A new solution is offered to the Infant Language Acquisition Problem, rejecting both of Chomsky's alternatives. It proposes that the infant does not acquire his mother tongue by mastering its grammar, whether by inference from personal experience or via an innate Language Acquisition Device such as the UG, but that the language he hears is all…

In contemporary understanding, the working areas of children's psychology are expanding considerably. The mental health of the children ensures that they are able to use their developmental abilities, cope with difficulties in life, be productive and be creative, and demonstrate cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics appropriate to…

The authors argue that childhood played a special role in the cultural-historical theory of human culture and biosocial development made famous by Soviet psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky and his circle. Th?ey discuss how this school of thought has, in turn, influenced contemporary play studies. Vygotsky used early childhood to test and refi?ne his…

Recent research with Western populations has demonstrated that children use imitation flexibly to engage in both instrumental and conventional learning. Evidence for children's imitative flexibility in non-Western populations is limited, however, and has only assessed imitation of instrumental tasks. This study (N = 142, 6- to 8-year-olds)…

Previous research has shown indirectly that infants may use two different mechanisms-an object tracking system and an analog magnitude mechanism--to represent small (less than 4) and large (greater than or equal to 4) numbers of objects, respectively. The current study directly tested this hypothesis in an ordinal choice task by presenting 10- to…

A core component of applied educational and child psychology practice is the skilfulness with which practitioners are able to rigorously structure and conceptualise complex real world human problems. This is done in such a way that when they (with others) jointly work on them, there is an increased likelihood of positive outcomes being achieved…

Previous studies have reported that infants selectively reproduce observed actions and have argued that this selectivity reflects understanding of intentions and goals, or goal-directed imitation. We reasoned that if selective imitation of goal-directed actions reflects understanding of intentions, infants should demonstrate stability across…

Age differences in rates of forced confabulation and memory consequences thereof were assessed using a recall task similar to real forensic interview procedures. Children viewed a target video and were tested with the same 18 questions immediately afterward and 1 week later. Of the 18 questions, 12 were answerable; the 6 unanswerable questions…

This article engages critically with the concept of agency in infant and toddler educational discourse. It is argued that agency, when conceptualised with emphasis on individuality and the autonomous self, poses a conceptual "dead end" for those who are not-yet-in-language, such as babies and toddlers. In considering agency as an aspect…

Low- and middle-income countries often have limited resources, underdeveloped health systems and scarce knowledge of autism spectrum disorder. The objectives of this preliminary study were to develop and adapt intervention materials and to train a native clinician to implement a community-based parent-mediated behavioural intervention in rural…

Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and…

Service-learning is a powerful method of teaching and learning that has been used effectively for more than two decades. This volume contributes further to the Advances in Service-Learning Research series that focuses upon service-learning in teacher education. Research and theory indicate that knowledge of service-learning pedagogy and how to…

In the summer of 1899, [John] Dewey gave two series of talks at Honolulu High School on Tuesday and Friday evenings from 8:00 to 10:00. The first set of five lectures was entitled "The Life of the Child;" the second set, "Movements in Nineteenth Century Thought." The first talk of the lecture series was delivered on the evening…

Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds (n = 70) and adults (n = 89) evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body…

As a psychologist of 35 years, Wendy Mogel discusses what she has discovered to be the new trend behind anxiety in young boys. Through hours of probing and pondering, neither hyperparenting nor early trauma (what one might think were logical causes of a young boy's anxiety) is the key to understanding this new trend. She explains that many…