Over 10 years, five state colleges and universities in a Midwestern state offered blended early childhood education training programs. A total of 242 teachers with unified ECE teaching endorsements in this state completed an online survey exploring their preparedness for work in inclusive settings with children birth to grade 3. Results describe…

Background: Maternal eating disorders (ED) have been shown to increase the risk of feeding difficulties in the offspring. Very few studies, however, have investigated whether the effect of a maternal ED on childhood feeding is a direct effect or whether it can be ascribed to other child or maternal factors. We aimed to determine the role of…

For the past several decades, researchers have been investigating the stages infants go through on their way to acquiring their native language. Research into the question of the order in which, and time when, various facets of phonology are acquired has resulted in a basic timeline of development. Exploration of a second question, namely what…

To learn from conspecifics, infants would be greatly advantaged by knowing when to seek information from them. Although in prior work infants used a labeler's gaze direction to infer the referent of a novel label, it was unclear whether infants in these studies recognized that they needed information or were happening upon the information by…

The present study investigates the contribution of 2 mechanisms to imitation in infancy. The principle of rational action suggests that infants normatively evaluate the efficiency of observed actions. In contrast, it has been proposed that motor resonance (i.e., the mapping of others' actions onto one's own motor repertoire) plays a central role…

In two experiments, we investigated the development of representational flexibility in visual recognition memory during infancy using the Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) task. In Experiment 1, 6- and 9-month-old infants exhibited recognition when familiarization and test occurred in the same room, but showed no evidence of recognition when…

This research investigated 12-month-olds' ability to use person-specific language to determine to which of several absent things a person is referring. Infants were introduced to two experimenters who played separately with a different ball. One researcher asked infants to retrieve her object when both balls were hidden. Infants selected the…

A violation-of-expectation paradigm was used to test whether infants infer a person based on the presence of hands alone. Infants were familiarized to a pair of hands that extended out from a curtain to play with a rattle, after which the curtain was opened to reveal either a real person or a mannequin. Infants' looking at these outcomes was…

Two experiments investigate whether 7-month-olds reason about the origin of motion events by considering two sources of causally relevant information: spatiotemporal cues and dispositional status information derived from the identification of an object as either animate (with the enduring causal property of self-initiated motion) or inanimate…

Until recently, it was generally assumed that the ability to attribute false beliefs did not emerge until about 4 years of age. However, recent reports using spontaneous- as opposed to elicited-response tasks have suggested that this ability may be present much earlier. To date, researchers have employed two kinds of spontaneous-response…

The Mirror Neuron System hypothesis stating that observed actions are projected onto the observer's own action system assigns an important role to development, because only actions mastered by the observer can be mirrored. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether there is evidence of a functioning mirror neuron system (MNS) in…

There is a growing list of examples illustrating that infants are transitioning from having earlier abilities that appear more "universal," "broadly tuned," or "unconstrained" to having later abilities that appear more "specialized," "narrowly tuned," or "constrained." Perceptual narrowing, a well-known phenomenon related to face, speech, and…

Relationship-based interventions are an effective means for reducing postpartum depression (PPD), but few cost-effective tools that can be administered efficiently in medical and home settings are available or well-studied. This study examines the efficacy of the Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO), an infant-centered relationship-based…

Objective: To determine the prevalence of home safety practices and use of safety equipment by disadvantaged families participating in a national home safety equipment scheme in England. Design: Cross-sectional postal survey sent to a random sample of 1,000 families. Setting: England, United Kingdom. Results: Half the families (51%) returned a…

The early relationship between children's emerging articulatory abilities and their capacity to process speech input was investigated, following recent studies with English-learning infants. Twenty-six monolingual Italian-learning infants were tested at 6 months (no consistent and stable use of consonants, or vocal motor schemes [VMS]) and at the…