It was suggested that working-class mothers less frequently believed that their infants were capable of communicating with other people, and hence felt it was futile to attempt to interact with them verbally. (Authors)

The rate and nature of mother-child interaction - verbal and nonverbal- and its effects are here discussed and recent research is presented and analyzed. (Editor/JB)

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric Association (New York, New York, 1969).

Differences in program goals, theory, populations served, methods, duration, staff, and evaluation measures make it difficult to compare the effectiveness of different infant intervention programs. Formative evaluation is suggested as a way of ensuring that programs are being carried out. Where effectiveness is in doubt, process evaluation can…

Describes aspects of the father's role from the birthing process through the infant, preschool, and kindergarten-primary years and into the elementary and middle years of childhood. (RH)

Discusses five critical issues pertaining to quality infant care: improving training for caregivers of infants and toddlers, ensuring health and safety, meeting special needs of children and their parents, balancing high quality and affordability, and evaluating program effectiveness. (RH)

To further explore findings indicating that parental gender is a much more important predictor of caretaker behavior style than is involvement in parental role, 45 Swedish couples were observed at home interacting with their 16-month-old infants. Findings suggest that gender differences in parental behavior are much less amenable to social…

The literature on the infants of narcotic-addicted mothers is reviewed in regard to psychological outcome and those aspects of the medical consequences that contribute to that outcome. (Author/MP)

Discusses the possibility that early linguistic experience affects infant speech perception and that this effect may be of practical consequence in later language learning. (EKN)

Examines within an experimental paradigm phonological selection and avoidance patterns of infants and discusses the role of these patterns in early lexical acquisition. (EKN)

Nine infants with Down's syndrome, seven nonhandicapped infants, and one severely handicapped infant were given the choice of listening to familiar nursery rhymes or to the same rhymes with each word reversed so that the rhythms, intonation and stress patterns were kept intact but the words became nonsense. (RH)

Five symposium papers evaluate the usefulness of ideas associated with the life-span view for enriching, highlighting, or expanding issues, theory, and research pertinent to change processes during infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and for intervention programs during these periods. (Author/MP)

Reviewed literature on the influence of a speaker's expressive behavior on the behavioral response of another person in adult-adult and infant-adult dyads. Mutual influence in expressive behaviors was demonstrated to be a pervasive feature of social interaction found across a variety of behaviors and across developmental time. (Author/DB)