The authors examined technological and traditional infant toys to understand the U.S. toy market facing today's care givers. They found significant differences in the two types of toys in terms of their developmental targets--with more traditional toys aimed at physical development and more technological toys aimed at cognitive development. Given…

Evidence shows individual variation in lexical acquisition as a function of socioeconomic status and linguistic input. Research has primarily involved English-speaking populations and considered only mothers' child-directed speech. This study analyzes the effects of socioeconomic status on quantitative and qualitative properties of linguistic…

We compared systematically the structure, the focus, the thematic sequences, the complexity and the syntactic properties between maternal and paternal infant-directed speech in engagements of infants with their mothers and fathers. Eleven mother-infant and 11 father-infant dyads were video-recorded during their natural interactions at home from…

Diminished response to name, a potential early marker of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), may also indicate risk for other disorders characterized by attention problems, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Using a familial risk design, we examined whether response to name ability at 6, 12, 18, 24, and 36 months of age…

We assessed 24-month-old infants' lexical processing efficiency for both novel and familiar words. Prior work documented that 19-month-olds successfully identify referents of familiar words (e.g., The dog is so little) as well as novel words whose meanings were informed only by the surrounding sentence (e.g., The vep is crying), but that the speed…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

Fourteen-month-olds selectively imitated a sub-efficient means (illuminating a lightbox by a head-touch) when this was modeled by linguistic ingroup members in video-demonstrations. A follow-up study with slightly older infants, however, could replicate this effect only in a video-demonstration context. Hence it still remains unclear whether…

The present study investigates the relation between language environment and language delay in 63 British-English speaking children (19 typical talkers (TT), 22 late talkers (LT), and 22 late bloomers (LB) aged 13 to 18 months. Families audio recorded daily routines and marked the new words their child produced over a period of 6 months. To…

Fragmented sleep is common in infancy. Although night awakening is known to decrease with age, in some infants night awakening is more persistent and continues into older ages. However, the influence of fragmented sleep on development is poorly known. In the present study, the longitudinal relationship between fragmented sleep and psychomotor…

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1-5 years (N = 320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial…

Saccade latency is widely used across infant psychology to investigate infants' understanding of events. Interpreting particular latency values requires knowledge of standard saccadic RTs, but there is no consensus as to typical values. This study provides standard estimates of infants' (n = 194, ages 9 to 15 months) saccadic RTs under a range of…

Aim: To investigate developmental trajectories in early childhood and predictors of class assignment. Methods: Data were available for Gen2 infants at 12 (n = 2275), 24 (n = 1845) and 36 (n = 2110) months of age in the Raine Study. Latent growth class analysis was used to identify developmental trajectories based on the Ages and Stages…

Vulnerability of morphosyntactic production, including grammatical aspect, has been identified in at least some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exposed to typologically different languages. However, Tovar et al. (2015) found strengths in comprehending grammatical aspect in English-exposed children with ASD, suggesting that the…

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experience about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations--that is, to engage in higher-order…

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experiences about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations--i.e., to engage in higher-order…