As the articles in this issue attest, U-shaped curves in development have stimulated a wide spectrum of research across disparate task domains and age groups and have provoked a variety of ideas about their origins and theoretical significance. In the authors' view, the ubiquity of the general pattern suggests that U-shaped curves can arise from…

U-shaped developmental functions, and their N-shaped cousins, have intrigued developmental psychologists for decades because they provide a compelling demonstration that development does not always entail a monotonic increase across age in a single underlying ability. Instead, the causes of development are much more complex. Indeed,…

This article reports 2 experiments examining the changing role of iconicity in symbol learning and its implications regarding the mechanisms supporting symbol-to-referent mapping. Experiment 1 compared 18- and 26-month-olds' mapping of iconic gestures (e.g., hopping gesture for a rabbit) vs. arbitrary gestures (e.g., dropping motion for a rabbit).…

The authors use the creation and implementation of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) as a lens through which to view evolving public policy toward infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families, and ZERO TO THREE's growing sophistication and impact in the policy arena. Beginning in 1986, P.L. 99-457 (later renamed…

This article focuses on infants in the first year of life who have experienced single or very circumscribed episodes of trauma in the context of otherwise relatively normal developmental trajectories. Young infants who experience pain may show heightened reactions to pain even years later. Children may remember, and may even reenact, traumatic…

This article describes how the Fairbanks Native Association's (FNA) Early Head Start (EHS) program in Alaska participated in the EHS Pathways to Prevention initiative. At the FNA EHS program, staff members had watched their families struggle to receive appropriate and respectful mental health services. Developing more culturally relevant services…

Background: Successful communication with profoundly deaf children is heavily dependent on visual attention. Previous research has shown that mothers of deaf children--notably those who are deaf themselves--use a variety of strategies to gain their children's attention. This study compares patterns of visual attention in deaf and hearing children…

Learning to reach for and manipulate objects requires considerable neuromotor control and flexibility. Through environmental and object exploration individual neuromotor strategies expand, and prehensile skills improve, as infants and children overcome constraints. Infants and children with prehensile deficits often have difficulty exploring…

The present research examined alternative accounts of prior violation-of-expectation (VOE) reports that young infants can represent and reason about hidden objects. According to these accounts, young infants' apparent success in these VOE tasks reflects only novelty and familiarity preferences induced by the habituation or familiarization trials…

Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

Based on the position that cultural ideologies shape child development, many developmental analyses have focused on analyzing cultural conceptions of independence and interdependence. Less attention has been paid to charting the developmental sequences of children's independent and interdependent behavior that are ostensibly shaped by cultural…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…

This study assessed the relation between mother mental state language and child desire language and emotion understanding in 15--24-month-olds. At both times point, mothers described pictures to their infants and mother talk was coded for mental and nonmental state language. Children were administered 2 emotion understanding tasks and their mental…

Links between neonatal biological rhythms and the emergence of interaction rhythms were examined in 3 groups (N=71): high-risk preterms (HR; birth weight less than 1,000 g), low-risk preterms (LR; birth weight=1,700-1,850 g), and full-term (FT) infants. Once a week for premature infants and on the 2nd day for FT infants, sleep-wake cyclicity was…