Using data from the National Early Intervention Longitudinal Study, this study provides a framework for characterizing the delivery of early intervention services based on the combinations of service providers who work with infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families. Five groups of providers were identified. Results showed that the…

The extent to which the influences of family-systems intervention practices could be traced to variations in parent-child interactions and child development was investigated by meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM). MASEM is a procedure for producing a weighted pooled correlation matrix and fitting a structural equation model to the…

Guided by theories of cultural participation, the authors examined mother-child, father-child, and triadic interactive behaviors in 141 Israeli and Palestinian couples and their firstborn child at 5 and 33 months as antecedents of children's social competence. Four parent-child measures (parent sensitivity, child social engagement, parental…

The assessment of young children's development and learning has recently taken on new importance. Private and government organizations are developing programs to enhance the school readiness of all young children, especially children from economically disadvantaged homes and communities and children with special needs. Well-planned and…

Infants' apparent failure in gaze-following tasks is often interpreted as a sign of lack of understanding the referential nature of looking. In the present study, 8- and 12-month-old infants followed the gaze of a model to one of two locations hidden from their view by occluders. When the occluders were removed, an object was revealed either at…

What are the characteristics of programs that have the greatest likelihood of success in promoting the development of very young children at risk? This brief review of research offers insights for policy makers and early childhood educators alike. The United States is fortunate to have well-designed early educational intervention programs that may…

Forty toddlers aged 20 to 24 months were presented with 32 pairs of images with the auditory stimulus Look followed by the name of the target image (e.g. "Look...tree") in an intermodal preferential looking (IPL) paradigm. The same series of 16 items was presented first with one image as target and then with the other member of the pair as target.…

A pivotal period in the development of language occurs in the second year of life, when language comprehension undergoes rapid acceleration. However, the brain bases of these advances remain speculative as there is currently no functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from healthy, typically developing toddlers at this age. We…

Children on the autism spectrum often demonstrate atypical joint attention, leading some researchers to consider joint attention deficits a core feature of the autism spectrum. Structured measures, such as the Early Social Communication Scales (ESCS), are commonly used to provide a metric of joint attention. To explore the assessment of joint…

Methods used to assess children's speech perception and recognition in the clinical setting are out of step with current methods used to investigate these experimentally. Traditional methods of assessing speech discrimination, such as picture pointing, yield accuracy scores which may fail to detect subtle perceptual difficulties. This paper will…

Disruptive behavior, including aggression, defiance, and temper tantrums, typically peaks in early toddlerhood and decreases by school entry; however, some children do not show this normative decline. The current study examined disruptive behavior in 318 boys and girls at 2, 4, and 5 years of age and frustration reactivity, physiological…

This article reports 2 experiments using a new method to study 18- to 24-month-olds' visual experiences as they interact with objects. Experiment 1 presents evidence on the coupling of head and eye movements and thus the validity of the head camera view of the infant's visual field in the geometry of the task context. Experiment 2 demonstrates the…

Two studies, an experimental category learning task and a computational simulation, examined how sequencing training instances to maximize comparison and memory affects category learning. In Study 1, 2-year-old children learned color categories with three training conditions that varied in how categories were distributed throughout training and…

Prelinguistic vocal development is "the process by which infants and toddlers produce increasingly more complex, phonetically diverse, and speech-like utterances before they say words on a regular basis" (Ertmer, 2005, p. 85). Research has shown that children with bilateral, moderate-to-profound hearing loss experience delays and deficits in vocal…

Early childhood educators use several learning centers in a classroom to target growth in different developmental areas, but as a preschool teacher, the author was always impressed by how children addressed multiple areas of development at the sensory table. Understanding that sensory experiences were important for preschoolers, the author wanted…