Infants' speech perception abilities change through the first year of life, from broad sensitivity to a wide range of speech contrasts to becoming more finely attuned to their native language. What remains unclear, however, is how this perceptual change relates to brain responses to native language contrasts in terms of the functional…

Infants prefer native structures such as familiar faces and languages. Music is a universal human activity containing structures that vary cross-culturally. For example, Western music has temporally regular metric structures, whereas music of the Balkans (e.g., Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey) can have both regular and irregular structures. We…

We investigated whether great apes, like human infants, monkeys and dogs, are subject to a strong gravity bias when tested with the tubes task, and--in case of mastery--what the source of competence on the tubes task is. We presented 22 apes with three versions of the tubes task, in which an object is dropped down a tube connected to one of three…

Past research has demonstrated that infants can rapidly extract syllable distribution information from an artificial language and use this knowledge to infer likely word boundaries in speech. However, artificial languages are extremely simplified with respect to natural language. In this study, we ask whether infants' ability to track transitional…

This study examined associations between supportive coparenting and infant-mother and infant-father attachment security. Observed and parent-reported coparenting, and observed maternal and paternal sensitivity were assessed in a sample of 68 families with 3.5-month-old infants. Infant-mother and infant-father attachment security were assessed in…

While content words (e.g., 'dog') tend to carry meaning, function words (e.g., 'the') mainly serve syntactic purposes. Here, we ask whether 17-month old infants can use one language-universal cue to identify function word candidates: their high frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants listened to a series of short, naturally recorded…

The consequences of prenatal maternal stress for development were examined in 125 full-term infants at 3, 6, and 12 months of age. Maternal cortisol and psychological state were evaluated 5 times during pregnancy. Exposure to elevated concentrations of cortisol early in gestation was associated with a slower rate of development over the 1st year…

Three experiments demonstrate that biological movement facilitates young infants' recognition of the whole human form. A body discrimination task was used in which 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants were habituated to typical human bodies and then shown scrambled human bodies at the test. Recovery of interest to the scrambled bodies was observed in…

The conditions for serial search are described. A multiple target search methodology (Thornton & Gilden, 2007) is used to home in on the simplest target/distractor contrast that effectively mandates a serial scheduling of attentional resources. It is found that serial search is required when (a) targets and distractors are mirror twins, and…

This study investigated factors related to the quality of early-childhood practitioners' interactions with infants in play and routine contexts. Participants were 24 practitioners working with 9-20-month-old infants in long day-care infant programmes. Video-recordings of their interactions with a nominated infant during play and in routine…

Objectives: This article examines safe haven laws, which allow parents to legally abandon their infants. The main objective is to determine whether safe haven laws fit the criteria of "crime control theater", a term used to describe public policies that produce the appearance, but not the effect, of crime control, and as such are essentially…

Animal studies indicate that early maternal care has long-term effects on brain areas related to social attachment and parenting, whereas neglectful mothering is linked with heightened stress reactivity in the hippocampus across the lifespan. The present study explores the possibility, using magnetic resonance imaging, that perceived quality of…

The present work examined the discovery of linguistic cues during a word segmentation task. Whereas previous studies have focused on sensitivity to individual cues, this study addresses how individual cues may be used to discover additional, correlated cues. Twenty-four 9-month-old infants were familiarized with a speech stream in which…

This article examines the quality of maternal mind-mindedness among adult and adolescent mothers, using an assessment of the appropriateness and emotional valence of maternal mind-related comments while interacting with their infants. Twenty-nine adult mothers and 69 adolescent mothers participated in two assessments with their 18-month-old…

Since the airing of "Sesame Street" in 1985, television produced for children has expanded to more television shows and educational media that includes videos, DVDs, and computer products. Viewing screen media is pervasive in the environments of young children, and companies are designing products for our youngest viewers--infants and toddlers.…