The theory of natural pedagogy has proposed that infants can use ostensive signals, including eye contact, infant-directed speech, and contingency to learn from others. However, the role of bodily gestures, such as hand-waving, in social learning has been largely ignored. To address this gap in the literature, this study sought to determine…

This study examined the relevance of infant temperament, parent personality and parenting stress for children's socio-emotional development, looking in addition for any differences between mothers and fathers. Participants, from a community sample, were 410 mothers and fathers reporting their personality (NEO Personality Inventory), child…

This study estimated ASD prevalence in a cohort of 3-year-old very preterm children (N = 55) and investigated the usefulness of parent-reported ASD screeners and the ADOS-2. 12.7% received an ASD diagnosis by clinical judgment based on DSM-5 criteria. An additional 14.5% were classified as having a broader-autism-phenotype outcome. Sensitivity…

This research investigates selectivity in word learning for bilingual infants. Previous work demonstrated that bilingual infants show greater openness to non-native language sounds in object labels than monolinguals (Hay et al., 2015; Singh, 2018). It remains unclear whether bilingual openness extends to nonspeech sounds. We presented 14- and…

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity of eye-tracking methods to evaluate infant and toddler interpretation of visual stimuli. The application of these methods makes it increasingly important to understand the development of infant sensitivity to the perceptual properties implicated in such methods. In light of recent studies that…

Using data from the All Our Families study, a longitudinal study of 1992 mother-child dyads in Canada (47.7% female; 81.9% White), we examined the developmental pathways between infant gestures and symbolic actions and communicative skills at age 5. Communicative gestures at age 12 months (e.g., pointing, nodding head "yes"), obtained…

Previous research has demonstrated differences in the acoustic features of crying signals between deaf and typical hearing (TH) infants. This study aims at comparing the acoustic parameters of cries of infants with different degrees of deafness versus TH infants. About 110 infants aged 6-12 months (61 TH infants, 34 infants with bilateral deafness…

Each language has its unique way to mark grammatical information such as gender, number and tense. For example, English marks number and tense/aspect information with morphological suffixes (e.g., -"s" or -"ed"). These morphological suffixes are crucial for language acquisition as they are the basic building blocks of syntax,…

Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g. 'This is a' + 'dax' -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In…

This present research analyses the linguistic environmental setting in homes of children under the age of two years from different social groups and looks at the extent to which the speech from other children contributes to shaping that environment. The corpus includes recordings of spontaneous speech from middle-class households in residential…

Modern developmental science is informed by several shared principles and adopts a lifespan approach that goes from infancy to senescence. Increasingly, disciplines outside psychology are adopting research frameworks (e.g., fetal origins, developmental origins of health and disease, first 1000 days) that prioritize prenatal experience as a driver…

Interoception--the ability to perceive and respond to internal bodily sensations--is fundamental for the continuous regulation of physiological processes. Recently, it has been suggested that because infants depend completely on their caregivers for survival, the development of interoceptive processing emerges as a result of early dyadic…

Understanding others' preference for a relational category of objects (e.g., prefer darker colored shirts) can be challenging for young children, as it involves comparison of choice options within and across exemplars. Adding to the challenge is occasional inconsistency in choices made by others. Here the authors examined whether 14-month-olds…

Hands convey important social information, such as an individual's emotions, goals, and desires, are used to direct attention through pointing, and are a major organ for haptic perception. However, very little is known about infants' representation of human hands. In Experiment 1, infants tested in a familiarization/novelty preference task…

Early intervention supports infants and toddlers with confirmed or suspected autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in achieving optimal outcomes, and caregiver-implemented NDBIs are recommended as a developmentally appropriate intervention approach for very young children and their families. Research highlights discrepancies between early…