This study examined the relationship of crossing the midline while reaching for objects to the development of bimanual reaching among infants ages 12, 18, and 26 weeks. Findings indicated that the frequency of two-hand grabbing and the number of midline reaches increased with age; most midline reaches were part of two-handed reaches and occurred…

Presents findings from a multisite case study of consortia in the federal Healthy Start Initiative to reduce infant mortality in high-risk communities. Examines the facilitators of well- functioning consortia in a framework of empowerment theory and community organizing with women of color. Implications for social work practice and for policy are…

Reviews the use of memory measures in the literature. Suggests problems with assumptions underlying Bogartz's proposed new measure. Responds to specific criticisms by claiming that Bogartz is critical of two measures that are not even used, unfamiliar with traditional conditioning theory, wrong in an assertion about traditional measures, and…

Responds to the general criticisms of Rovee-Collier, explaining a proposed new measure of infant memory in terms of four fundamental ideas earlier enumerated by Rovee-Collier and Shyi. Seeks to refute three of four specific criticisms made by Rovee-Collier, and admits a mistake related to the fourth criticism. (BC)

This study of six infants (three with blindness, three sighted) identified an underlying sequence in the development of crawling, with the ability to reach for an object and to move to or from the sitting position being the two most critical precursors to the actual execution of crawling. Infants with blindness had a lower frequency of activity…

Infants looked at visual displays of two or three items while listening to auditory sequences of two or three sounds. When the rate and duration of sounds were constant, infants looked longer at the visual display that was numerically equivalent to the auditory sequence. When the rate and duration of sounds varied, infants showed no preference for…

Assessed children's and mothers' speech at the times of children's first word and first vocabulary spurt. Found that infants were more likely to talk before than after their mother spoke and that about one-third of infants' speech occurred in response to mothers' speech. Results support a model of language development in which the child's role is…

Analyzed the acoustic properties of spontaneous speech to 14-month olds by English- and Japanese-speaking mothers in the United States. Found that utterance- and phrase-level acoustic regularities were large enough to be detected without correcting for other influences. These findings suggest that a naive listener could estimate a prosodic…

Examined attachment classification of children with cleft lip and palate (CLP) and isolated cleft palate (ICP) and comparison group at 12 months of age; found no significant differences. Findings suggest that infants with clefts, despite special needs and caregiving requirements, seem not to have elevated risk for insecure attachments at the end…

This study used event-related potentials (ERP) and visual preference technique to assess 6-month olds' ability to recognize their mothers' face. Results of five experiments suggested that infants can recognize their mothers' face, but the neural processes accompanying recognition depend on the difficulty with which mothers can be discriminated…

Reports on connectionist models that simulated the formation of global-level and basic-level representations in young infants; revealed a global-to-basic order of category emergence; uncovered formation of two global-level representations--initial "self-organizing" perceptual level and subsequent "trained," non-perceptual…

Examined associations among mothers' insightfulness into their 12-month-olds' internal experience as assessed through interviews regarding mothers' videotaped interaction with their infant, mothers' sensitivity to infant's signals during laboratory and home play sessions, and infant's security of attachment to mothers in the Strange Situation.…

Two experiments tested infants' sensitivity to properties of point-light displays of a walker and a runner that were equivalent regarding the phasing of limb movements. Found that 3-, but not 5-month-olds, discriminated these displays. When the symmetrical phase-patterning of the runner display was perturbed by advancing two of its limbs by 25…

Integrates recent views of early perceptual-cognitive growth with accounts on the development of communication in infancy. Emphasizes supporting evidence for a view that combines innate perceptual and constructive mechanisms with associative memory in explaining how human infants process information. Also considers how the sociocultural…

Study applies family stress theory to the influence of personal, child, and familial factors on a mother's parenting stress during the first 3 years of her infant's life. Mother's personality was most predictive of parenting stress. Counterintuitively, mothers who were more satisfied with work or school choices were more likely to be chronically…