Background: Spontaneous upper extremity movements in infancy provide insight on neuromotor development. Spatiotemporal kinematics have been used to evaluate typical development of reaching, a foundational motor skill in infancy. This study evaluates the relationship between spontaneous upper extremity movements, not elicited by a toy, and motor…

Studies on the emergence of effects of socioeconomic inequality typically report that socioeconomic background is positively associated with early cognitive abilities. However, studies on looking behaviour in habituation tasks rarely investigate this association, although such tasks are standard in measuring cognitive abilities in infants. The…

According to the cross-situational learning account, infants aggregate statistical information from multiple parent naming events to resolve ambiguous word-referent mappings within individual naming events. While previous experimental studies have shown that infant and adult learners can build correct mappings based on statistical regularities…

Computational Thinking (CT) is recognised as an essential foundational skill that enhances problem-solving abilities and is a crucial learning area for effective engagement in an increasingly digital society. This paper highlights the significance of screen-less tangible tools in promoting young children's exploration and open-ended play with…

Despite the long-standing debate over the assumed universality of maternal sensitivity predicting attachment security (i.e., sensitivity hypothesis), few long-term longitudinal investigations on attachment have been conducted outside the Western context. We leveraged data from a prospective 9-year longitudinal study of middle-class families (N =…

Recent studies have indicated that patterns of infant-caregiver attachment are associated with differences in infants' processing of social signals of emotion, such as facial expressions. In the current longitudinal study we extended this line of research to social signals of actual attachment figures by investigating whether 7-month-old infants'…

Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to…

There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted…

This was a cross-sectional study that aimed to evaluate the association between breastfeeding and motor development of infants at 3-4 months of age in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul. The outcome, infant motor development, was evaluated through the Bayley Scale of Infant Development (Bayley III). The prevalence of infants that stopped…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to the parent's ability to treat the child as an individual with a mind of his or her own. Studies have found representational and interactional MM to predict child development, but more research is needed on the validity of representational MM in parents of infants. Therefore, we examine the reliability and validity of…

We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus and colleagues from 1999, which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, 7-month-old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we…

How do infants learn about the formal properties of language using only cues they can access in speech? And what intuitions do they bring to the learning problem? Chapter 2: To explore whether current notions of statistically-based language learning could successfully scale to infants' linguistic experiences "in the wild", we implemented…

The socio-emotional experiences of infants during transitions to early childhood education and care (ECEC) and across their first year in these out-of-home contexts are not well known. In an international project across five countries (New Zealand, Finland, Australia, Scotland and the United States), observational data, video of key moments, plus…

Computational models of infant word-finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant-directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies…

The early language environment, especially high-quality, contingent parent-child language interactions, is crucial for a child's language development and later academic success. In this secondary analysis study, 89 parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to either the Music Together® (music) or play date (control) classes. Children were 9- to…