Smoke from massive wildfires blanketed Indonesia in late 1997. This paper examines the impact that this air pollution (particulate matter) had on fetal, infant, and child mortality. Exploiting the sharp timing and spatial patterns of the pollution and inferring deaths from "missing children" in the 2000 Indonesian Census, I find that the…

Teachers of infants need a large bunch of key ideas and activities of all kinds to unlock in each child the treasures of loving kindness, thoughtful and eloquent use of language, intense active curiosity to learn, willingness to cooperate, and the deep desire to work hard to master new tasks. Teachers can tune in to each child's special…

A woman's behaviors during pregnancy can have a significant influence on her baby's healthy development. Women who smoke or drink alcohol during pregnancy, go without prenatal care or suffer from poor nutrition are more likely to experience complications during pregnancy or childbirth, and their babies are at increased risk for developing a number…

One of the findings from the ZERO TO THREE "Parenting Infants and Toddlers Today" (Hart Research Associates, 2009) parent survey was that while the majority of parents understood ways of promoting their child's development, their understanding of the milestones related to social and emotional development was less consistent. This is an important…

Part representation is not only critical to object perception but also plays a key role in a number of basic visual cognition functions, such as figure-ground segregation, allocation of attention, and memory for shapes. Yet, virtually nothing is known about the development of part representation. If parts are fundamental components of object shape…

In this paper, sung speech is used as a methodological tool to explore temporal variability in the timing of word-internal consonants and vowels. It is hypothesized that temporal variability/stability becomes clearer under the varying rhythmical conditions induced by song. This is explored cross-linguistically in German--a language that exhibits a…

Just as the early years of a child's development create the architecture for future brain growth, early implementation of federal Part C legislation laid the groundwork for a system of supports for families of infants and toddlers with disabilities. Some aspects of the current legislation provide a sturdy foundation for sound policies and…

This study identified deficits in executive functioning in pre-adolescent preterms and modeled their role, along with processing speed, in explaining preterm/full-term differences in reading and mathematics. Preterms (less than 1750 g) showed deficits at 11 years on a battery of tasks tapping the three basic executive functions identified by…

The present study examined the influence of children's experiences during non-maternal childcare on their behavior toward unfamiliar peers. Participants included children classified as negatively reactive at four months of age (N = 52) and children not negatively reactive (N = 61), who were further divided into those who experienced non-maternal…

A top priority in the field of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is the development of precise early diagnostic tools that can be completed with minimal time and training. We report on the convergent and divergent validity of the Baby and Infant Screen for Children with aUtIsm Traits (BISCUIT), specifically the BISCUIT-Part 1. Previous research with…

Adults preferentially use information from the left side of face images to judge gender, emotion, and identity. In this study, we examined the development of this visual-field bias over middle childhood (5-10 years). Our goal was to both characterize the developmental trajectory of the left-side bias (should one exist) and examine the selectivity…

Research based on naturalistic and checklist methods has revealed differences between English and Chinese monolingual children in their trajectories of learning nouns and verbs. However, studies based on controlled laboratory designs (e.g., Imai et al., 2008) have yielded a more mixed picture. Guided by a multidimensional view of word learning (in…

While numbers generally cue processing of quantity or order, they can also contain semantic information, as in the case of historic years (e.g., "1492" calls forth associations of Columbus sailing the ocean blue). Whether these dates are processed as quantities or events may depend on the context in which they occur. We examined such "ambiguous…

Infantile spasms (IS, West syndrome) represent a difficult to treat and sometimes not immediately recognized form of epilepsy which is relatively rare. West Syndrome or IS is one of the most recognized types of epileptic encephalopathy, a form of epilepsy usually associated with developmental regression and delay, frequently difficult to treat and…

Background: Psychophysiological hyperresponsiveness to social-evaluative stress plays a key role in current theories of social phobia (SP). Owing to the early onset of this disorder, the study of children with SP can help to improve etiological models. However, research to date has failed to clarify whether children with SP are physiologically…