This article analyses early years education policy in England from 1918 to 1972, applying the theoretical ideas of John Kingdon. Throughout this period, the educational needs of young children were a low political priority, but they did occasionally rise on the agenda. When the issue gained prominence, politicians considered two key policy…

Infant-toddler teachers are often the first people outside of families to interact with infants on a daily basis. Through these interactions teachers can promote infant mental health, prevent problems, screen and identify infants experiencing difficulties, make referrals, and work as members of interdisciplinary intervention teams. However,…

An important aspect of Family Language Policy in bilingual families is parental language choice. Little is known about the continuity in parental language choice and the factors affecting it. This longitudinal study explores maternal language choice over time. Thirty-one bilingual mothers provided reports of what language(s) they spoke with their…

This article provides guidelines for an entry-level course that prepares psychology students and practitioners to acquire entry-level skills, abilities, knowledge, and attitudes important to the individual assessment of intellectual abilities of children and youth. The article reviews prominent international, regional, and national policies,…

Low birthweight (LBW) children tend to have higher risks of developmental problems. According to differential susceptibility hypothesis, these putatively vulnerable children may also disproportionately benefit from positive environmental exposure. This study aimed to examine whether LBW status moderates home environmental influences on…

This article outlines the "over-pruning hypothesis" of autism. The hypothesis originates in a neurocomputational model of the regressive sub-type (Thomas, Knowland & Karmiloff-Smith, 2011a, 2011b). Here we develop a more general version of the over-pruning hypothesis to address heterogeneity in the timing of manifestation of ASD,…

Today's pluralistic society is characterized by families from many linguistic and cultural backgrounds, including families with infants and toddlers who are deaf or hard of hearing (d/Dhh). Taking a multicultural perspective, the author examines family-centered early intervention (FCEI) and the transition to school services for children who are…

Personal names are more than just a sound or word. From the earliest stages of development, names are closely connected to a child's attachment figures and sense of identity. Like words of magic, young children first use names to beckon the parent to them. Experiences with others provide the necessary backdrop for young children to infuse names…

This research examined the development of adaptive generalization in infants' object-directed actions. Infants ages 9 and 12 months participated in an object manipulation task with stimulus objects from 2 categories that differed in shape and weight and that bore a consistent shape or weight correspondence. Weight differences between…

Time is central to any understanding of the world. In adults, estimation errors grow linearly with the length of the interval, much faster than would be expected of a clock-like mechanism. Here we present the first direct demonstration that this is also true in human infants. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we examined 4-, 6-, 10-, and…

Following the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this…

Studies of phonological development that combine speech-processing experiments with observation and analysis of production remain rare, although production experience is necessarily relevant to developmental advance. Here we focus on three proposals regarding the relationship of production to word learning: (1) "Articulatory filter": The…

Infants' ability to mentally track the orientation of an object during a hidden rotation was investigated (N = 28 in each experiment). A toy on a turntable was fully covered and then rotated 90°. When revealed, the toy had turned with the turntable (probable event), remained at its starting orientation (improbable event in Experiment 1), or…

Reactive attachment disorder of infancy or early childhood (RAD) was introduced as a psychiatric condition in DSM-III in 1980 (American Psychiatric Association; APA). Students who have this condition, which is associated with experiencing severe social neglect during early development (i.e., before the age of 5), have significant difficulties with…

To investigate possible influences on and consequences of mothers' speech, specific infant behaviors preceding and following four pragmatic categories of mothers' utterances--responsive utterances, supportive behavioral directives, intrusive behavioral directives, and intrusive attentional directives--were examined longitudinally during dyadic…