Examines the functioning of toddlers with physical anomalies (but without central nervous system damage) in comparison to premature toddlers (with similar deviant early experience but no deviant physical appearance) and to normal toddlers. Premature and disabled toddlers performed more poorly than normal toddlers in measures of social initiative,…

This paper reviews findings from comprehensive early intervention studies with young children with autism and formulates questions that need to be answered to establish efficacious, accessible early treatment. Results suggest that intensive, very early treatment appears to lessen the debilitating effects of autism. Research questions involve…

Discussion of the functional relationship between self-injurious behavior (SIB) and self-restraint in people with severe disabilities considers SIB and self-restraint as members of the same functional response class, SIB and self-restraint as functionally independent responses, access to self-restraint as positive reinforcement of SIB, termination…

This study established content validity and reliability for the Infant Behavioral Summarized Evaluation, a rating scale for young children with autism. Analysis of videotapes for 89 children (ages 6-48 months) revealed a significant group of 19 items, including characteristic early autistic behaviors and some less commonly described (such as…

This study examined test characteristics of the Pediatric Language Acquisition Screening Tool for Early Referral-Revised (PLASTER-R), a set of developmental questionnaires for children 3 to 60 months of age. The PLASTER-R was moderately to highly successful in identifying children within normal limits for language development. Test-retest…

This collection of 66 assessment instrument profiles was compiled to address the issue of multidisciplinary evaluation of infants and toddlers, aged birth through 2 years, and the identification of family needs. Six categories of instruments are included: (1) developmental screening, (2) developmental tests, (3) specific screening, (4) specific…

Within a longitudinal design, the present study assessed parental attitudes, quality of stimulation in the environment, historical factors, and children's temperament to identify determinants of cognitive ability at 54 months. Children (n=147) were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: a center-based intervention, a home-based…

Examines the influence on children's social development of variation in the quality of child care environments. Findings suggest that overall quality, caregiver-child verbal interactions, and director experience were each highly predictive of the children's social development in day care. (Author/RWB)

Addressing methodological limitations, Study One compared parent-child interactions of normal and language-delayed children; Study Two investigated whether mothers adjust the length of their utterances to the child's ability to comprehend or to produce language; Study Three probed interactional variables associated with variations in the…

Forty children under three years of age referred for early childhood special education evaluation were randomly assigned to either a multidisciplinary, standardized assessment or a transdisciplinary, play-based assessment. Play-based assessments took less time to complete, resulted in favorable parent and staff perceptions, provided useful…

Rasch calibration procedures were applied to item-response data for the 1,262 infants and toddlers comprising the standardization sample for the Mental Scale of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Analyses tend to confirm the psychometric integrity of the instrument. (Author)

This study found that the speech of mothers (n=28) of toddlers slow to acquire expressive language tended to differ only in the frequency of use of lexical contingency devices (specifically expansion and extension of child speech), when compared to mothers of normally speaking toddlers. (Author/DB)

White subjects were asked to evaluate toddler behavior after viewing a 14-minute film of a white child and a black child playing spontaneously. Each toddler was presented as both a male and a female to 208 well-educated adult subjects. In Treatment I, the children were called John and Mike; in Treatment II, Jane and Mary; in Treatment III, John…

Investigated the content and development of children's imitative behavior in the home. The data consisted of incidents of naturally occurring imitations of 24 children 16 and 29 months of age collected over a four-month period by mothers trained in observational recording. Immediate imitations decreased with age; deferred imitations increased with…

A 14-month-old was well-treated by his family until 6.5 months old, when his young mother was traumatized, and the child became neglected and physically abused. Explosive destructive behavior not seen in him before was then observed, supporting the hypothesis that the abused become abusers due to excessive unpleasure, which mobilizes their…