Five-month-old infants selectively attend to novel people who sing melodies originally learned from a parent, but not melodies learned from a musical toy or from an unfamiliar singing adult, suggesting that music conveys social information to infant listeners. Here, we test this interpretation further in older infants with a more direct measure of…

Opioid use in pregnancy and the postpartum period increases the vulnerability of the newborn in many ways. No single system can appropriately meet all the needs of this population. Due to the variety of systems that are involved, there are multiple opportunities for gaps in care. Thus, the systems of care must collaborate, communicate, and share…

This research develops a context-sensitive understanding of infant toilet training that takes account of a diversity of influences on the phenomenon. Data are drawn from a qualitative study of everyday life in families with young children. Parents in 54 families living in Norway were interviewed about the everyday life of the family during their…

Adults need to recognize and understand the importance of the parent-child relationship in supporting infants and young children who are exposed to traumatic events. All children need the support, security, and safety that come with a consistent, emotionally available relationship. For young children who have a more limited understanding and…

Good nutrition during the 1,000-day window between pregnancy and 2 years old can give children the opportunity to reach their full potential. Conversely, malnutrition early in life can cause irreversible damage to a child's brain development and physical growth, leading to a lifetime of poor health and lost potential. Each year, malnutrition costs…

Early intervention (EI) for families of infants and toddlers with or at risk for developmental delays or disabilities is federally guided to begin at birth or older. With technological advances in prenatal testing, pregnant families are increasingly learning of diagnoses that result in EI eligibility once the child is born. For these families,…

Substantial evidence endorses the early assessment of cognitive development to promote children's developmental health and well-being. Especially in the Brazilian context, there is a paucity of standardized screening and assessment tools with normative data to evaluate young children. This study provided initial reliability and validity evidence…

The current research aims at constructing a developmentally sensitive mindreading scale (i.e., a battery of tasks measuring different aspects of mindreading ability in children from 1 to 3.5 years of age). Over 300 Polish children were tested at six-month intervals with 48 different tasks designed to measure mindreading ability (for a total of six…

Community health workers have been shown to be an effective way to improve health outcomes in under-resourced contexts like South Africa. Community health workers can support health and well-being through supporting mother-infant bonding, which is associated with a wide range of benefits. The bond between mother and infant is critical for infants'…

Families who have children with delays or disabilities are often expected to become advocates for their children. Despite this inherent expectation, there is limited research available focused on advocacy during the early years (birth to three). The purpose of this study was to use qualitative inquiry, specifically semi-structured interviews, to…

This dissertation investigated the caregiving relationships between infants and nonparental caregivers in early childcare settings through the lens of attachment and language behaviors. This study sought to provide an opportunity to extend our understanding of the socioemotional factors that influence children's development in their daily lives.…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…

Word segmentation is a fundamental aspect of language learning, since identification of word boundaries in continuous speech must occur before the acquisition of word meanings can take place. We previously used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are less sensitive to statistical and…

In the spring of 2020, the emerging COVID-19 pandemic prompted states across the country to mandate that most early childhood education programs close, leaving families with young children scrambling to adapt to full-time caregiving and leaving educators uncertain of their economic and professional future. For many communities, this hardship was…

Infants change their behaviours in accordance with the objects they are exploring. They also tailor their exploratory actions to the physical context. This selectivity of exploratory actions represents a foundational cognitive skill that underlies higher-level cognitive processes. The present study compared the development of selective exploratory…