Drawing on literature relevant to the impact of sibling death, the authors examined the invisible loss of siblings never known. This article presents findings of a phenomenological study of 15 adult siblings who "storied" the psychological presence and power of a deceased infant sibling never known but who acted as memory keepers for…

Recent work showed that infants recognize and store function words starting from the age of 6-8 months. Using a visual fixation procedure, the present study tested whether French-learning 14-month-olds have the knowledge of syntactic categories of determiners and pronouns, respectively, and whether they can use these function words for…

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants' attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment 1 used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds'…

We observed infant siblings of children with autism later diagnosed with ASD (ASD siblings; n = 17), infant siblings of children with autism with and without other delays (Other Delays and No Delays siblings; n = 12 and n = 19, respectively) and typically developing controls (TD controls; n = 19) during a free-play task at 18 months of age.…

Understanding how language emerged in our species calls for a detailed investigation of the initial specialization of the human brain for speech processing. Our earlier research demonstrated that an adult-like left-lateralized network of perisylvian areas is already active when infants listen to sentences in their native language, but did not…

Purpose: This clinical exchange reviews two independent phonological assessment measures: mean babbling level (MBL) and syllable structure level (SSL). Both measures summarize phonetic inventory and syllable shape in a calculated average and have been used in research to describe the phonological abilities of children ages 9 to 36 months. An…

This study used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) on two generations of African American women who gave birth from 1967 to 2005 to describe changing relationships between marital status and low birth weight (LBW) across the generations. An increasing protection of marriage on infant LBW across the two generations was found after…

Growth modeling was used to examine the developmental trajectory of infant temperamental fear with maternal fear and depressive symptoms as predictors of infant fearfulness and change in infant fear predicting toddler anxiety symptoms. In Study 1, a sample of 158 mothers reported their own depressive symptoms and fear when their children were 4…

English, French, and bilingual English-French 17-month-old infants were compared for their performance on a word learning task using the Switch task. Object names presented a /b/ vs. /g/ contrast that is phonemic in both English and French, and auditory strings comprised English and French pronunciations by an adult bilingual. Infants were…

Establishing positive peer relationships is integral to children's social development and is linked to a variety of long-term outcomes and life skills. The present study provides an in-depth examination of the ways in which child care providers guide young children in their early social experiences with peers during infancy, when social competence…

Previous work demonstrated that 9-month-olds who were familiarized with 3-syllable strings consistent with both a broader (AAB or ABA) and narrower (AA"di" or A"di"A) generalization made only the latter. Because the narrower generalization is a subset of the broader one, any example that is consistent with the broader generalization but not the…

This book contains a wealth of practical and specific activities and materials to use with infants and toddlers to enhance growth and development. Writing in the accessible style that her readers appreciate, Ann Lewin-Benham looks at current research from the neurosciences to show what teachers and childcare providers can do with very young…

Electronic media--whether child-oriented videos and games or background television--is increasingly embedded in young children's lives, raising questions of its impact on children's language skills. New research presents a multitextured picture of how different types of e-media--depending on content, context, and a child's age--can help and hurt.…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

The study investigates the preschool readiness of moderately preterm children and, in particular, the likely presence of learning disabilities at preschool age. Its theoretical model detects linguistic comprehension and expression; memory-related metacognition and cognition skills; orientation and motor coordination skills; premathematics and…