A community-based survey of children aged 0 to 5 years in Ghana found that of 650 childhood burns, 5.4 percent were purposefully inflicted. Perpetrators were mostly friends (43 percent), siblings (37 percent), and traditional healers (6 percent). Healers inflicted burns on children who were comatose after convulsions. (Author/DB)

Examined the ability of 1-year olds to remember the location of nonvisible targets. Found that infants were able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and to code its distance and direction with respect to themselves or the larger framework. Difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks was associated with cognitive complexity and…

Investigates numerical competence in five-month-old infants using a violation-of-expectation paradigm. Supports previous findings that young children possess not only the competence for limited numerical abstraction, but also the ability to carry out addition and subtraction operations. An alternative explanation, that infants' responses are based…

An infant girl's unusual phonological behavior was evaluated in light of a maternal model which appeared to exaggerate features of normal conversational speech. Parental responses to immature speech patterns may account for selected case study behaviors which have been reported in both the child phonology and child fluency literatures. (KM)

Hand preference during signing was examined longitudinally in nine very young children with deaf parents. These children generally showed a distinct and persistent hand preference in their signing, beginning with the production of their first signs. (14 references) (VWL)

Assessments of temperament, emotion, cognition, and language acquisition were obtained for 200 pairs of 14-month-old twins. Comparisons between the assessment correlations for identical and fraternal twins indicated an influence of genetics on inhibition, activity, temperament, empathy, negative emotion, spatial memory, categorization skills, and…

Examined the relationship between nonmaternal care and infant-mother attachment. Results indicated that full-time, nonmaternal care was not associated with increased insecure attachment and did not negatively affect the associations between infant-mother attachment and the mother's involvement with her infant during the infant's first year of…

Assessed infants' ability to anticipate temporally cued events by presenting trials in which an interesting event was paired with a noise, followed by trials in which the interesting event was omitted. Infants demonstrated anticipatory heart-rate responses to the interesting event and a change in response to the interesting event from general to…

Assessed infants' detection of relative motion between a target and its surrounding static reference features in two experiments. Found evidence for 8- and 20-week-olds' detection of a moving target, and a target and surrounding reference features moving in opposite directions. Twenty-week-olds detected a target that moved faster and in the same…

Investigated influence of maternal employment on maternal departure and reunion behavior during infant's first year among 60 infants and their mothers. Mothers who worked more hours were more autonomous and less anxious upon departure from their infant, and mothers who were satisfied with their employment role were more autonomous and less anxious…

Examined Parenting Inventory: Young Children (PI), rating scale measuring developmental expectations and behaviors of parents of young children. Data from 1,056 mothers revealed PI discriminated successfully between parents with children of different ages and had substantial content validity. PI was not strongly related to Adult-Adolescent…

This study of 14 mother-infant dyads found that deaf mothers were highly responsive to infants but, unlike hearing mothers, waited to respond until infants spontaneously looked back at them. The paper proposes incorporating the strategies used by deaf mothers into an interaction model for use with hearing parents whose infants have hearing loss.…

Examined the learning of a manipulative response by well and at-risk infants of 6 to 13 months of age who had experienced respiratory interventions in the perinatal period. Risk status reliably predicted the learning performance. Results confirmed that the effects of perinatal interventions involving respiratory complications influenced infants'…

Investigated genetic change and continuity within the domains of temperament, emotion, and cognition and language for 200 pairs of twins assessed at 14 and 20 months of age. Correlations of measures at the two ages indicated that individual differences in the second year of life showed greater change than continuity on most measures. (MDM)

Examined the effects of maternal employment and separation anxiety on maternal interactive behavior and infant attachment in 73 mother-infant pairs. Employed mothers who reported high levels of separation anxiety were more likely than low-anxiety mothers to exhibit intrusive behaviors. Although employment was not directly related to attachment,…