We suggest that prior to school entry, our earliest "teachers" and "learning settings" --that is, our parents, caregivers, and homes--provide signals about our environmental conditions. In turn, our brains may interpret this information as cues indicating the types of environments we will likely face and adapt accordingly. We…

Previous findings indicate that bilingual Catalan/Spanish-learning infants attend more to the highly salient audiovisual redundancy cues normally available in a talker's mouth than do monolingual infants. Presumably, greater attention to such cues renders the challenge of learning two languages easier. Spanish and Catalan are, however,…

Maternal perinatal depression is not an uncommon experience, yet few mothers are identified and treated--a concerning fact, given the potential for negative impact on both maternal and infant well-being. In the present study, I review recent research in the field of maternal perinatal depression and highlight associated developmental outcomes…

The study asked whether Deaf mothers seek to exploit the iconicity in signed languages to facilitate their infants' word learning. Two longitudinal case studies followed modifications that 2 Deaf mothers applied to their input while interacting with their hearing infants. Both mothers were sensitive to the communicative abilities of their infants…

Associative word learning, i.e., associating a word with an object, is an important building block of early word learning for TD infants. This study investigated the development of word-I object associations by TD infants and infants and toddlers with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder associated with delayed language and cognitive…

Typically developing (TD) infants adapt to the social world in part by shifting the focus of their processing resources to the relevant aspects of a visual scene. Any impairment in visual orienting may therefore constrain learning and development in domains such as language. However, although something is known about visual orienting in infants at…

Meta-analyses of head circumference in autistic individuals exist; however, simple meta-analytic approaches are limited. Consequently, we gathered head circumference raw data of autistic (N = 2381) and typically developing participants (N = 994) by re-analysing the data from previously published studies together. The present study found no mean…

It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more…

The current article serves a dual purpose: to highlight the overlooked and recent concept of parenting-related exhaustion and to propose a specific methodology to test concurrent variations of the parent's exhaustion with the partner's exhaustion and her or his perceived and given support. Questionnaire data were collected from 97 mother-father…

Lexical iconicity--signs or words that resemble their meaning--is overrepresented in children's early vocabularies. Embodied theories of language acquisition predict that symbols are more learnable when they are grounded in a child's firsthand experiences. As such, pantomimic iconic signs, which use the signer's body to represent a body, might be…

There is a need for more research focusing on the health outcomes of infants born to the understudied group of adolescent mothers. Archivical data from four independent sources were used to answer the following research question: During the child's first year, what adverse health factors are associated with acts of intimate partner violence (IPV)…

In the language development literature, studies often make inferences about infants' speech perception abilities based on their responses to a single speaker. However, there can be significant natural variability across speakers in how speech is produced (i.e., inter-speaker differences). The current study examined whether inter-speaker…

Hudson Kam (2018) examined whether learning of a particular aspect of language that adults are known to have difficulty with (grammatical gender) could be improved by manipulating the learning experience of adults so that it was more like that of infants. Specifically, based on likely differences between adult and child learners' experiences as…

Learning to walk leads to an increase in language abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms accounting for this relation remain unclear. Investigating the quality of early gait control may offer some insights. The purpose of this study was to: (1) quantify how 13-month-olds (n = 39; 39% male) and 24-month-olds (n = 39; 59% male) adapt gait…

Young children with visual impairment and their families often require specialized assistance through early intervention to develop adaptive routines, cues, and environmental settings during mealtimes and other daily tasks. There is little empirical data in the area of mealtime routines available to support families of young children with visual…