Research Findings: This study investigated the prevalence of pedagogical questions posed by 27 early childhood educators as they interacted with infants in each of two naturally-occurring contexts: book-focused interactions and educator mediated play. The pedagogical questions expressed by educators to infants were coded as "confirm"…

For New Jersey parents, the high cost of child care, coupled with the lack of available space for babies in licensed facilities, has made a challenging task even more difficult. Findings from a recent study by Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) revealed that there is a severe shortage of infant-toddler child care, especially in low-income…

The goal of the current study is to assess the temporal dynamics of vision and action to evaluate the underlying word representations that guide infants' responses. Sixteen-month-old infants participated in a two-alternative forced-choice word-picture matching task. We conducted a moment-by-moment analysis of looking and reaching behaviors as they…

Parent language input is a well-established predictor of child language development. Multisensory attention skills (MASks; intersensory matching, shifting and sustaining attention to audiovisual speech) are also known to be foundations for language development. However, due to a lack of appropriate measures, individual differences in these skills…

Background: Lower-income families in the United States are at increased risk for food insecurity and have higher rates of tobacco use. Many retailers accepting government food assistance benefits also sell tobacco products, whose marketing promotes smoking initiation and undermines quit attempts. We examined the presence of tobacco marketing in…

A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of…

In this article, Trenna Valado, Jennifer Tracey, Jonathan Goldfinger, and Rahil Briggs highlight the potential to expand the promise of pediatric care to encompass the full array of child and family needs that can affect the long-term wellbeing of infants and toddlers. Pediatric care is not stigmatized, nearly universally accessed, and oriented…

Research shows an association between mother-infant shared reading and children's language and literacy development. Educators in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres frequently interact with groups of similar-aged infants, yet infant-educator shared reading has received little attention. This naturalistic observational study…

China's fast-developing urbanization has promoted a great number of rural families migrating to urban areas. The objective of this study is to address the existing situation of urban migrant parents' parenting for infant and toddlers and the association between co-parental self-efficacy and child developmental outcomes. A sample of 387 parents of…

There is evidence that parents could influence the development of their children's effortful control in infancy through social interaction. Playful interactions in infancy often involve scaffolding - i.e. the parental provision of support and modelling for problem solving and learning during play. However, previous research has found little…

The Child Observation Record (COR), initially developed in 1993 by HighScope Educational Research Foundation, is an observation-based instrument that provides systematic assessment of young children's knowledge and abilities in all major areas of development. Teachers or caregivers spend a few minutes each day writing brief notes or…

Background: Research has demonstrated that having an understanding of families' everyday routines is important when planning interventions, yet the nature of the information revealed by families about their daily lives has been scarcely documented. The aim of this study was to examine the concerns and priorities of families with a child with a…

Altered structural connectivity has been identified as a possible biomarker of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk in the developing brain. Core features of ASD include impaired social communication and early language delay. Thus, examining white matter tracts associated with language may lend further insight into early signs of ASD risk and the…

Women are at greater risk of exposure to interpersonal violence during pregnancy. The influence prenatal violence has on children's behavioral adjustment is generally understood to stem from its impact on mothers, but there is a dearth of prospective research to test these models. The current study evaluated the influence of interpersonal violence…

Researchers disagree as to the importance for infant language learning of isolated words, which occur relatively rarely in input speech. Brent and Siskind (2001) showed that the first words infants "produce" are words their mothers used most frequently in isolation. Here we investigate the long-term effects of presentation mode on…