Adults have little difficulty perceiving objects as complete despite occlusion, but newborn infants perceive moving partly occluded objects solely in terms of visible surfaces. The developmental mechanisms leading to perceptual completion have never been adequately explained. Here, the authors examine the potential contributions of oculomotor…

Prior work suggests that active experience affects infants' understanding of simple actions. The present studies compared the impact of active and observational experience on infants' ability to identify the goal of a novel tool-use event. Infants either received active training and practice in using a cane to retrieve an out-of-reach toy or had…

There has been limited study of how the constitutional characteristics of infants with Down syndrome (DS) influence the patterning of their relations with caregivers. To assess natural and perturbed interactions between infants with DS and their mothers, we tested ten 6-month-old infants with DS and 20 typically developing (TD) 4-month-old of…

Mothers' use of specific types of object motion in synchrony with object naming was examined, along with infants' joint attention to the mother and object, as a predictor of word learning. During a semistructured 3-min play episode, mothers (N = 24) taught the names of 2 toy objects to their preverbal 6- to 8-month-old infants. The episodes were…

The content of mothers' emotional, verbal, and gestural communication to their infants was examined under conditions of potential physical risk in a laboratory motor task. Mothers encouraged and discouraged their 12- and 18-month-old infants to crawl or walk down a sloping walkway. Mothers expressed positive affect on nearly every trial. They…

Children born preterm exhibit working memory deficits. These deficits may be associated with structural brain changes observed in the neonatal period. In this study, the relationship between neonatal regional brain volumes and working memory deficits at age 2 years were investigated, with a particular interest in the dorsolateral prefrontal…

The current study examines the syntactic and prosodic characteristics of the maternal speech to two infants between six and ten months. Consistent with previous work, we find infant-directed speech to be characterized by generally short utterances, isolated words and phrases, and large numbers of questions, but longer utterances are also found.…

Parents and child care personnel in English-dominant parts of the world often express misgivings about raising children bilingually. Their concerns are based on the belief that dual language learning during the infant-toddler stage confuses children, delays their development, and perhaps even results in reduced language competence. In this…

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). "A first language: The early stages", Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult…

Paper presented at the Merrill-Palmer Institute on Research and Training of Infant Development (Detroit, Mich., Feb. 15-17, 1968).

Examined the nonnutritive sucking responses of 5- to 15-week-old infants to the contingent and noncontingent presention of natural speech stimuli, the contingent withdrawal of speech stimuli, and the absence of speech stimuli. (Author/JMB)

The Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale with Kansas Supplement was administered to 60 newborns who were classified as extremely healthy or as having slight perinatal problems. Correlations between behavioral responding on the assessment scale and levels of plasma cortisol (obtained from blood tests) were examined. (PCB)

Results of three experiments support the generalization that early perception of object unity depends on perceived motion, and that the class of effective motions includes, at least, the rigid translations of an object in three-dimensional space. Effective motions may be specified by very different sources of stimulus information. (RH)

Swimming classes that use forced infant submersion may post health hazards, including hyponatremia (infantile water intoxication), intestinal parasites, and dental enamel erosion. (MT)