Observation is a useful tool, even in infant and toddler classrooms. Applied correctly, observation and assessment can help lay a foundation for a successful education throughout life. As appropriate practices are researched and policies change, teachers and caregivers of the youngest children (referred to as careteachers for this article) find…

In some areas of rural Africa, long-standing cultural traditions and beliefs may discourage parents from verbally engaging with their young children. This study assessed the effectiveness of a parenting program designed to encourage verbal engagement between caregivers and infants in Wolof-speaking villages in rural Senegal. Caregivers (n = 443)…

Zika virus infection-associated microcephaly has generated public health and media concern. Unsettling images emerging from Brazil of infants with abnormally small heads have raised concern among women of childbearing age, international travelers, government officials, and health care professionals. The World Health Organization declared the most…

Many English-speaking children use plural nominal forms in spontaneous speech before the age of two, and display some understanding of plural inflection in production tasks. However, results from an intermodal preferential study suggested a lack of "comprehension" of nominal plural morphology at 24 months of age (Kouider, Halberda, Wood,…

Theoretically, interventions initiated with at-risk infants prior to the point in time a definitive autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis can be made will improve outcomes. Pursuing this idea, we tested the efficacy of a parent-mediated early intervention called Adapted Responsive Teaching (ART) via a randomized controlled trial with 87…

The present article proposes a new developmental model of how young infants adapt and respond to complex contingencies in their environment, and how this influences development. The model proposes that typically developing infants adjust to an increasingly complex environment in ways that make it easier for them to allocate limited attentional…

Throughout their 1st year, infants adeptly detect statistical structure in their environment. However, little is known about whether statistical learning is a primary mechanism for event segmentation. This study directly tests whether statistical learning alone is sufficient to segment continuous events. Twenty-eight 7- to 9-month-old infants…

In previous infant studies on statistics-based word segmentation, the unit of statistical computation was always aligned with the syllabic edge, which had a consonant onset. The current study addressed whether the learning system imposes a constraint that favors word forms beginning with a consonant onset over those beginning with an onsetless…

Typically, the point vowels [i,?,u] are acoustically more peripheral in infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). If caregivers seek to highlight lexically relevant contrasts in IDS, then two sounds that are contrastive should become more distinct, whereas two sounds that are surface realizations of the same underlying…

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same…

This study investigated maternal prenatal docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) intake and infant cognitive development at 22 months. Estimates for second- and third-trimester maternal DHA intake levels were obtained using a comprehensive Food Frequency Questionnaire. Infants (n = 67) were assessed at 22 months on a novel object search task. Mothers'…

Evidence indicates that the nature of adult-infant attachments will impact on the quality of care the infant receives, although findings are often couched in outcomes for children rather than adult concerns. In this article, the argument is made that the adult's experience of caregiving is also an important area for investigation.…

The idea that infant participation in research is achievable by researchers "voicing" infants' experiences and "perspectives" is a central feature of current moves towards participatory research. In this article we offer an alternative. Specifically, we suggest a different point of reference than infants' own…

The Sustainable Development Goals mandate that by 2030, all children should have access to quality early child development opportunities, healthcare and pre-primary education. Yet validated measures of ECD in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are rare. To address this gap, a Systematic Review (SR) of measures available to profile the…

This qualitative study explores how a group of preservice teachers, all of whom had been well prepared to become primary-grade teachers, made a transition into infant/toddler group care settings. The authors used the teachers' daily journal entries, individual interview, document analysis (course syllabus, weekly planning sheets), and weekly team…