Siblings of children with autism have an increased risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD). As children with autism often exhibit an atypical trajectory of head circumference (HC) growth, HC may be an indicator of vulnerability to autism. This study investigated whether infant siblings of children with ASD (n = 77) with an atypical trajectory of…

Normal auditory perception relies on accurate judgments about the temporal relationships between sounds. Previously, we used a perceptual-learning paradigm to investigate the neural substrates of two such relative-timing judgments made at sound onset: detecting stimulus asynchrony and discriminating stimulus order. Here, we conducted parallel…

In their first few years, almost all children learn at least one language, though not equally well. Differences in the quantity, quality, sources, and variety of language inputs and conversation opportunities have a long-lasting effect. This article provides an overview of early language development and explains how talking with babies promotes…

Recent overviews of autism research have yielded a number of suggestions, including: additional research with very young, and with lower functioning samples, and renewed emphasis on appropriate comparison/control groups. We reviewed the abstracts from a major autism conference (IMFAR) from 2004 to 2006 to examine these trends. We found an increase…

The current study investigated a new, easily administered, visual inhibition task for infants termed the Freeze-Frame task. In the new task, 9-month-olds were encouraged to inhibit looks to peripheral distractors. This was done by briefly freezing a central animated stimulus when infants looked to the distractors. Half of the trials presented an…

First word learning should be difficult because any pairing of a word and scene presents the learner with an infinite number of possible referents. Accordingly, theorists of children's rapid word learning have sought constraints on word-referent mappings. These constraints are thought to work by enabling learners to resolve the ambiguity inherent…

Past research has indicated that English-learning infants begin segmenting words from speech by 7.5 months of age (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). More recent work has demonstrated, however, that 7.5-month-olds' segmentation abilities are severely limited. For example, the ability to segment vowel-initial words from speech reportedly does not appear until…

Based on doctoral dissertation, Brown University (1966), and supported by grants GB-4151 and GB-724 from the National Science Foundation.

The purpose of this research was to assess the infant's abilities to make successive discriminations in the size of a figure. The subjects were 90 10-month-old infants. (Author/MP)

Results obtained from 27 infants ranging in age from 10 to 12 weeks indicated that infants develop expectancies regarding how stimuli occurring in particular contexts should behave based on their prior experiences with these stimuli. (Author/RH)

Two experiments investigated the ability of 3-month-olds to acquire generalized expectancies of reward and the role of these expectancies in memory retrieval. In both experiments, infants exhibited positive transfer over invariant and variable stimulus series; however, in the second experiment, violations of either expected order produced a…

Two experiments examined changes in the search of infants aged six, seven, and eight months. Experiment 1 found that the majority of infants displayed transitional search before intentional search. Experiment 2 showed that the infants' awareness of a hidden object develops gradually. (Author/RH)

Investigates infant behavior with respect to the development of object permanance. Nine-month-old infants were presented with a problem in which they saw an object hidden in one of two places but were prevented from searching for it until after the spatial relationship between infant and object was changed in some way. (Author/SS)

A series of experiments demonstrated that sharing was a characteristic activity of children 18 months of age and younger. (SB)

Investigated the responses of 57 infants to breast and axillary odors produced by lactating females. Two-week-old bottle-fed girls responded preferentially to the breast odor of a nursing woman when it was paired with the woman's axillary odors or odors from a nonparturient female. (RJC)