Investigated whether infants can construe the same set of objects as an object category or as embodying an object property. Results of 2 experiments involving 48 and 64 14-month-olds respectively suggest that infants have begun to distinguish nouns from adjectives, they expect different grammatical forms to highlight different aspects, and that…

Notes the variability in child speech and language development. Explores the debate over whether and when to intervene with children whose speech is developing later than the norm. (HTH)

Explores how experiences after birth exert a dramatic and precise impact, physically determining how the intricate neural circuits of the brain are wired, in particular, in areas of language and vocabulary. Discusses the brain's acute vulnerability to trauma such as under or over stimulation or abuse. (HTH)

Notes the difference between "properly" stimulated and "expensively stimulated" or "over" stimulated when it comes to providing an environment for infant brain development. Highlights the effectiveness of just talking to a child. Suggests that more important than a particular toy is that parents be attuned to the kind…

Explores what is known about the genetic underpinnings of temperament. Examines the role of experience in shaping personality, suggesting that personality is both heritable and influenced by environment. (HTH)

We monitored changes in looking that emerged when 3- to 6-month-old infants were presented with 48 trials pairing familiar and novel faces. Graphic displays were used to identify changes in looking throughout the task. Many infants exhibited strong side biases produced by infants looking repeatedly in the same direction. Although an overall…

This article presents the author's comments on a set of articles representing an unusual collation of work by investigators from different parts of the world, using similar high-tech instrumentation and procedures to measure eye movements in infants who lie in a fairly constrained age range. Although the articles in this thematic collection share…

This paper considers possible problems researchers might face when interpreting the results of studies that employ variants of the preference procedure. Infants show a tendency to shift their preference from familiar to novel stimuli with increasing exposure to the familiar stimulus, a behaviour that is exploited by the habituation paradigm. This…

Previous research has demonstrated infants' capacity to discriminate between situations in which all the objects successively hidden behind a screen are present, or not, after the removal of the screen. Two types of interpretation have been proposed: counting capacity or object memorization capacity. In the usual paradigm, the missing object in…

Jones and Herbert describe research on deferred imitation and how this research reflects on the development of explicit memory in infancy. The article raises several interesting questions about how the medial temporal lobe memory system develops. In this commentary, I discuss some of the additional theoretical and empirical questions that are…

Infants aged 3-5 months (mean of approximately 4 months) were given a novel anticipatory looking task to test object permanence understanding. They were trained to expect an experimenter to retrieve an object from behind a transparent screen upon hearing a cue (''Doors up, here comes the hand''). The experimenter then hid the object behind one of…

Interagency coordination on behalf of eligible infants and toddlers and their families is a defining feature of Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In the present study, enrollment data for child welfare services and Part C services were examined to assess the degree of overlap between the two service systems. Results…

This study explored the dynamic interaction between a mother and her 11-month-old visually impaired infant before and after the mother was taught infant massage. After the mother learned infant massage, she had more appropriate physical contact with her infant, engaged with him within his field of vision, directly vocalized to him, and had a…

Three experiments document that conceptual knowledge influences lexical acquisition in infancy. A novel target object was initially labeled with a novel word. In both yes-no (Experiment 1) and forced-choice (Experiment 2) tasks, 2-year-olds' subsequent extensions were mediated by the conceptual description of the targets. When targets were…

Regulatory aspects of development can best be understood by research that conceptualizes relations between cognition and emotion. The neural mechanisms associated with regulatory processes may be the same as those associated with higher order cognitive processes. Thus, from a developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective, emotion and cognition…