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…

Purpose: We aimed to provide novel information on utterance duration as it relates to vocal type, facial affect, gaze direction, and age in the prelinguistic/early linguistic infant. Method: Infant utterances were analyzed from longitudinal recordings of 15 infants at 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 months of age. Utterance durations were measured and coded…

Wynn's (1992) seminal research reported that infants looked longer at stimuli representing "incorrect" versus "correct" solutions of basic addition and subtraction problems and concluded that infants have innate arithmetical abilities. Since then, infancy researchers have attempted to replicate this effect, yielding mixed…

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…

One of the most fundamental aspects of learning a language is determining the mappings between words and referents. An often-overlooked complication is that infants interact with multiple individuals who may not produce words in the same way. In the present study, we explored whether 10- to 12-month-olds can use talker-specific knowledge to infer…

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…

The development of theory of mind (ToM) in infancy has been mainly documented through studies conducted on a single age group with a single task. Very few studies have examined ToM abilities other than false belief, and very few studies have used a within-subjects design. During 2 testing sessions, infants aged 14 and 18 months old were…

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…

Infants' disposition to learn repetitions in the input structure has been demonstrated in pattern generalization (e.g., learning the pattern ABB from the token "ledidi"). This study tested whether a repetition advantage can also be found in lexical learning (i.e., learning the word "lele" vs. "ledi"). Twenty-four…

This is a longitudinal study of development in coordinated mother-infant vocal interaction from 4 to 10 months (N = 41) focusing on the development of turn-taking patterns and time spent in coordinated vocal interaction. Data analyses were carried out using multistate analysis. Both mothers and infants were found to coordinate their own…

Infant-parent interactions are bidirectional; therefore, it is important to understand how infants' communicative behavior elicits variable responses from caregivers and, in turn, how infants' behavior varies with caregivers' responses; furthermore, how these moment-to-moment interactive behaviors relate to later language development. The current…

Two experiments demonstrate that 5-month-olds are sensitive to local redundancy in visual-temporal sequences. In Experiment 1, 20 infants saw 2 separate sequences of looming colored shapes that possessed the same elements but contrasting transitional probabilities. One sequence was random whereas the other was based on bigrams. Without any prior…

Recent work has shown that children have detailed phonological representations of consonants at both word-initial and word-final edges. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether onsets and codas are equally represented by young learners since word edges are isomorphic with syllable edges in this work. The current study sought to explore toddler's…

The first distribution of Chinese infant-mother (n = 61) attachment classifications categorised by trained and reliability-tested coders is reported with statistical comparisons to US norms and previous Chinese distributions. Three-way distribution was 15% insecure-avoidant, 62% secure, 13% insecure-resistant, and 4-way distribution was 13%…