With the growing participation of infants and toddlers in group care settings ongoing examination and research into what constitutes quality education and care for this age group is paramount. Theories and approaches espoused in Aotearoa/New Zealand's mandated early childhood curriculum "Te Whariki: He whariki matauranga mo nga mokopuna o…

This collection explores key issues related to infant and toddler wellbeing, offering diverse international perspectives on how wellbeing is culturally understood. Scholars from Drawing from Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Brazil, Greece, Norway, Portugal and the UK present local conceptualizations that contribute to a broader, global…

Purpose: The adenoids, or pharyngeal tonsils, consist of a pad of lymphoid tissue, located on the posterior pharyngeal wall of the nasopharynx. During childhood, the adenoid pad serves as a contact site for the soft palate to assist with velopharyngeal closure during oral speech. During adenoidal involution, most children are able to maintain…

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred--like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal…

Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B…

We examined the communicative intentions behind parents' deictic gesture use with high-risk infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 17), high-risk infants who were not diagnosed with ASD (n = 25), and low-risk infants (n = 28) at 12 months and assessed the extent to which the parental deictic gesture intentions predicted…

As of July 2022, child care employment in the United States was still 8.4% below what it was in February 2020 with nearly 90,000 child care professionals leaving the workforce for higher-paying and less stressful jobs. Although New Jersey's child care employment has been rising, the numbers have not reached pre-pandemic levels. This ongoing child…

Purpose: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration indications for cochlear implantation in children is currently 9 months of age and older for children with bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL). Studies have shown that earlier activation of a cochlear implant (CI) can lead to better spoken language outcomes. As auditory skills are a…

Most infants exhibit an attentional bias for faces and fearful facial expressions. These biases reduce toward the third year of life, but little is known about the development of the biases beyond early childhood. We used the same methodology longitudinally to assess attention disengagement patterns from nonface control pictures and faces…

Eighty-one adolescent and young mother-infant dyads have been divided into two groups with/without traumatic experiences in maternal history to examine the effect of maternal traumatic experiences on the quality of mother-infant relationship. At infant 3 months, mother-infant interaction was video-recorded. Results showed that adolescent and young…

The coaching service delivery model is often implemented within parent-mediated interventions for infants at an elevated likelihood of autism spectrum disorder. However, less is known about the exact coaching behaviors used within intervention sessions. Therefore, we examined the coaching behaviors implemented within the Adapted Responsive…

Infants diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (autism) have difficulty engaging in social communication and interactions with others and often experience language impairment. The use of infant-directed speech (IDS), which is the speech register used when interacting with infants, is associated with infant language and socio-communicative…

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a rare, late detected developmental disorder associated with severe deficits in the speech-language domain. Despite a few reports about atypicalities in the speech-language development of infants and toddlers with RTT, a detailed analysis of the pre-linguistic vocalisation repertoire of infants with RTT is yet missing. Based…

Electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry has been widely studied across the lifespan, with multiple studies conducted in infancy. However, few have investigated frontal EEG asymmetry in the context of emotional-eliciting tasks, controlling for baseline to focus on an experimental episode response. The present study was designed to address this gap in…

Sensitive caregiving is an essential aspect of positive parenting that influences executive functions development, but the mechanisms underlying this association are less clear. Using data from the Family Life Project, a large prospective longitudinal sample of 1292 families residing in rural, predominately low-income communities, the current…