Maltreated infants and toddlers are more likely to be placed into foster care than any other age group of children. They also remain in foster care longer and are less likely to be reunified with their birth families. Thus, it is important that child welfare and other practitioners use the best strategies available to ensure children's expeditious…

Purpose: This study examined the extent to which children born preterm (< 37 weeks) and/or who have low birth weight (< 2,500 g) catch up with their full term peers in terms of their language abilities at early school age (= 5 to < 9 years). Method: A systematic literature search identified empirical studies that fit the inclusion…

Purpose: The aims of this study were to examine phonological short-term memory in children born preterm (PT) and to explore relations between this neuropsychological process and later language skills. Method: Children born PT (n = 74) and full term (FT; n = 60) participated in a nonword repetition (NWR) task at 36 months old. Standardized measures…

Vygotsky (in: Rieber, Carton (eds) The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, vol 1, Pleneum Press, Newyork, pp 167-241, Retrieved from http://images.lib.monash.edu.au/edf5411/04118997.pdf, 1987) stated that academic or scientific concepts require a level of conscious awareness on the part of the child within everyday situations. Academic concepts can…

Data from children with ASD who are learning Indo-European languages indicate that (a) they vary hugely in their expressive language skills and (b) their pragmatic/socially-based language is more impaired than their structural language. We investigate whether similar patterns of language development exist for Mandarin-exposed children with ASD.…

A large body of research has established that high-quality early care and education (ECE) has benefits for young children's cognitive and social-emotional development that can lead to improved outcomes later in life, especially for children who are economically disadvantaged. Research also shows that disadvantaged children have unequal access to…

This study sought to determine whether a book provision intervention delivered to low-income mothers participating in the Nurse-Family Partnership had an effect on family shared book reading patterns and family attitudes toward shared book reading. The 25 participants in this study were low-income, first-time mothers, aged 18-25 with infants,…

Object construction involves organizing multiple objects into a unified structure (e.g., stacking blocks into a tower) and may provide infants with unique spatial information. Because object construction entails placing objects in spatial locations relative to one another, infants can acquire information about spatial relations during construction…

We investigated heart rate (HR) in infants at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of age, at high (HRA) and low (LRC) familial risk for ASD, to identify potential endophenotypes of ASD risk related to attentional responses. HR was extracted from functional near-infrared spectroscopy recordings while infants listened to speech stimuli. Longitudinal analysis…

The visual preferences of infants for adult versus infant faces were investigated. Caucasian 3.5- and 6-month-olds were presented with Caucasian adult vs. infant face pairs and Asian adult vs. infant face pairs, in both upright and inverted orientations. Both age groups showed a visual preference for upright adult over infant faces when the faces…

This study tested the impact of child-directed language input on language development in Spanish-English bilingual infants (N = 25, 11- and 14-month-olds from the Seattle metropolitan area), across languages and independently for each language, controlling for socioeconomic status. Language input was characterized by social interaction variables,…

Educare is a birth to age 5 early education program designed to reduce the achievement gap between children from low-income families and their more economically advantaged peers through high-quality center-based programming and strong school-family partnerships. This study randomly assigned 239 children (< 19 months) from low-income families to…

While academic attention is now being paid to infant-peer relationships in early childhood education and care settings and the role of teachers in these interactions, research is inclined to emphasise the importance of shared understanding as a feature in infant-peer relationships. As such, little research attention has been given to the alteric…

Infants who begin their lives in intensive care are impacted physically and socioemotionally for many months and years to come. Likewise, stressful experiences of caring for a baby hospitalized in intensive care have an impact on primary caregivers, typically the baby's parents. Infant mental health (IMH) is an expanding, evidence-based field that…

This article investigates the approach of care as curriculum and teachers' perceptions of this notion. It is a descriptive account of the interviews of four Aotearoa New Zealand-based infant and toddler teachers' perceptions of care as curriculum. Care as curriculum is a pedagogical approach that was brought to the research process. This was an…