As infants interact with the object world, they generate rich information about object properties and functions. Much of infant learning unfolds in the presence of caregivers, who talk about and act on the objects of infant play. Does mother joint engagement correspond to real-time changes in the complexity and duration of infant object…

Infants build knowledge by acting on the world. We conducted an ecologically grounded test of an embodied learning hypothesis: that infants' active engagement with objects in the home environment elicits caregiver naming and cascades to learning object names. Our home-based study extends laboratory-based theories to identify real-world processes…

Infants and toddlers experience the world in interaction with others. Likewise, social interactions are important in learning about math--concepts of number ("one," "two," "three"), space ("on top," "upside-down," "round"), and magnitude ("more," "big,"…

This article seeks to connect ethnographic findings from a study on parenting, childcare and early childhood in Chile's Mapuche communities with facets of the LOPI model. From Facet 1, we observe that children are included in social situations from an early stage, which empowers them to learn how to interact through such instances as greeting…

Background: Typical scaffolding coding schemes provide overall scores to compare across a sample. As such, insights into the scaffolding process can be obscured: the child's contribution to the learning; the particular skills being taught and learned; and the overall changes in amount of scaffolding over the course of the task. Aims: This study…

Purpose: Although a growing body of literature has identified the positive effects of visual speech on speech and language learning, oral movements of infant-directed speech (IDS) have rarely been studied. This investigation used 3-dimensional motion capture technology to describe how mothers modify their lip movements when talking to their…

The relation of social and linguistic input measures to early vocabulary development was examined in 30 low-income African American mother-infant pairs. Observations were conducted when the child was 0 years, 1 month (0;1), 0;4, 0;8, 1;0, 1;6, and 2;0. Maternal input was coded for word types and tokens, contingent responsiveness, and…

This study used event-related potentials (ERP) and visual preference technique to assess 6-month olds' ability to recognize their mothers' face. Results of five experiments suggested that infants can recognize their mothers' face, but the neural processes accompanying recognition depend on the difficulty with which mothers can be discriminated…

We examined whether mothers' use of temporal synchrony between spoken words and moving objects, and infants' attention to object naming, predict infants' learning of word-object relations. Following 5 min of free play, 24 mothers taught their 6- to 8-month-olds the names of 2 toy objects, "Gow" and "Chi," during a 3-min play…

Since general principles of first language acquisition and environmental input have been clarified by research of the last decade, more differentiated questions are explored in the present study. The main goal is the investigation of similarities and differences in the language teaching and learning processes involved in the verbal interactions…

A report is presented which relates to a general hypothesis suggested by previous data on visual response to faces that in the first weeks of life infants develop expectations regarding the human face. Three predictions were made: (1) Silent human faces would elicit less direct regard than faces accompanied by voices; (2) A familiar face would…

This longitudinal study including 87 infant-mother dyads examined the relation between infant temperamental attention, maternal encouragement of attention, language, and the effects of gender. At ages 0;4, 0;8, and 1;0, global attention was assessed from Rothbart's (1981) IBQ; manipulative exploration was assessed with the Bayley (1969) IBR; and…

The second year of the Community Family Day Care Project, begun in August 1970, to test the belief that group day care is the best way to provide care for children of working parents is discussed. The tasks for the second year were to demonstrate the feasibility of improving quality, stability, continuity, and flexibility in an existing network of…

This discussion is divided into two chapters: Dominant Social Definition of Early Childhood and The Predominate Definition of Early Childhood and Social Learning. The first chapter has the following divisions: (1) The child as intellectual learner and artistic creator, (2) The naive science and naive art, (3) The "cultural" market of early…