Two experiments examined developmental changes in children's visual recognition of common objects during the period of 18 to 24 months. Experiment 1 examined children's ability to recognize common category instances that presented three different kinds of information: (1) richly detailed and prototypical instances that presented both local and…

The aim of this study was to investigate the temporal structure of mother-infant interactions with songs, with particular attention to two aspects: 1) the singing of the mothers to their infants, and 2) the non-verbal behaviours mothers and infants produce in synchrony with the musical beat. Four mother-infant dyads were video-recorded when the…

A shift from language-general to language-specific sound discrimination abilities has been largely attested in different populations of infants during the second half of the first year of life; however, data are still scarce regarding bilingual populations. Previous research with 4-, 8- and 12-month-old Catalan-Spanish bilingual infants had…

The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6- and 9-month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement…

Sleep has been shown to aid a variety of learning and memory processes in adults (Stickgold, 2005 ). Recently, we showed that infants' learning also benefits from subsequent sleep such that infants who nap are able to abstract the general grammatical pattern of a briefly presented artificial language (Gomez, Bootzin & Nadel, 2006 ). In the present…

By examining voice onset time (VOT) discrimination in 4- and 8-month-olds raised in a French-speaking environment, the current study addresses the question of the role played by linguistic experience in the reshaping of the initial perceptual abilities. Results showed that the language-general -30- and +30-ms VOT boundaries are better…

A number of studies have investigated infants' abilities to extract and discriminate number from multimodal events. These results have been mixed for several possible reasons, including aspects of the experimental design that provide perceptual cues that are unrelated to number, and are known to influence looking preferences. This experiment used…

Studies on rational imitation have provided evidence for the fact that infants as young as 12 months of age engage in rational imitation. However, the developmental onset of this ability is unclear. In this study, we investigated whether 9- and 12-month-olds detect voluntary and implicit as well as nonvoluntary and explicit constraints in the head…

This study examined contributions of maternal sensitivity and maternal representation of childhood experiences to differences in attachment strategies in a cohort of infants from birth to six years. Antenatal maternal attachment representation was assessed with the Adult Attachment Interview. Maternal sensitivity was assessed with the Child-Adult…

How the memory of adults evolves from the memory abilities of infants is a central problem in cognitive development. The popular solution holds that the multiple memory systems of adults mature at different rates during infancy. The "early-maturing system" (implicit or nondeclarative memory) functions automatically from birth, whereas the…

Parents' physiological regulation may support infants' regulation. Mothers (N=152) and 6-month-old male and female infants were observed in normal and disrupted social interaction. Affect was coded at 1-s intervals and vagal tone measured as respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Maternal sensitivity was assessed in free play. Mothers and infants…

We investigated whether infants comprehend others' nonverbal communicative intentions directed to a third person, in an "overhearing" context. An experimenter addressed an assistant and indicated a hidden toy's location by either gazing ostensively or pointing to the location for her. In a matched control condition, the experimenter performed…

This study assesses the extent of phonetic continuity between babble and words in four Italian children followed longitudinally from 0;9 or 0;10 to 2;0--two with relatively rapid and two with slower lexical growth. Prelinguistic phonetic characteristics, including both (a) consistent use of specific consonants and (b) age of onset and extent of…

Learning must be constrained for it to lead to productive generalizations. Although biology is undoubtedly an important source of constraints, prior experience may be another, leading learners to represent input in ways that are more conducive to some generalizations than others, and/or to up- and down-weight features when entertaining…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the language status of 120 young, Latino dual language learners living in poverty in the United States. Maternal language input and home language and literacy environments were examined with regard to language development at 24 and 36 months. Results suggested that even when combining English and Spanish…