In June 2003, Congress passed the Keeping Children and Families Safe Act, which reauthorized the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which provides federal funding for state child welfare agencies. A new provision in the reauthorized CAPTA requires that states receiving CAPTA funds develop and implement "provisions and…

Vitamin B[subscript 12] deficiency in infants often produces haematological and neurological deficits, including macrocytic anaemia, neurodevelopmental delay or regression, irritability, weakness, hypotonia, ataxia, apathy, tremor, and seizures. The diagnosis of vitamin B[subscript 12] deficiency can be difficult when the typical macrocytic…

Detecting early signs of autism is essential for timely diagnosis and initiation of effective interventions. Several research groups have initiated prospective studies of high-risk populations including infant siblings, to systematically collect data on early signs within a longitudinal design. Despite the potential advantages of prospective…

Infants represent the acts of others and their own acts in commensurate terms. They can recognize cross-modal equivalences between acts they see others perform and their own felt bodily movements. This recognition of self-other equivalences in action gives rise to interpreting others as having similar psychological states such as perceptions and…

In the present experiment, we used a deferred imitation paradigm to explore the effect of crawling on memory retrieval by 9-month-old human infants. Infants observed an experimenter demonstrate a single target action with a novel object and their ability to reproduce that action was assessed after a 24-hr delay. Some infants were tested with the…

An infant's ability to process auditory signals presented in rapid succession (i.e. rapid auditory processing abilities [RAP]) has been shown to predict differences in language outcomes in toddlers and preschool children. Early deficits in RAP abilities may serve as a behavioral marker for language-based learning disabilities. The purpose of this…

The authors describe a study of families in the Family Drug Treatment Court (FTDC), an effort to promote permanent placement for substance-exposed infants within time requirements mandated by the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). The purpose of the study was to evaluate parent functioning after FTDC involvement, infant developmental…

Purpose: To evaluate whether the validity of the Receptive Vocabulary scale of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for Infants (MCDI-I; L. Fenson et al., 1991), a parent-report measure of early vocabulary, could be improved for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by removing items that are biased. Method: Logistic…

Nearly 20 years ago, before e-mails, listservs, and blogs, the author had participated in an intense discussion with a group of early childhood education and care (ECEC) program directors about the pros and cons of publicly funded pre-kindergarten (pre-K). They debated about how universal pre-K (UPK) might impact the cost of infant and toddler…

Infants placed in foster care are at high risk for emotional and behavioral problems. Assessment of their mental health must account for their often-adverse life experiences prior to placement and the involvement of multiple systems that shape their lives in lieu of parents' authority. This article presents practice guidelines for infant mental…

Statewide birth certificate and preschool exceptionality records were integrated to identify risk factors for developmental delay (DD). Epidemiological methods were used to investigate both individual-level and population-level risk for DD associated with a number of child and maternal factors. Infants born with very low birth weight were at the…

In 3 experiments, 9-month-old infants' expectations for what distinct count noun labels refer to were investigated. In Experiment 1, a box was opened to reveal 2 objects inside during familiarization: either 2 identical objects or 2 different objects. Test trials followed the same procedure, except before the box was opened, the contents were…

Communities in the UK are seeing a sustained shift in the balance of care of babies and the youngest children from families to nurseries, with a particular emphasis being placed on early learning. Yet a basic question of whether nurseries should be modelled on the intimacy and spontaneity of family interactions or the more professional and planned…

Children's exposure to mind-related talk has been shown to foster young children's metacognitive understanding and to orient them to the patterns of literate language long before they commence formal literacy instruction at school. In this paper, we report on a longitudinal study of the mind-related talk of 22 mothers when their infants were aged…

The perceived spatiotemporal continuity of objects depends on the way they appear and disappear as they move in the spatial layout. This study investigated whether infants' predictive tracking of a briefly occluded object is sensitive to the manner by which the object disappears and reappears. Five-, 7-, and 9-month-old infants were shown a ball…