During the first year of life, infants' perception of speech becomes tuned to the phonology of the native language, as revealed in laboratory discrimination and categorization tasks using syllable stimuli. However, the implications of these results for the development of the early vocabulary remain controversial, with some results suggesting that…

In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language…

Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, preferential-looking tasks with 9- to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either English or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as "in" and "on" in English by spatial prepositions and "kkita" and…

This paper provides evidence for imitative abilities in neonatal chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes"), our closest relatives. Two chimpanzees were reared from birth by their biological mothers. At less than 7 days of age the chimpanzees could discriminate between, and imitate, human facial gestures (tongue protrusion and mouth opening). By the time…

Infants follow the gaze direction of others from the middle of the first year of life. In attempting to determine how infants understand the looking behavior of adults, a number of recent studies have blocked the adult's line of sight in some way (e.g. with a blindfold or with a barrier). In contrast, in the current studies an adult looked behind…

America's first hospitals for premature infants were built at the turn of the twentieth century at fairs, amusement parks, and expositions. These hospitals represented both a medical and a social frontier. They had a great impact on American medicine because they demonstrated the success of caring for premature infants using incubators. The…

This paper considers the meaning, reference and clinical relevance of Winnicott's concept of "riddance". Taking its starting point from the infant's behaviour in letting go the spatula, as described in his paper, "The observation of infants in a set situation", it explores his explanation of riddance activity in the context of…

We introduce the thematic collection by noting some striking similarities in the cognitive abilities of human infants and nonhuman primates. What are the implications of these similarities for our comprehension of human infant cognition? After providing a brief historical and conceptual background on comparative behavioral research, we discuss how…

This study focused on the predictive contributions of infants' temperamental negative emotionality (proneness to fear, anger), sex, maternal responsivity, and their interaction on toddlers' empathy-related responding to distress in 3 contexts. Ninety-eight infants and their mothers participated in a longitudinal study. When the infants were 10…

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggests a gradual, experience-dependent specialization of cortical face processing systems that takes place largely in the 1st year of life. To further investigate these findings, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from typically developing 9-month-old infants presented with pictures of…

Previous research has shown that infants begin to display sensitivities to language-specific phonotactics and probabilistic phonotactics at around 9 months of age. However, certain phonotactic patterns have not yet been examined, such as contrast neutralization, in which phonemic contrasts are neutralized typically in syllable- or word-final…

We investigated the developmental trajectory of nonadjacent dependency learning in an artificial language. Infants were exposed to 1 of 2 artificial languages with utterances of the form [aXc or bXd] (Grammar 1) or [aXd or bXc] (Grammar 2). In both languages, the grammaticality of an utterance depended on the relation between the 1st and 3rd…

The goal of the study was to identify and differentiate subgroups among mothers whose infants were diagnosed as having a developmental disability. The sample consisted of 80 mothers from intact families whose infants had such diagnoses, most of whom were diagnosed with Down syndrome. All mothers were receiving early intervention services.…

In the United States, legislation originally enacted in 1986 provided grants to states to build interagency service systems for children from birth to 3 years of age with developmental delays and disabilities. This legislation now renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was intended to facilitate the development of a…

In this book excerpt the authors briefly note the typical developmental features of babies ages birth to four months, four to eight months, eight to twelve months, and twelve to eighteen months. They make suggestions for interactions supporting play during each stage.