The cognitive mechanisms and benefits of active learning in early child development are poorly understood. The current study investigated 20-23-month-old infants' curiosity-driven information selection in a novel word learning task, designed to identify any potential advantage for active learning over passive learning. In a gaze-contingent…

New motor skills can shape how infants communicate with their caregivers. For example, learning to walk allows infants to move faster and farther than they previously could, in turn allowing them to approach their caregivers more frequently to gesture or vocalize. Does the link between walking and communication differ for infants later diagnosed…

It is known that infant-directed speech (IDS) plays a key role in language development. Previous research, however, has also identified significant variability across societies in terms of how often IDS occurs. For example, some studies report very little IDS in non-western, small-scale societies -- including children growing up in small-scale…

One of the earliest sources of mathematical input arises in dyadic parent-child interactions. However, the emphasis has been on parental input only in speech and how input varies across different environmental and child-specific factors remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the relationship among parental math input modality and type,…

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…

Caregivers' goals influence their interactions with their children. In this preregistered study, we examined whether directing parents to "teach" their baby versus "learn" from their baby influenced the extent to which they engaged in intrusive (e.g., controlling, adult-centered rather than child-centered), sensitive, warm, or…

This study explores vocal development as an early marker of autism, focusing on canonical babbling rate and onset, typically established by 7 months. Previous reports suggested delayed or reduced canonical babbling in infants later diagnosed with autism, but the story may be complicated. We present a prospective study on 44 infants later diagnosed…

School readiness is a topic of great interest to early childhood and maternal child health initiatives, such as the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programme. However, there is a lack of information about best practices or strategies in home visiting and their relative effectiveness in improving school readiness,…

Research has documented elevated experiences of racial discrimination among African American families, and its adverse impacts on their psychological well-being. However, most studies have investigated the experiences of and consequences for older children and adults. The goal of the current study was to examine the relations among mothers'…

Four-month-old infants extract ordinal information in number-based and size-based visual sequences, provided that magnitude changes involve increasing relations. Here the ontogenetic origins of ordinal processing were investigated between 2018 and 2022 by testing newborns' discrimination of reversal in numerosity (Experiment 1, N = 22 White, 11…

Sleep problems have been associated with atypical development, but there is limited understanding of when sleep problems arise and how they differ across clinical populations. We aimed to evaluate sleep characteristics of infants with Down syndrome (DS), higher familial likelihood of autism (HL) and lower familial likelihood of autism (LL) at 6…

This study examined the characteristics of the vocal behaviors of parents and preterm infants, as compared to their term-born peers, at three months of age. Potential links between specific features of parental IDS and infants' vocal activity were also sought. We analyzed the frequencies and durations of vocalizations and pauses during the dyadic…

Maternal perinatal stress is a well-documented risk factor for adverse child outcomes, but limited evidence is available from Latin America. This study investigated associations between maternal psychosocial stress during pregnancy and postpartum and infant socioaffective development at 3 months of age in Argentina. The sample included 198…

Purpose: To investigate the language environments experienced by preterm-born infants, this study compared the linguistic and interactive features of parent--infant conversations involving 2-year-old preterm- and term-born infants. The study also explored how mother-infant and father-infant conversations may be differentially affected by…

Infancy is a period of significant change for both the brain and behavior. During the first two years of life, the brain experiences an explosion of synaptic connections and myelination, alongside rapid development in motor, linguistic, and social behavioral abilities. Understanding the relationship between brain development and behavioral…