Between 6 and 9 months, while infant's ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group is maintained, discrimination of faces within other-race groups declines to a point where 9-month-old infants fail to discriminate other-race faces. Such face perception narrowing can be overcome in various ways at 9 or 12 months of age, such as…

Malnutrition is a global concern and it impacts negatively on mortality, morbidity, educability and productivity. Millions of children in South Africa are affected. This study examines the key factors associated with malnutrition among children aged six months to five years in a semi-rural area of the Western Cape, South Africa. A quantitative…

Montrul's (2008) onset age hypothesis predicts that, if attrition occurs in early bilingualism, it will be more severe in simultaneous than in sequential bilinguals. This study tested that prediction in an eye-tracking experiment focused on the processing of Spanish gender agreement during sentence reading. Heritage Spanish speakers exposed to…

In this commentary, Buchheim states that she recognizes that infant-parent relationship has been shown to be of particular significance to preterm infants' socioemotional development, and that preterm children have been reported to be at higher risk of developing attachment insecurity and disorganized attachment. In the feature paper on attachment…

Research has shown that young infants use contrasting acoustic information to distinguish consonants. This has been used to argue that by 12 months, infants have homed in on their native language sound categories. However, this ability seems to be positionally constrained, with contrasts at the beginning of words (onsets) discriminated earlier.…

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a…

Advocating for quality early care and education has been an Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) priority for many years, starting with the commitment to ensure that children in disadvantaged communities have the opportunity for state-funded, full-day preschool. ACNJ firmly believes that the path to success in school and in life starts with…

The power of human language rests upon its intricate links to human cognition. By 3 months of age, listening to language supports infants' ability to form object categories, a building block of cognition. Moreover, infants display a systematic shift between 3 and 4 months--a shift from familiarity to novelty preferences--in their expression of…

The aim of this study is to define the changes within the social dimension of the functional status of women and their partners in the months following the birth of their child. A total of 90 participants were included in the study (45 women and 45 partners). Data were collected in two steps via face-to-face interviews. The first step involved…

Fifteen-month-olds have difficulty detecting differences between novel words differing in a single vowel. Previous work showed that Australian English (AusE) infants habituated to the word-object pair DEET detected an auditory switch to DIT and DOOT in Canadian English (CanE) but not in their native AusE (Escudero et al., 2014). The authors…

Although preterm infants are at risk for social deficits, interventions to improve mother-infant interaction in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) are not part of standard care (SC). Study participants were a subset from a randomized controlled trial of a new intervention for premature infants, the Family Nurture Intervention (FNI), designed…

Anger is a central characteristic of negative affect and is relatively stable from infancy onward. Absolute levels of anger typically peak in early childhood and diminish as children become socialized and better able to regulate emotions. From infancy to school age, however, there are also individual differences in rank-order levels of anger. For…

Purpose: The vocalizations of young infants often sound nasalized, suggesting that the velopharynx is open during the 1st few months of life. Whereas acoustic and perceptual studies seemed to support the idea that the velopharynx closes for vocalization by about 4 months of age, an aeromechanical study contradicted this (Thom, Hoit, Hixon, &…

How long does it take for a newborn to recognize an object? Adults can recognize objects rapidly, but measuring object recognition speed in newborns has not previously been possible. Here we introduce an automated controlled-rearing method for measuring the speed of newborn object recognition in controlled visual worlds. We raised newborn chicks…

Adults automatically infer a person's social disposition and future behavior based on the many properties they observe about how they look and sound. The goal of the current study is to explore the developmental origins of this bias. We tested whether 12-month-old infants automatically infer a character's social disposition (e.g., whether they are…