There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted…

In this article, I briefly review theories about the development of theory of mind, and then examine evidence for minimalism, the idea that infants initially understand only behaviors. To this end, I consider the need for a wide variety of species to predict the behaviors of other animals and that human infants are not unique in this regard. I…

Fragmented sleep is common in infancy. Although night awakening is known to decrease with age, in some infants night awakening is more persistent and continues into older ages. However, the influence of fragmented sleep on development is poorly known. In the present study, the longitudinal relationship between fragmented sleep and psychomotor…

From a dynamic systems perspective, transition points in development are times of increased instability, during which behavioral patterns are susceptible to temporary decoupling. This study investigated the impact of the vocabulary spurt on existing patterns of communicative coordination. Eighteen typically developing infants were videotaped at…

This dissertation investigates how distributional information in the speech stream can assist infants in the initial stages of acquisition of their native language phonology. An exploratory statistical analysis derives this information from the adult speech data in the corpus of conversations between adults and young children in Russian. Because…

IN EXPERIMENT 1, DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGES IN THE PROSODIC FEATURES OF INFANT VOCALIZING WERE STUDIED WITH NOVEL ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC TECHNIQUES. COMPLETE AND CONTINUOUS RECORDINGS OF ALL THE VOCALIZATIONS OF TWO INFANTS DURING THE FIRST FIVE MONTHS OF LIFE WERE COLLECTED AND SYSTEMATICALLY SAMPLED FOR ANALYSIS. COMPOSITE STATISTICS, DESCRIBING THE THREE…

This book is a collection of six papers presented at a 1974 University of Minnesota symposium on child development. The six chapters deal with language acquisition, visual perception, effects of television viewing, the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), problem-solving strategies, and Piagetian concepts related to social development. The first…

Determined whether young children's inconsistent production of sentence subjects was due to limitations in their knowledge of English or in their ability to access and use that knowledge. Subjects were 19 young children from 1 to 2 years old. Found that processing limitations, rather than defective grammar, explain the missing subjects in very…

Presents nine experimental studies investigating auditory and visual discrimination in very young infants. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding habituation, cross-modal stimulation, receptive language development, and individual differences. Appendices include data on visual fixation duration and information on…

This investigation addresses problems of defining verbal imitation, and suggests solutions by analyzing verbal interactions between two children and their mothers. Children were between 18 and 35 months old, with a mean length of utterance between 1.4 and 4.2 morphemes. Analyses focus upon the uses these children made of maternal models; 10…

This study compared the linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral performance at 6-8 years of age of eight children born preterm and low birth weight (3-5 pounds) with that of 12 full-term peers. Quantitative analyses of performance profiles for all the children are provided. Findings found no significant differences between groups in linguistic,…

The behavior of a preverbal infant was analyzed in a search for orderly and systematic patterns. Basic elements of the infant's repertoire were distinguished. A comparison was made between the nonverbal and those verbal structures which appear early. (Author/RM)

Assessment of the prelinguistic behaviors of 43 deaf children (ages 8 to 49 months) of hearing parents in Israel found only partial resemblance to the theoretical model of prelinguistic communication in hearing infants. Unique interrelationships among pointing and early noncommunicative behaviors were found with no correlation between use of…

Analyzes components of the concept of intuitive parenting in cultural samples of 10 German, 20 U.S. and 6 Greek mothers with first-born infants. Although results indicate general parenting programs that are not culturally specific, quantitative cultural differences are found in verbal behavior. (SLD)