Each year, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) releases a list of scientific advances that represent significant progress in the field of autism research. The "Summary of Advances" provides short, plain language summaries of the top research breakthroughs selected by the IACC from a pool of research articles nominated by…

This study examined the relation of 3-year core information-processing abilities to lexical growth and development. The core abilities covered four domains--memory, representational competence (cross-modal transfer), processing speed, and attention. Lexical proficiency was assessed at 3 and 13 years with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT)…

Since its creation in the early 1980s, Light Box, a product developed by the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) that is designed for working on functional vision tasks with children who have visual impairments or multiple disabilities, has been an effective tool to help teach children with visual impairments to locate and track items…

Sensitive responding to others' emotional body expressions is an essential social skill in humans. Using event-related brain potentials, it has recently been shown that the ability to discriminate between emotional body expressions develops between 4 and 8 months of age. However, it is not clear whether the perception of emotional body expressions…

The present studies examined the role of linguistic experience in directing English and Mandarin learners' attention to aspects of a visual scene. Specifically, they asked whether young language learners in these 2 cultures attend to differential aspects of a word-learning situation. Two groups of English and Mandarin learners, 6-8-month-olds (n =…

The trend toward inclusive and interdisciplinary service delivery in early intervention and early childhood special education has propelled collaboration focused on aligning respective standards for personnel preparation across professional organizations (V. D. Stayton, 2015). Representing what a state deems to be the minimum parameters necessary…

Children under 18 years represent 23 percent of the population, but they comprise 33 percent of all people in poverty. Among all children, 44 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. Our very youngest children--infants and toddlers under age 3 years--appear to be particularly…

This dissertation examined the role of maternal input in word order acquisition of Mandarin-speaking children from the one-word to multi-word stages. Four questions about the role of maternal input were addressed: frequency effects, age-related changes, utterance type effects, and verb diversity effects. Predictions for each question were made…

Thirty infants at 1;1 and their mothers were videotaped while playing for 18 minutes. Experimental stimuli were presented in three communicative intent contexts--proto-declarative, proto-imperative, and ambiguous--to elicit infant communicative bids that did and did not contain gestures. Mothers' responses were analyzed, and their verbal responses…

The Fullerton Longitudinal Study offers a unique opportunity to model the stability of intelligence and achievement and their relations from elementary through secondary school. Using latent variable modeling, we fit a cross-lagged panel model to examine the relations between intelligence and achievement in two academic domains: mathematics and…

Early Childhood Mental Health Endorsement® (ECMH-E®) offers a credential for those whose work with or on behalf of children 3-6 years old and their families is informed by infant and early childhood mental health principles. Those who have earned ECMH-E demonstrate completion of specialized education, work, in-service training, and reflective…

We compared loss and gain in communication from 1 to 2 years in children later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (n = 41), language impairment (n = 110) and in children with typical language development at 7 years (n = 831). Participants were selected from a prospective population cohort study of child language (the Early Language in…

The DEC Recommended Practices provide guidance to families and professionals about the most effective ways to improve learning outcomes and promote development of young children, birth through age 5, who have, or are at-risk for, developmental delays or disabilities. "Family: Knowing Families, Tailoring Practices, Building Capacity" is…

Research has indicated differences in prosodic expression for infants-at-risk-of-autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and it has been proposed that caregiver speech to these infants may also be moderated prosodically. In typical development, the pitch range of maternal infant-directed speech (IDS) narrows and utterance intensity decreases with infant…

This study analyzes how others engage rural and urban Mozambican infants during naturalistic observations, and how the proportion of time spent in different engagements relates to infants' language development over the second year of life. Using an extended version of Bakeman and Adamson's (1984) categorization of infant engagement, we…