The global pandemic has caused some sudden changes in education. The Suzuki Early Childhood Education (SECE), which aims at the musical education of babies (0-3) and conducts the lessons face-to-face, is one of the areas most affected by the pandemic. Due to the nature of babies, in these lessons, where digital technology is rarely involved,…

Infants show shifting patterns of visual engagement to faces over the first years of life. To explore the adaptive implications of this engagement, we collected eye-tracking measures on cross-sectional samples of 10-25-month-old typically developing toddlers (TD;N = 28) and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD;N = 54). Concurrent language…

Decisions being made on Capitol Hill and in state capitals may seem remote from the experiences of early childhood professionals, but policymakers have a big impact on babies and families. Early childhood professionals and parents bring key expertise and passion to policy advocacy and have a powerful role to play. This article identifies the…

Emerging audio technologies over the last decade have provided a new, unprecedented window into the everyday lives of infants and young children. These new approaches will allow us to begin to address longstanding questions about the nature of language experiences across languages, communities and situations and the role of these experiences in…

Purpose: To evaluate the validity, reliability, and sensitivity of the novel Means-End Problem-Solving Assessment Tool (MEPSAT). Methods: Children with typical development and those with motor delay were assessed throughout the first 2 years of life using the MEPSAT. MEPSAT scores were validated against the cognitive and motor subscales of the…

Families across the United States face a variety of challenges securing early care and education (ECE) for their children. The supply and price of ECE programs in local areas tell part but not all the access story for families. Describing access across multiple dimensions provides decision makers with a deeper understanding of families' ECE needs…

The purpose of this pilot study was to develop and evaluate the feasibility of an experiential teaching and learning initiative that trained undergraduate students studying speech-language pathology to serve as family navigators promoting social communication and language development in infants and toddlers from lower-income backgrounds. Three…

Parents are a child's first teachers. They are responsible for building children's social, emotional, physical, and intellectual foundations. The problem investigated through this dissertation case study was the inconsistent knowledge of child development and developmentally appropriate activities among parents of young and primary school aged…

Depression is a major global health concern, especially among mothers of young children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While various risk and protective factors have been well-established, the role of fathers in potentially mitigating maternal depression remains understudied. This study aimed to investigate the association between…

Background: Mothers with intellectual disability are less likely than mothers without intellectual disability to breastfeed their infants, but there is little literature that addresses infant-feeding decisions among this population. This study explores experiences of mothers with intellectual disability in making and carrying out infant-feeding…

In previous work, 11-month-old infants were able to learn rules about the relation of the consonants in CVCV words from just four examples. The rules involved phonetic feature relations (same voicing or same place of articulation), and infants' learning was impeded when pairs of words allowed alternative possible generalizations (e.g. two words…

Purpose: The objective was to determine velopharyngeal (VP) status of stop consonants and vowels produced by young children with repaired cleft palate (CP) and typically developing (TD) children from 12 to 18 months of age. Method: Nasal ram pressure (NRP) was monitored in 9 children (5 boys, 4 girls) with repaired CP with or without cleft lip and…

Early exposure to multiple languages can enhance children's communication skills, even when children are effectively monolingual (Fan, Liberman, Keysar & Kinzler, 2015). Here we report evidence that the social benefits of multilingual exposure emerge in infancy. Sixteen-month-old infants participated in a communication task that required…

We delineate the sequence that typically developing infants pass tasks that assess different early social cognitive skills considered precursors to theory-of-mind abilities. We compared this normative sequence to performance on these tasks in a group of autistic (AUT) children. 86 infants were administered seven tasks assessing "intention…

The behavior of newborns is ambiguous. Cultural models--representations shared by members of a community--provide new parents and others with a cognitive and motivational structure to understand them. This study asks members of several cultural groups (total n = 100) to judge the "similarity" of behavioral items in the Neonatal…