In sub-Saharan Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have far-reaching consequences for 550 million children under the age of 18. This UNICEF Child Alert examines how the disease and measures put in place to contain it are impacting the lives of children across the region, exacerbating existing threats like conflict, climate change and…

This article focuses on educational language practices as described by preschool teachers in Norwegian kindergartens in groups consisting of one- to three-year-old children. Research indicates a relationship between high-quality childcare and language development, yet there is a need for more research on educational practices in high-quality…

Across the country, placements in foster care are rising. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that 273,539 children in the U.S. entered foster care. In 34 percent of those cases, parental drug abuse was one of the factors leading to the child's removal from their family. Additionally, the U.S. Substance Abuse and…

Within the context of the education-care divide in the field, numerous studies have affirmed that preschool teachers feel unprofessional when they assume a caring role yet believe that love and care are central to their work. However, immigrant/refugee teachers may experience this tensionality more acutely since their own cultural beliefs and…

This implementation research report describes the local programs, home visiting staff, and families who participated in the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE), a national evaluation of the federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program launched in 2011. This national evaluation is…

This case study report calls on school-community leaders to consider a made-in-Canada approach that raises literacy rates, prevents early school leaving and breathes life back into small towns. This step-by-step guidebook provides a practical toolkit and worksheets based on the concrete experiences of the "L'ÉcoRéussite" program, which…

High rates of infant and toddler screen media use coupled with research indicating no benefit to this viewing have led the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to advise against any screen media use with children less than 2 years old and less than 2 hours per day of entertainment programming for children 2 years and older (AAP, 2011). Our survey…

Purpose: Infant-directed speech (IDS) facilitates language learning in infants with normal hearing, compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). It is well established that infants with normal hearing prefer to listen to IDS over ADS. The purpose of this study was to determine whether infants with hearing impairment (HI), like their NH peers, show a…

How do human infants learn the causal dependencies between events? Evidence suggests that this remarkable feat can be achieved by observation of only a handful of examples. Many computational models have been produced to explain how infants perform causal inference without explicit teaching about statistics or the scientific method. Here, we…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the association between prenatal cigarette exposure and physiological regulation at 9 months of age. Specifically, we explored the possibility that any association between prenatal cigarette exposure and infant physiological regulation was moderated by postnatal environmental tobacco smoke (ETS)…

This study tests the hypothesis that developmental dyslexia is (partly) caused by a deficit in implicit sequential learning, by investigating whether infants at familial risk of dyslexia can track non-adjacent dependencies in an artificial language. An implicit learning deficit would hinder detection of such dependencies, which mark grammatical…

Young infants' learning of words for abstract concepts like "all gone" and "eat," in contrast to their learning of more concrete words like "apple" and "shoe," may follow a relatively protracted developmental course. We examined whether infants know such abstract words. Parents named one of two events shown in side-by-side videos while their…

By 14 months, infants have become exquisite observers of others' behavior and successful word learners. But do they coordinate their early observational and language capacities to gain insight into the intentions of others? Building upon Gergely, Bekkering, and Kiraly's (2002) classic head-touch phenomenon, we consider the contribution of language…

Previous research has suggested that people are unable to correctly choose which unfamiliar voice and static image of a face belong to the same person. Here, we present evidence that people can perform this task with greater than chance accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants saw photographs of two, same-gender models, while simultaneously…

Upper extremity movements, midline behaviors, fine, and gross motor skills are frequently impaired in hemiparesis and cerebral palsy. We investigated midline toy exploration and fine and gross motor skills in infants at risk for hemiplegic cerebral palsy. Eight infants with neonatal stroke (NS) and thirteen infants with typical development (TD)…