Joint attention (JA) is the purposeful coordination of an individual's focus of attention with that of another and begins to develop within the first year of life. Delayed, or atypically developing, JA is an early behavioural sign of many developmental disabilities and so assessing JA in infancy can improve our understanding of trajectories of…

A qualitative study of three parents and their toddlers with autism was conducted to investigate the communicative functions underlying parent-toddler interactions and how the instrumental or social nature of one partner's actions influenced the other's engagement. Parent-child interaction videos collected from a separate intervention study were…

A qualitative study of three parents and their toddlers with autism was conducted to investigate the communicative functions underlying parent-toddler interactions and how the instrumental or social nature of one partner's actions influenced the other's engagement. Parent-child interaction videos collected from a separate intervention study were…

Detecting self-generated actions and imitating other-generated actions are important abilities in order to interact with others. The relationship between these domains was investigated in 6-8-month-old infants. In a contingency-preference task, infants observed their own legs on a real-time and a delayed video display. In an imitation task, the…

Given the centrality of prosociality in everyday social functioning, understanding the factors and mechanisms underlying the origins of prosocial development is of critical importance. This experiment investigated whether experience with reciprocal object exchanges can drive the developmental onset of sharing behavior. Seven-month-old infants took…

Given the dependent nature of parent-infant interactions necessary for language development, it is important to understand how context may influence these interactions. This study examines how contextual variables influence communicative, cognitive and social measures of parent-infant interactions. Specifically, how do feedback toys and…

Typically developing (TD) children refer to objects uniquely in gesture (e.g., point at a cat) before they produce verbal labels for these objects ("cat"). The onset of such gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words, showing a strong positive relation between early gestures and early words. We asked whether gesture plays the…

Over the past few decades, there has been extensive debate as to whether humans represent number abstractly and, if so, whether perceptual features of a set such as cumulative surface area or contour length are extracted more readily than number from the external world. Here we show that 7-month-old infants are sensitive to smaller ratio changes…

Infants' motor skill development triggers changes in parent-infant interactions, exploration, and play behaviors, particularly during periods of locomotor transitions. We investigated how these transitions reorganized infants' and mothers' explorations of spatial layouts. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed biweekly from the age of 6…

The present dissertation extracted 17,291 questions from Aki, Ryo, and Tai and their mother's spontaneously produced speech data available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000; Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, 1998). The children's age ranged from 1;3 to 3;0. Their questions were coded for (1) yes/no questions that include a sentence-final…

Differences in vocabulary that children bring with them to school can be traced back to the gestures they produced at the age of 1;2, which, in turn, can be traced back to the gestures their parents produced at the same age (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009a). We ask here whether child gesture can be experimentally increased and, if so, whether the…

Atypical gaze processing has been reported in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Here we explored how infants at risk for ASD respond behaviorally to others' direct gaze. We assessed 10-month-olds with a sibling with ASD (high risk group; n = 61) and a control group (n = 18) during interaction with an adult. Eye-tracking revealed less…

Since their discovery in the early 1990s, mirror neurons have been proposed to be related to many social-communicative abilities, such as imitation. However, research into the early manifestations of the putative neural mirroring system and its role in early social development is still inconclusive. In the current EEG study, mu suppression,…

This qualitative multicase study explored the process through which three student caregivers engaged in relationships with key infants in the context of an infant practicum course as a foundation for learning about infant development and practice. Focusing on caregiver-infant dyads, data sources included videotaped observations of caregiver-child…

Previous studies have demonstrated that various psychosocial risks are associated with poor cognitive functioning in children, and these risks frequently cluster together. In the current longitudinal study, we tested a model in which it was hypothesized that cumulative psychosocial adversity of mothers would have deleterious effects on children's…