Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether participation in a community event developed using Health Belief Model constructs increased intention to follow the American Academy of Paediatrics Safe Sleep Guidelines for infants. Design: Observational cohort study. Setting: Safe Sleep Community Baby Showers held between Spring 2015…

The aim of the present study is to assess the relationship between the young child's attention in a word learning interactive context with the educators in nurseries during shared-book reading and child's subsequent vocabulary growth. The participants in the study were 24 infants from eight nurseries. Each infant was first observed during five…

We investigated gesture production in infants at high and low risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and caregiver responsiveness between 12 and 24 months of age and assessed the extent to which early gesture predicts later language and ASD outcomes. Participants included 55 high-risk infants, 21 of whom later met criteria for ASD, 34 low-risk…

Early intervention (EI) for infants and toddlers with disabilities relies on family-centered practices. Caregiver coaching, one family-centered practice used in EI, can lead to improved supports by caregivers and improved outcomes for children with disabilities. However, within the research literature, little is understood about the experiences,…

This study explores the cultural construction of "difficult" temperament in the first 2 years of life, as well as the logistical and thematic continuity across infancy and childhood in what mothers perceive as difficult. It extends earlier work regarding older children in six cultural sites: Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden,…

Breastfeeding duration has been linked to maternal and child health. Current-status (or interval-censored) data offers a more reliable measure of duration and cessation of breastfeeding than approaches that rely on recall, due to high percentage of 'heaping'. The present study explores the determinants of breastfeeding termination within the first…

Forming social evaluations of others is a core component of social cognition. In this study, the relationship between bilingual experience and social evaluations was investigated in 8-month-old infants. We compared monolingual and bilingual infants' responses to third-party interactions where characters performed prosocial and antisocial actions…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and…

The present study examined the dyadic nature of fathers' and mothers' reported frequency of storybook reading by testing (1) the longitudinal association in parents' frequency of storybook reading when their children were 10.47 months old and 52.95 months old, (2) the interdependence between both parents' reported frequency of storybook reading,…

This study investigated the associations between maternal depression when infants were 3 to 11 months old (M = 6 months), and positive parenting behaviors when children were between 12 and 22 months (M = 17 months) and the home language environment assessed when children were 18 to 28 months old (M = 23.5 months) in a sample of 29 low-income…

A qualified and dedicated early care and education (ECE) professional workforce is essential for the well-being of our youngest children. Despite the importance of ECE professionals, the field continues to experience challenges recruiting and retaining individuals in the workforce, often due to high expectations for early care with inadequate…

Only about 10 percent of eligible infants and toddlers with developmental delays nationwide receive early intervention services, which are widely agreed to reduce delays and lessen the adverse effects of risk factors and disabilities on learning and development. California serves fewer children than the national average. Challenges arise from…

Previous research shows that English-learning 7.5-month-olds are biased to segment speech at strong syllables consistent with the predominant trochaic (strong-weak) pattern of words in their language (Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999). The present study asked whether 7.5-month-olds can use a familiar name to override their metrical bias and…

Infants are precocious word learners, and seem to possess systematic expectations about how words refer to object kinds. For example, while monolingual infants show a one-to-one mapping bias (e.g. mutual exclusivity), expecting each object to have only one basic level label, previous research has shown that this is less robust in bi- and…

Infants learning languages with long consonants, or geminates, have been found to "overselect" and "overproduce" these consonants in early words and also to commonly omit the word-initial consonant. A production study with thirty Italian children recorded at 1;3 and 1;9 strongly confirmed both of these tendencies. To test the…