Infantile spasms (IS) is a rare epileptic disorder occurring in children under the age of one that can often lead to severe developmental delays throughout life. Though over 200 etiologies have been associated with this disorder, many cases remain unexplained. Research into the etiology of IS has implicated causes such as exposure to prenatal…

Past research has shown a discrepancy in young infants' use of height information in occlusion and containment events--a pattern typically accounted for by event categorization and rule learning. Broadening these theories, the present experiment examined the role of comparison in young infants' reasoning about physical events. We rotated a typical…

The Early Childhood Personnel Center (ECPC) was funded by the Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education to provide technical assistance to State Systems of Early Childhood Intervention and Institutions of Higher Education on issues related to personnel development. One initiative of the ECPC has been to collaborate…

One primary problem in extremely preterm children is the occurrence of atypical language development. The aim of this study was to explore the components of language (articulatory phonetics, lexicon and syntax) in comprehension and production in extremely preterm children between the 4th and 5th year of age. The language section of the Preschool…

Temperament growth has been examined in infancy, but the spectrum of reactive and regulatory dimensions was not previously considered. We evaluated linear and nonlinear growth trajectories for overarching factors and fine-grained indicators of infant temperament obtained via parent report (N = 143) at 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 months of age.…

There is a strong association between access to early intervention (EI) services by 6 months of age and improved speech and language outcomes for children with permanent hearing loss (PHL). This study identified factors impacting on age of engagement and timing of engagement in EI services by families of 377 children with PHL. This retrospective…

The "4th trimester" refers to the transition period after childbirth when infants are adjusting to life outside the womb and mothers are adjusting to new parenthood. This critical period is marked by significant biological, psychological, and social changes, which are currently insufficiently supported. The 4th trimester perspective…

Infants start learning words, the building blocks of language, at least by 6 months. To do so, they must be able to extract the phonological form of words from running speech. A rich literature has investigated this process, termed word segmentation. We addressed the fundamental question of how infants of different ages segment words from their…

Infants and toddlers spend a substantial amount of their time in out-of-home care, and are thus being tended to not only by their mothers but also by their caregivers. It is therefore of considerable importance to study the effects of caregiver-infant compared to mother-infant interactions. To address this issue, first, various variables of…

The present study investigated the role of morphosyntactic information in the acquisition of transitive and intransitive verb argument structures (VAS) in the Japanese language, which allows massive omissions of arguments and case markers. In particular, we investigated how the 'variation sets' proposed by Küntay and Slobin work in Japanese.…

The author argues for a functionalist understanding of autism. Instead of explaining autism as an inborn or otherwise neurological deficit, autism may be understood as a functional disturbance: the impairment of the abstract attitude. The abstract attitude is a concept developed by German neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1987-1965) to describe…

Nepalese Female Community Health Volunteers' (FCHVs) knowledge on social attention and communication development and the early signs of autism was evaluated before, immediately after, and 12-months following training on typical and atypical social-communicative development in infants/toddlers, early signs of autism, and monitoring of key…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

The NOURISH:ECE project explored the role of maternal and child health nurses (MCHNs) in early childhood education and care (ECEC) through the design and pilot of professional learning (PL) regarding responsive feeding practices. Eight focus groups were conducted in Queensland (MCHNs, n = 20; educators, n = 29) to explore attitudes regarding…

To understand the broader societal context for supporting the healthy development and well-being of infants and toddlers, the following excerpt from the "State of Babies Yearbook: 2022 Executive Summary" presents key findings on the status of America's families with young children. As of August 2022, the reconciliation bill proposed in…