To what extent does language acquisition recruit domain-general processing mechanisms? In this dissertation, evidence concerning this question is garnered from the study of individual differences in infant speech perception and their predictive value with respect to language development in early childhood. In the first experiment, variation in the…

This study considers the process of prioritisation undertaken by Hearing Impaired (HI) Support Services in England in a context of change driven by early screening, early intervention and reform in children's services. The aim of prioritisation is to identify the relative needs of deaf children and their families fairly, transparently and…

Objective: To examine the relative contributions of maternal characteristics and behaviors in predicting infant weight gain over the first year of postpartum life. Design: Longitudinal study of maternal feeding style throughout infancy. Setting: A Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children center. Participants:…

This article discusses a project about babies undertaken by a class of children ranging in age from 2.9 years to 3.9 years old in a small Illinois town. Throughout this project, the children studied equipment and supplies needed to care for babies. They made dolls for the classroom, constructed a cradle, made observational drawings, created topic…

Infancy and early childhood sleep-wake behaviours from current and retrospective parental reports were used to explore the relationship between sleeping arrangements and parent-child nighttime interactions at both time points. Children (N = 45) from educated, middle-class families, mostly breastfed in infancy, composed a convenience sample that…

Purpose: This investigation aimed to examine the development of tongue-jaw coordination during speech from childhood to adolescence. Method: Electromagnetic articulography was used to track tongue and jaw motion in 48 children and adults (aged 6-38 years) during productions of /t/ and /k/ embedded in sentences. Results: The coordinative…

Objective: Methamphetamine use among pregnant women is an increasing problem in the United States. Effects of methamphetamine use during pregnancy on fetal growth have not been reported in large, prospective studies. We examined the neonatal growth effects of prenatal methamphetamine exposure in the multicenter, longitudinal Infant Development,…

There have been few investigations of the effects of very immature preterm birth on specific linguistic competencies and phonological working memory at preschool age. Study 1 aimed to investigate early grammatical abilities in very immature healthy preterms, taking into account their cognitive development and biological and social factors. The…

Twelve- and 14-month-old infants' ability to represent another person's visual perspective (Level-1 visual perspective taking) was studied in a looking-time paradigm. Fourteen-month-olds looked longer at a person reaching for and grasping a new object when the old goal-object was visible than when it was invisible to the person (but visible to the…

Young infants tend to look longer at physical events that have unexpected outcomes than those that have expected outcomes, suggesting that they have knowledge of physical principles such as numerosity and occlusion (Baillargeon & Graber, 1987; Wynn, 1992). Although infants are typically tested in the presence of a caregiver, the social component…

During the second year of life, infants exhibit a "video deficit effect." That is, they learn significantly less from a televised demonstration than they learn from a live demonstration. We predicted that repeated exposure to televised demonstrations would increase imitation from television, thereby reducing the video deficit effect. Independent…

This paper considers the area of perinatal death by focusing on the mother's experience. An argument is made for questioning whether mothers attempt to replace a dead infant. It is suggested instead that they long to mother their lost baby and as a result their new infant is mothered in the shadow of the dead baby. The term "penumbra baby" is…

Two experiments investigated the proclivity of 14-month-old infants (a) to altruistically help others toward individual goals, and (b) to cooperate toward a shared goal. The infants helped another person by handing over objects the other person was unsuccessfully reaching for, but did not help reliably in situations involving more complex goals.…

Recent deferred imitation experiments are shedding new light onto the development of declarative memory during early infancy and revealing interesting new facets, for example, that infants process novel information on more than one level. In the current study with 13-month-old infants we examined relational information processing of novel,…

This article provides general guidelines for home visitors who work with teenage parents and their babies to explore their own thoughts and feelings in relation to the young parents with whom they work and to develop a receptive posture in working with these clients. The authors first guide the reader through a series of questions to identify the…