Ten dyads were observed biweekly from 10 to 24 months of infant age while playing together at home with a set of toys. The aim was to examine whether mother-infant coregulation changes over the second year of the infant's life and whether there are individual differences in that process. Normative trends as well as variability between and within…

It is well attested that 14-month-olds have difficulty learning similar sounding words (e.g., bih/dih), despite their excellent phonetic discrimination abilities. By contrast, Rost and McMurray (2009) recently demonstrated that 14-month-olds' minimal-pair learning can be improved by the presentation of words by multiple talkers. This study…

Recent research suggests that witnessing events of fission (e.g., the splitting of a solid object) impairs human infants', human adults', and non-human primates' object representations. The present studies investigated the reactions of gorillas and orangutans to cohesion violation across different types of fission events implementing a behavioral…

Purpose: This study examined a mother's speech style and interactive behaviors with her twin sons: 1 with bilateral hearing impairment (HI) and the other with normal hearing (NH). Method: The mother was video-recorded interacting with her twin sons when the boys were 12.5 and 22 months of age. Mean F0, F0 range, duration, and F1/F2 vowel space of…

Executive functions play an important role in cognitive development, and during the preschool years especially, children's performance is limited in tasks that demand flexibility in their behavior. We asked whether preschoolers would exhibit limitations when they are required to apply a general rule in the context of novel stimuli on every trial…

In this article, we hypothesize that "invariance detection," a general perceptual phenomenon whereby organisms attend to relatively stable patterns or regularities, is an important means by which infants tune in to various aspects of spoken language. In so doing, we synthesize a substantial body of research on detection of regularities across the…

The ability to individuate objects is one of our most fundamental cognitive capacities. Recent research has revealed that when objects vary in color or luminance alone, infants fail to individuate those objects until 11.5 months. However, color and luminance frequently covary in the natural environment, thus providing a more salient and reliable…

Background: Previous studies have highlighted that episodes of crying of children with autistic disorder (AD) were perceived as inexplicable from their parents who could not identify causative factors. These results supported the view of AD as related to a problem of expressing and sharing emotions. Moreover, no evidence has been presented on…

The goal of this small-scale study was to investigate how parental separation behaviours affect the transitional behaviour of infants aged 6-18 months. Thirty parent-infant pairs were observed during the separation process across three metropolitan childcare centres in Adelaide, South Australia. Observed interactions with both their infants and…

Data from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care (Phase I) and propensity score techniques were used to determine whether working full time in a nonstandard schedule job during the child's first year predicted parenting practices over 3 years. Results indicated that women who worked full time in a…

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of adaptations for children with low vision of the Bayley Scales, a standardized developmental instrument widely used to assess development in young children. Low vision adaptations were made to the procedures, item instructions and play material of the Dutch version of the Bayley Scales of Infant…

Individuals of all ages extract structure from the sequences of patterns they encounter in their environment, an ability that is at the very heart of cognition. Exactly what underlies this ability has been the subject of much debate over the years. A novel mechanism, implicit chunk recognition (ICR), is proposed for sequence segmentation and chunk…

Past studies have identified individual differences in infant visual attention based upon peak look duration during initial exposure to a stimulus. Colombo and colleagues found that infants that demonstrate brief visual fixations (i.e., short lookers) during familiarization are more likely to demonstrate evidence of recognition memory during…

Background: Attachment theory was conceptualized by Bowlby as relevant across the life span, from "cradle to grave". The research literature on attachment in infants and preschool-aged children is extensive, but it is limited in adolescence. In particular, it is unclear whether or not attachment security is distinguishable from other qualities of…

Using structural equation modeling to investigate the multiple pathways of sleeping position and children's early development at six-, eighteen- and thirty-six-month children, with parental demographics and child health status controlled. The participants consisted of 1783 six-month children, who were assessed using the Taiwan Birth Cohort Study…