This article reports the behavior of 3 newborn chimpanzees in the first 4 months of life, reared by their mothers and living in a community of 14 chimpanzees in a semi-natural enriched environment. We focused on spontaneous activity during the night partly because sleeping behavior constitutes an essential part of the infants' activity.…

The first major goal of this study was to determine whether touch would enhance mother-infant coregulation in ordinary, nonstressful face-to-face interactions. In an experimental manipulation of presence versus absence of touch in face-to-face interactions between 79 mothers and their 3.5-month-old infants, results indicated that when touch is…

Retaining detailed representations of unstressed syllables is a logical prerequisite for infants' use of probabilistic phonotactics to segment iambic words from fluent speech. The head-turn preference study was used to investigate the nature of English- learners' representations of iambic word onsets. Fifty-four 10.5-month-olds were familiarized…

Three types of role reversal imitation were investigated in typically developing 12- and 18-month-old infants and in children with autism and other developmental delays. Many typically developing infants at both ages engaged in each of the 2 types of dyadic, body-oriented role reversal imitation: self-self reversals, in which the adult acted on…

In this qualitative study, the relationship development process of three infant-caregiver dyads in a university-affiliated childcare setting was explored and some contributing factors to the development were identified. Data were collected through multiple methods (observations, video recordings, interviews, documents) for a semester. The findings…

Purpose: Infants have a good ability to detect brief silent gaps between 2 short identical sound markers (within-channel gap detection), with thresholds between 2 and 11 ms. The present experiment traces the development of temporal resolution for between-channel gaps (i.e., gaps delineated by spectrally disparate markers). This ability appears…

Understanding one's sexuality is a lifelong process. This pamphlet outlines developmental markers for what children need to know about sexuality, from infancy through adolescence. These guideposts can help parents, caregivers, and educators decide when a discussion of a given subject is age-appropriate. They may be particularly helpful for those…

Young children follow a fairly consistent pattern in their acquisition of language. This pattern is important because language develops rapidly and has been shown to affect later school readiness. A study published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, examines for the first time how the quality of childcare affects the development…

This practice guide includes a description of the development and use of a universal checklist for identifying infants and toddlers that may be eligible for early intervention. The checklist was specifically developed to facilitate and streamline the identification of potentially eligible children without the need to administer screening or…

"Science Briefs" summarize the findings and implications of a recent study in basic science or clinical research. This brief reports on the study "Evidence for a Gene-Environment Interaction in Predicting Behavioral Inhibition in Middle Childhood" (N. A. Fox, K E. Nichols, H. A. Henderson, K. Rubin, L. Schmidt, D. Hamer, M. Ernst, and D. S.…

This study investigated the humorous activity of two infants, 18 and 21 months old, in their infant group childcare setting. This was a qualitative study that followed two infants for four months. Through participant and non-participant observations, journal writing and interviews, data were collected on children's involvement in humorous…

The nature and origin of the human capacity for acquiring language is not yet fully understood. Here we uncover early roots of this capacity by demonstrating that humans are born with a preference for listening to speech. Human neonates adjusted their high amplitude sucking to preferentially listen to speech, compared with complex non-speech…

Two experiments explored the existence and the development of relations between action representations and object representations. A priming paradigm was used in which participants viewed an action pantomime followed by the picture of a tool, the tool being either associated or unassociated with the preceding action. Overall, we observed that the…

Eighteen-month-olds' spatial categorization was tested when hearing a novel spatial word. Infants formed an abstract categorical representation of support (i.e., placing 1 object on another) when hearing a novel spatial particle during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence. Infants with a productive spatial vocabulary did not…

Infant-directed maternal speech is an important component of infants' linguistic input. However, speech from other speakers and speech directed to others constitute a large amount of the linguistic environment. What are the properties of infant-directed speech that differentiate it from other components of infants' speech environment? To what…