differ from those of mother-child dyads with normal hearing, and whether mother and child influence each other over the first year after implantation. Eighteen Italian-speaking…

Advice about the age for introducing complementary food to infants varies across European countries. Little is known about the actual practice of complementary feeding (CF) in the face of different advice from health professionals within Europe, nor about the impact of different ages of onset of CF on infant food acceptance. This longitudinal…

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…

This article concerns itself with the potential for ateliers to disrupt conformist approaches to pedagogy in early childhood education and care. An illustration of the role of the atelier in amplifying the aesthetics of the experience of the educational project of Reggio Emilia illuminates how disruption of conformity can be activated through the…