Indicates that infants are able to discriminate synthetic speech patterns varying in duration of the formant transitions. This variation provides information sufficient to signal the phonetic distinction between a stop consonant and a semivowel in adult listeners. Also makes conclusions regarding the discriminability of a given difference in…

Discusses the emotional impact of a stillbirth on a family. The Perinatal Mortality Counseling Program (PMCP) at Shands Teaching Hospital, Gainesville, Florida, provides crisis intervention and support for these families, as well as serving a research function. Outlines the program, including its history, composition, procedures, and research.…

A Study of concerns of l00 middle class parents who had lost infants revealed that the death of an infant or fetus was viewed as devastating because of inadequate community recognition of the loss. Many parents turn for support to physicians who are often unable to meet their needs. Causes and solutions for this situation are discussed.…

Compared the mother-son and father-son interactions of male toddlers who were completely home-reared with the parent-child interactions of male toddlers who participated in a daily three-hour playgroup. (JMB)

Thirty families with a developmentally disabled child less than 1.5 years old were compared to 30 families with a nonhandicapped child. Half of the families lived in California, and half in Denmark. Parents with a very young developmentally disabled child saw themselves more negatively after the baby's birth and expressed more negative feelings…

Case of a severely handicapped preschooler illustrates advantages of home-based infant stimulation program. Initial goals were: work toward physical separation of mother and child, shape and reinforce child's behavior to extinguish crying, shape and reinforce mother's behavior to enrich home environment, and stimulate and reinforce a developmental…

Examined young children's language productivity with newly learned forms by teaching them four new words: two nouns and two verbs. Findings indicate children combined the novel nouns productively with already known words much more often than they did the novel verbs--by many orders of magnitude and several children pluralized the new nouns,…

Examines the possibility that bilingual experience in infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of this longitudinal study indicate that infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event fundamentally…

In response to O'Brien et al., who examined predictors of child outcome among at-risk infants as possible eligibility criteria for early intervention programs, this paper notes that most biological risk factors in infants are not adequately predictive of developmental dysfunction. It stresses that when social problems are the cause of…

Presents an analysis of existing norm-referenced measures of social and emotional competence and disability for young children birth-to-5 to determine whether these indices satisfy technical and conceptual requirements. It concludes that informal clinical opinion should be used to supplement norm-referenced measures in this area. (DB)

The importance of evaluation in early childhood interventions of infants and toddlers with developmental disabilities is discussed. Eight questions guiding the evaluation process are presented, focusing on intervention expectations, purposes of intervention, personalization of intervention, and specification of anticipated outcomes, among others.…

This paper describes findings from a survey of the attitudes of 188 special education teachers toward ethical dilemmas surrounding surgery, active and passive euthanasia and the right to die. (Author/PB)

Describes CHILD-PAC (Children's Hand-on Integrated Learning Discoveries--Parents as Co-Partners), a take-home learning center developed for infants and toddlers with disabilities and their parents to promote positive, interactive parent-child learning and playing. Three different CHILD-PACs designed to turn potentially difficult interaction times…

Reports on the continuing study of a congenitally acochlear child using an analytical focus on the prelinguistic vocalizations involving the description of syllable groupings within a prosodic hierarchy. Results indicate that audition is not necessary for the formation of prelinguistic phrasing, but hearing does influence certain aspects of…

Presents evidence that the supposed paradox in which infants find abstract patterns in speech-like stimuli whereas even some preschoolers struggle to find abstract syntactic patterns within meaningful language is no paradox. Asserts that all research evidence shows that young children's syntactic constructions become abstract in a piecemeal…