Studied infants' reactions to a Plexiglas box placed over a toy by their mothers. (JMB)

Examined the relationship of newborns' 1-minute Apgar scores to their 8-month Bayley mental and motor scores and to 8-month classifications of their development as normal, suspect, or abnormal. Also investigated relationships between Apgar scores and race, longevity, and birth weight. (JMB)

Adult influences on infant peer interaction were examined to determine whether infants would be more likely to sustain interaction with one another when their mothers were encouraging them to do so than they would when their mothers were busy with something else. A total of 36 infants, 14 months of age, were videotaped during 30-minute play…

Behavioral outcomes in mother-infant interaction in the first month of life after contact in the recovery room are described. In the first postpartum hour, personnel presented 62 infants to their mothers. Personnel crossed two modes (skin-to-skin versus cradling) and two durations (15 versus 60 minutes) of contact. Instances of maternal and infant…

In a study of infant smiling, 20 mother-infant dyads were videotaped in normal face-to-face interaction when the infants were 9 and 14 weeks of age. Videotapes were used to determine which of two classes of smiling behavior models, either arousal modulation or activation indicator, was most supported by empirical data. Arousal modulation models…

A short-term longitudinal study investigated the way parents come to perceive their infant's temperament as difficult, and to identify factors influencing parents' impression formation. Subjects were 40 middle and lower middle class breastfeeding mothers and their singleton newborns of 38 weeks gestation and 2500 grams birth weight. All mothers…

The underlying semantic structure of the complete lexicon of four Hebrew-speaking infants at the one-word stage of lexical development was examined. Particular attention was given to the timing of word acquisition and the patterns of identified relationships among words. Three types of interrelationships among early words were explored: (1)…

The digest presents the background and reasons for early intervention with children at risk for handicaps. Early intervention is defined, and three primary reasons for intervention are cited: (1) to enhance the child's development, (2) to provide support and assistance to the family, and (3) to maximize the child's and family's benefit to society.…

Observations suggest that 12-month-old children show little evidence of possession rules, while 18- and 24-month-olds are still coming to differentiate purely personal possession rules from shared possession rules that take into account the other child's status or rights as a possessor. Children 12 months old exhibited the highest frequency of…

Pulsation threshold (PT) masking was used to assess frequency resolution among infants 3 and 6 months of age and adults. The masker intensity at which the pulsing probe becomes indistinguishable from a physically continuous probe is the PT. A measure of frequency resolution can be obtained by examining the effects of masker frequency on the PT. In…

A series of studies investigated whether infants can detect cues in ongoing speech that could help them delineate those segments that correspond to grammatical units like phrases and words. The methodology of the study involved asking whether infants show a preference between speech samples in which pauses have been inserted coincident with the…

This study investigated: (1) whether infants can develop expectations for events that alternate along the vertical axis; and (2) whether infants who form expectations with one action set can transfer them to a different action set--that is, from vertical to horizontal eye movements. A total of 32 infants of 3 months of age saw one of two picture…