This study examined the mediating role of emotional availability in the relation between parent positive personality and toddler problem behavior. The sample comprised 654 twins at 12 and 32 months. Primary caregivers (>95% mothers) completed six measures indexing parent positive personality assessed at 12 months, and emotional availability and…

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…

Young children's speech and communication skills have been in the spotlight in recent years, often in association with parental socio-economic status and children's 'readiness' for school. Finding innovative and open-ended ways to encourage children with communication difficulties to engage in interactive play was the premise for this action…

The present study focused on parents' social cue use in relation to young children's attention. Participants were ten parent-child dyads; all children were 36 to 60 months old and were either typically developing (TD) or were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children wore a head-mounted camera that recorded the proximate child view…

We investigate bilingual children's perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., "green" is pronounced with a final [m] in "green pen"), while French has voicing assimilation…

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…

This paper explores the connection between nurses' multilingual beliefs and their advice on multilingual parenting to families with young children. Data was gathered through video-stimulated reflection dialogues with 11 nurses employed at infant welfare clinics in Belgium. Our analysis disclosed two salient counter topics regarding participants'…

Currently, Developmental scales for children aged 0-6 years are a particularly valuable resource for assessing developmental milestones in children. Most scales are developed based on a broad conceptual framework, and their metric validation is insufficient and of low quality. The aim of this systematic review is to analyse the psychometric…

While changing demographics reflect an increasingly multicultural and multilingual U.S. population, Latinos continue to experience under-representation and lack of recognition inconsistent for such a growing segment of the U.S. population. Latinos face a myriad of inequities across systems that impact early childhood development and that continue…

This study examined the extent to which a discrepant comprehension-production profile (i.e., relatively more delayed comprehension than production) is characteristic of the early language phenotype in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and tracked the developmental progression of the profile. Our findings indicated that a discrepant…

Background: Previous work has documented lower vocalization rate and consonant acquisition delays in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We investigated differences in these variables at 12, 18, and 24 months in toddlers at high and low risk for ASD. Method: Vocalization rate and number of different consonants were obtained from speech…

Toddlers performed a spatial mapping task in which they were required to learn the location of a hidden object in a vertical array and then transpose this location information 90° to a horizontal array. During the vertical training, they were given (a) no labels, (b) alphabetical labels, or (c) numerical labels for each potential spatial location.…

This study examines novel language learning from inconsistent input in monolingual and bilingual toddlers. We predicted an advantage for the bilingual toddlers on the basis of the structural sensitivity hypothesis. Monolingual and bilingual 24-month-olds performed two novel language learning experiments. The first contained consistent input, and…

Both early intervention (EI) programs for infants and toddlers with disabilities and newborn screening (NBS) programs to identify specific disorders shortly after birth rest on the assumption that the best way to prevent or lessen the impact of a disorder is to provide treatment as early as possible. Despite this shared vision, the two programs…