Bilingual case study of infant acquiring Spanish and English from birth to 1;10 is used to address whether young bilinguals differentiate between their languages based on language choice. Daily diary records and weekly video recordings in the two language contexts were used to construct the child's lexicon and establish that translation…

This essay reviews research on mother-infant roles during early interactions and how these serve to foster the development of infant emotion regulation. It provides illustrations of the ways in which physical unavailability (resulting from hospitalization or other separation) and emotional unavailability (resulting from mental illnesses such as…

Evaluates empirical studies on child development. Suggests that most such research consists of studies of a priori, nonempirical, logical relations between concepts, whose definitions guarantee the relationship studied. Argues that hypotheses are empirical if variables involved are semantically and logically independent. Research that is not based…

The 4-stage Adolescent Family Assessment Model was tested with 114 Anglo-American and Mexican-American adolescent mothers. The two ethnic groups differed in the relationships among knowledge of infant care, caregiving behaviors, family approval, peer approval, family functioning, and demographic characteristics. (SV)

This article reviews the literature on interdisciplinary approaches to training infant specialists and discusses the challenges of implementing such programs. The Interdisciplinary Infant Intervention Program at Temple University (Pennsylvania) is described as an example of how these challenges can be met. Challenges identified include…

This article describes the Infant-Toddler Care Project in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which was developed to provide child care programs with on-site consultation that emphasizes aspects of quality care for all children and supports the inclusion of infants and toddlers with disabilities. An appended case study illustrates the project's approach…

Examined the relationship between infants' early verbal imitation, when the ability to copy behaviors first emerges, and their lexical development during the second year of life. Twenty infants were examined longitudinally at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months. Suggests that infants' early imitation of words not in their repertoires predicts and may…

Investigates the dominance of global versus local visual properties in four-month-old infants as a function of individual differences in fixation duration. Suggests that long-looking infants process visual information more slowly than short-looking infants, and there may be qualitative differences in the manner in which the two groups of infants…

Explores cognitive development in early childhood education and examines four kinds of prevailing misconceptions in the light of recent evidence: (1) infants and very young children are limited to sensorimotor cognition; (2) young children's cognition is animistic; (3) young children's thought is egocentric; and (4) young children can think only…

Observed the reactions of 3.5-month-old infants looking at a carrot that should have but did not appear in a window after passing behind a screen. The results of this and several similar experiments indicated that 3.5-month-old infants are able to represent and reason about hidden objects. (BC)

Six-month-old infants recognize a cue 24 hours after training in the original context but not in a different one. It is demonstrated that this retrieval deficit could be overcome if infants are briefly and passively exposed to a novel context. Concludes that each training episode is encoded in terms of the context in which it occurs. Contains 48…

Over one year, mothers observed the responses of their one-year-old children to distresses the children caused and witnessed in others. Children's prosocial behaviors, and reparative behaviors after they had caused distress, increased in frequency over the year. These behaviors were accompanied by changes in self-recognition. (BC)

This study, involving 67 children (ages 2 to 60 months) with motor delays, found that the Battelle Developmental Inventory (BDI) possessed moderate to high levels of concurrent validity with appropriate subtests from the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales and the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. (Author/JDD)

Twenty congenitally blind infants were placed in a panelled framework with various tactile and auditory objects for 20-minute periods. Results indicated that subjects improved their performance of spatially related activities when exposed to an environment helping them understand the concept and permanence of objects and the production of…

Discusses a study of prelinguistic "referential" communication routines and their effects on infants' mastery of protoreferential communication. Reports that observations were made of interactions between infants and mothers. Concludes that infants' communicative skill development depends partly on how adults organize interactions to…