Five-month-old infants selectively attend to novel people who sing melodies originally learned from a parent, but not melodies learned from a musical toy or from an unfamiliar singing adult, suggesting that music conveys social information to infant listeners. Here, we test this interpretation further in older infants with a more direct measure of…

Opioid use in pregnancy and the postpartum period increases the vulnerability of the newborn in many ways. No single system can appropriately meet all the needs of this population. Due to the variety of systems that are involved, there are multiple opportunities for gaps in care. Thus, the systems of care must collaborate, communicate, and share…

This research develops a context-sensitive understanding of infant toilet training that takes account of a diversity of influences on the phenomenon. Data are drawn from a qualitative study of everyday life in families with young children. Parents in 54 families living in Norway were interviewed about the everyday life of the family during their…

Adults need to recognize and understand the importance of the parent-child relationship in supporting infants and young children who are exposed to traumatic events. All children need the support, security, and safety that come with a consistent, emotionally available relationship. For young children who have a more limited understanding and…

Good nutrition during the 1,000-day window between pregnancy and 2 years old can give children the opportunity to reach their full potential. Conversely, malnutrition early in life can cause irreversible damage to a child's brain development and physical growth, leading to a lifetime of poor health and lost potential. Each year, malnutrition costs…

Early intervention (EI) for families of infants and toddlers with or at risk for developmental delays or disabilities is federally guided to begin at birth or older. With technological advances in prenatal testing, pregnant families are increasingly learning of diagnoses that result in EI eligibility once the child is born. For these families,…

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3).…

Word segmentation is a fundamental aspect of language learning, since identification of word boundaries in continuous speech must occur before the acquisition of word meanings can take place. We previously used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are less sensitive to statistical and…

In the spring of 2020, the emerging COVID-19 pandemic prompted states across the country to mandate that most early childhood education programs close, leaving families with young children scrambling to adapt to full-time caregiving and leaving educators uncertain of their economic and professional future. For many communities, this hardship was…

Infants change their behaviours in accordance with the objects they are exploring. They also tailor their exploratory actions to the physical context. This selectivity of exploratory actions represents a foundational cognitive skill that underlies higher-level cognitive processes. The present study compared the development of selective exploratory…

Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the…

Previous studies have found that infants shift their attention from the eyes to the mouth of a talker when they enter the canonical babbling phase after 6 months of age. Here, we investigated whether this increased attentional focus on the mouth is mediated by audio-visual synchrony and linguistic experience. To do so, we tracked eye gaze in 4-,…

In many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful…

Previous research shows that word segmentation is a language-specific skill. Here, we tested segmentation of bi-syllabic words in two languages (French; English) within the same infants in a single test session. In Experiment 1, monolingual 8-month-olds (French; English) segmented bi-syllabic words in their native language, but not in an…

The majority of research examining infants' decontextualized word knowledge comes from studies in which words and pictures are presented simultaneously. However, comprehending utterances about unseen objects is a hallmark of language. Do infants demonstrate decontextualized absent object knowledge early in the second year of life? Further, to what…