Infants and toddlers (birth to age 3) learn what it means to be members of, and to belong to and be accepted by, their societies by adopting behaviors, attitudes, manners, and ways of thinking that are deeply rooted in what is valued in their culture. Infant and toddler teachers play a pivotal role as transmitters and maintainers of culture when…

There are concerns about the quantity and quality of personnel in early childhood intervention (ECI) as the numbers of infants and young children with delays and disabilities grow in number, needs, and diversity. The Early Childhood Personnel Center (ECPC) was funded to provide technical assistance (TA) to state systems of ECI and institutions of…

This study deals with speech acts addressed to Hadza infants in Tanzania, a group that has traditionally lived off hunting and gathering. Three research questions are addressed: How do Hadza speech acts compare with those found in previous studies in other cultures? Are there differences between child and adult speakers? And do speech acts differ…

Attachment studies mostly follow the Western middle-class model in theory and methods. To demonstrate that the assessment of children's caregiving context is an often neglected, but crucial prerequisite for attachment studies, we (a) conducted a literature analysis of attachment research in non-Western contexts and (b) empirically investigated the…

We investigated whether 12-month-old infants rely on information about the certainty of goal selection in order to predict observed reaching actions. Infants' goal-directed gaze shifts were recorded as they observed action sequences in a multiple-goals design. We found that 12-month-old infants exhibited gaze shifts significantly earlier when…

Orienting biases for speech may provide a foundation for language development. Although human infants show a bias for listening to speech from birth, the relation of a speech bias to later language development has not been established. Here, we examine whether infants' attention to speech directly predicts expressive vocabulary. Infants…

Adaptive behavior requires focusing on relevant tasks while remaining sensitive to novel information. In adult studies of cognitive control, cognitive stability involves maintaining robust cognitive representations while cognitive flexibility involves updating of representations in response to novel information. Previous adult research has shown…

While some people feel that an infant who will never see or hear can bring only heartache, Orion's family knew differently. Deafblindness is not just about the absence of sight and sound. It is so much more than the sum of these two parts. What one learns from experiencing the collaboration between a teacher of the deaf and a teacher of the…

Recent studies suggest that infants' audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants' emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds…

This article describes the FAN (Facilitating Attuned Interactions) approach to attunement in relationships and how it serves as a framework for reflective practice in an exemplary home visiting program. The authors highlight the role of the FAN as a tool for "reflection-in-action" and as a guide for "reflection-on-action." The…

Preterm birth and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) stay are early adverse stressful experiences, which may result in an altered temperamental profile. The serotonin transporter gene ("SLC6A4"), which has been linked to infant temperament, is susceptible to epigenetic regulation associated with early stressful experience. This study…

Research has established that the body is fundamentally involved in perception: bodily experience influences activation of the shared neural system underlying action perception and production during action observation, and bodily characteristics influence perception of the spatial environment. However, whether bodily characteristics influence…

The purpose of this article is to establish a clear distinction between the concepts of childhood and infancy; this distinction can allow us to observe through the study of biopolitics, the radical changes that differ Foucault's classical analysis regarding children to Agamben's reflections on infancy. In the line of Agamben's theory, the…

Data from the 2014 National Center on Deaf-Blindness Count show that fewer than 100 infants and toddlers are currently identified with deafblindness across the United States and that identification rates for this population vary greatly from state to state. The author presents a key rationale for timely and accurate identification of early-onset…

Institutions of higher education are increasingly relying on distance technologies to prepare teacher candidates. In early childhood special education (ECSE), a field that focuses on working with young children ages 0-8 with delays and disabilities and their families, many of these distance technologies are being used to improve teacher candidate…