Objectives: (1) To estimate the incidence of abusive abdominal trauma (AAT) hospitalizations among US children age 0-9 years. (2) To identify demographic characteristics of children at highest risk for AAT. Design: Secondary data analysis of a cross-sectional, national hospitalization database. Setting: Hospitalization data from the 2003 and 2006…

Recent models of the early emergence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) propose an interaction between risk susceptibility and the infant's social environment, resulting in a progressively atypical developmental trajectory. The infant's early social environmental experience consists mostly of interaction with caregivers, yet there has been little…

Maternal cortisol levels (at 15, 19, 25, 31 and 37 weeks' gestation) and fetal movement response to vibroacoustic stimulation (VAS; at 25, 31 and 37 weeks) were assessed in 190 mother-fetus pairs. Fetuses showed a response to the VAS at 25 weeks and there was evidence of increasing maturation in the response at 31 and 37 weeks. Early elevations in…

This article presents an intensive analysis of a good outcome case of constructivist grief therapy with a bereaved mother, using the Innovative Moments Coding System (IMCS). Inspired by M. White and D. Epston's narrative therapy, the IMCS conceptualizes therapeutic change as resulting from the elaboration and expansion of unique outcomes (or as we…

Using an artificial language learning manipulation, Maye, Werker, and Gerken (2002) demonstrated that infants' speech sound categories change as a function of the distributional properties of the input. In a recent study, Werker et al. (2007) showed that Infant-directed Speech (IDS) input contains reliable acoustic cues that support distributional…

Dynamic spatial indexing is the ability to encode, remember, and track the location of complex events. For example, in a previous study, 6-month-old infants were familiarized to a toy making a particular sound in a particular location, and later they fixated that empty location when they heard the sound presented alone ("Journal of Experimental…

Why is a face with a smile but non-happy eyes likely to be interpreted as happy? We used blended expressions in which a smiling mouth was incongruent with the eyes (e.g., angry eyes), as well as genuine expressions with congruent eyes and mouth (e.g., both happy or angry). Tasks involved detection of a smiling mouth (perceptual), categorization of…

Both subjective impressions and previous research with monolingual listeners suggest that a foreign accent interferes with word recognition in infants, young children, and adults. However, because being exposed to multiple accents is likely to be an everyday occurrence in many societies, it is unexpected that such non-standard pronunciations would…

Linguistic stress and sequential statistical cues to word boundaries interact during speech segmentation in infancy. However, little is known about how the different acoustic components of stress constrain statistical learning. The current studies were designed to investigate whether intensity and duration each function independently as cues to…

In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to evaluate the contribution of surface color and color knowledge information in object identification. We constructed two color-object verification tasks--a surface and a knowledge verification task--using high color diagnostic objects; both typical and atypical color versions of the same…

Although growth in head circumference (HC) during infancy is known to predict later childhood outcomes, the mechanisms underlying this association with later sociocognitive abilities remain undetermined. Thus, using a sample of 241 pairs of normally developing Japanese twins, this study investigated the underpinnings of the association between HC…

Building on extensive feedback from the field as well as vigorous new research on how best to support infant and toddler development and learning, the authors have revised and updated the widely used "Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale." ITERS-3 is the next-generation assessment tool for use in center-based child care programs for…

Although there is consensus about the importance of early communicative gestures such as pointing, there is an ongoing debate regarding how infants develop the ability to understand and produce pointing gestures. We review competing theories regarding this development and use observations from a diary study of infants' social development, focusing…

This paper is aimed at analyzing verbal and nonverbal strategies in terms of body contact, face-to-face contact, and discourse style during the first three months of life in two cultural communities that have been characterized as embodying different cultural models of parenting: German middle-class, and Nso farmer families. It can be demonstrated…

Most children are able to successfully develop and use social skills in the context of interactions with peers and significant adults. Moreover, the ability to interact successfully with peers is crucial in establishing and maintaining viable social relationships. For children with disabilities, like pervasive development disorder (PDD),…