This study of 82 hearing-impaired children (ages 6 to 36 months) sought to provide normative data concerning their communication efforts and to document the course of development of these earliest communication efforts. The study found that certain cognitive abilities and strategies are prerequisite to the development of certain language…

This study found that interactions between mothers and deaf infants (n=20) were positively influenced by social support provided to mothers in the infants' early months, mothers' visual and tactile responsiveness, and infants' ability to cope with interactive stress. The relationship between early experience and later language development was not…

Administered the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory to 25 bilingual (English/Spanish) and 35 monolingual children who were furnishing data for longitudinal study. Assessment of the degree of overlap between bilingual children's lexical development in their two languages showed that they developed early vocabulary at the same rate as…

Dialogues between hearing mothers and their prelinguistic hearing-impaired (n=3) or normally hearing (n=7) infants were analyzed. Mothers of hearing-impaired infants contributed a greater percent of dyadic topic initiations than did other mothers. No group differences were found in responsiveness of mothers or infants. (Author/DB)

Studied parent-staff communication during morning and afternoon transition times in 16 proprietary day care centers. Found that communication varied by center, and communication occurred more between parents and staff of infants and toddlers than parents and staff of preschoolers. Age differences may have been a result of staffs' rather than…

This paper reviews research on disturbances of children with developmental delays and handicaps in responding to complex stimuli, suggesting that such disturbances may deleteriously influence behavioral/neurophysiological development. Intervention programs for teaching children with autism a generalized set to use in responding to complex…

The results from four early intervention evaluation studies are described in relationship to their impact on parent-child interaction. Intervention effects on child development were unlikely to occur unless mothers modified their style of interacting. Only their level of responsiveness was associated with positive developmental outcomes.…

Compared 6-month-old hearing infants' responsiveness to infant-directed and adult-directed signing. Results replicated those found with deaf infants, namely that infants showed greater attentional and affective responsiveness to infant-directed sign than to adult-directed sign, suggesting that infants are prepared to detect sign motherese…

A study compared 26,460 maltreated infants who entered foster care between 1989 and 1994 with a random sample of 68,401 other infants. Infants in care were more than twice as likely to have single parents and low birth weight, and twice as likely to have been born with a birth abnormality. (Author/CR)

Evaluated a multimodal inservice training program designed to enhance the competence of foster parents caring for infants with prenatal substance effects, and to promote an intent to foster such infants. Findings suggested the future foster-parent training efforts in this area should focus on knowledge and skill attainment. (Author)

A survey explored funding strategies used in 16 community-based programs serving infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families. Results pointed to two general funding sources: pooling or decategorization of public funds, and use of donated/raised funds for use by one or more programs to pay for unmet needs. (Author/CR)

Discusses the urgent need to develop leadership in early childhood education in order to improve the quality of programming for infants, toddlers, young children, and their families. Describes five areas of leadership skills: advocacy, administrative, community, conceptual, and career development. (KB)

The infant-and-toddler child-care program at the Child and Family Research Center at University of Nevada, Reno, is based on children's need for consistent, stable, and reliable adult care. Children stay with the same primary caregiver for the first three years. Four broad themes of the program are: attachment and trust, teacher-parent relations,…

Onset of canonical babbling was investigated for 1,536 high-risk infants at about 10-months corrected age. Although delays were infrequent, they were often associated with genetic, neurological, anatomical, and/or physiological abnormalities. Over half the cases of late canonical babbling, at the time of discovery, were not associated with prior…

An evaluation of 3,469 infants at risk found that of those who showed late onset of canonical babbling, fewer than half had been diagnosed with a medical problem accounting for the delay. A follow-up study found those with delayed canonical babbling had smaller vocabularies at 18, 24, and 30 months. (Author/CR)