Developmental changes in learning from peers and adults during the second year of life were assessed using an imitation paradigm. Independent groups of 15- and 24-month-old infants watched a prerecorded video of an unfamiliar child or adult model demonstrating a series of actions with objects. When learning was assessed immediately, 15-month-old…

Stoel-Gammon (this issue) provides a welcome addition to the phonological acquisition literature, bringing together insights from long-standing and more recent research to address the relationship between the developing phonological system and the developing lexicon. A growing literature on children's early use of words across languages and…

Do infants develop meaningful social preferences among novel individuals based on their social group membership? If so, do these social preferences depend on familiarity on any dimension, or on a more specific focus on particular kinds of categorical information? The present experiments use methods that have previously demonstrated infants' social…

The anticipation of two object dimensions during grasping was investigated in 10- and 12-month-olds. We presented objects varying in both orientation and size and analyzed infants' anticipatory hand configurations. We found in Experiment 1 that nearly all of the 12-month-olds (94%), but less than half of the 10-month-olds (40%), anticipated both…

The objective of this study was to describe intersubjective attitudes in infants who are later diagnosed with autism and to provide information about caregiver's behaviors during early spontaneous interactions. Interactive sequences from 42 home-movies (HM) from the first 18 months of life of three groups of children--non-regressive Autistic…

Teachers of infants need a large bunch of key ideas and activities of all kinds to unlock in each child the treasures of loving kindness, thoughtful and eloquent use of language, intense active curiosity to learn, willingness to cooperate, and the deep desire to work hard to master new tasks. Teachers can tune in to each child's special…

Infants from birth do express a sense of their own body as a differentiated entity among other entities in the world, an entity that is situated, physically bounded, organized, and agent in the environment. Quickly however, this implicit sense of self develops to become explicit, conceptual, and more importantly, public and social. This…

The control of social attention during early infancy was investigated in two studies. In both studies, an adult turned towards one of two targets within the infant's immediate visual field. We tested: (a) whether infants were able to follow the direction of the adult's head turn; and (b) whether following a head turn was accompanied by further…

This study seeks to determine whether center-based and family-based child care services differ with respect to process quality, as measured by the Educative Quality Observation Scales ("EQOS", Bourgon and Lavallee 2004a, b, c), for groups of children 18 months old and younger. It also seeks to identify structural variables associated…

The transition to parenthood is a substantial challenge for many couples, and the extent to which the partners can support each other and their relationship is strongly related to the sensitivity and responsiveness of their parenting of their infant. This paper critically analyses the links between the couple relationship and parenting of infants…

This study explores the stability and change in maternal life satisfaction and psychological distress following the birth of a child with a congenital anomaly using 5 assessments from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study collected from Pregnancy Week 17 to 36 months postpartum. Participating mothers were divided into those having infants…

Research Findings: I examined the long-term association between the lexical and acoustic features of maternal utterances during book reading and the language skills of infants and children. Maternal utterances were collected from 22 mother-child dyads in picture book-reading episodes when children were ages 6-12 months and 5 years. Two aspects of…

Executive functions (EFs) involve a number of interconnected systems that, when compromised, can result in difficulties that affect a child's ability to perform tasks across early childhood settings, including the home and community-based settings. In retrospective research studies, researchers have found that a young child's…

Previous research using the name-based categorization task has shown that 20-month-old infants can simultaneously learn 2 words that only differ by 1 consonantal feature but fail to do so when the words only differ by 1 vocalic feature. This asymmetry was taken as evidence for the proposal that consonants are more important than vowels at the…

In laboratory studies of social referencing, infants as young as 12 months have been reported to prefer looking at the experimenter over the caregiver for clarifying information. From an expertise perspective, such behavior could be interpreted as if the infant seeks information from others and can discriminate between persons who have or do not…