A short-term longitudinal study of the peer-related social interactions of 111 developmentally delayed toddlers and preschool children was carried out. Results suggested the existence of unusually marked deficits in peer interactions. Possible contributing factors were discussed. (Author/RH)

Social interactions regarding moral and conventional transgressions were observed among two toddler groups. Each of 16 day care center classrooms, eight serving 13- to 27-month-olds and eight serving 18- to 40-month-olds, was observed for three 45-minute sessions. Implications of results concerned the developmental origins of distinctions between…

Social play emerged earlier than social pretend play with a similar structure; the incidence of social pretend play increased with age. Four strategies for integrating pretense into social play were isolated; among them, verbal recruitment and "join" were found to be more effective than imitation or nonverbal recruitment. (Author/RH)

More children than ever are in care centers, and child care experiences of infants and toddlers are believed to have a powerful and lasting impact on children's well-being. A team of researchers from the FPG Child Development Institute created a study to examine the effects that transitions have on children's behavior and observable stress when…

To assess changes in visual-motor function with age, 20 visually impaired infants and toddlers were followed, longitudinally, with the Bayley Mental Scale of Infant Development (BMSID). The BMSID was seen to be an appropriate tool for evaluating such children and especially effective as part of a longitudinal process. (Author/DB)

The paper reports data from four studies using the Language Development Survey (LDS), a screening tool for the identification of language delay in two-year-old children. The LDS was found to have excellent sensitivity and specificity. Prevalence data using the LDS are reported, comparing three different severity cutoffs. (Author/DB)

Two case examples (a toddler with severe developmental delays and a 7-year old with severe mental retardation) illustrating effects of meal schedule and food quantity on displays of problematic behavior are offered. Brief functional analyses of aberrant behavior provided useful information for interpreting distinct patterns of behavior. (DB)

To test opposing theories about the relationship between intonation and syllable timing, these boundary features were compared in a longitudinal study of 9 children's speech development between the mean ages of 16 and 25 months. Results suggest that young children acquire the skills that control intonation earlier than they do skills of final…

This study tested the hypothesis that pretreatment level of play would predict the rate of increase in prelinguistic, intentional requesting during prelinguistic communication intervention of 8 children (ages 21 to 30 months) with developmental disabilities. A positive relation was found between amount of transitional or symbolic play at baseline…

A natural language sample of babble and words was obtained for 47 2-year-old children and compared with expressive language scores 5 months later. More than 50 percent of the variance in language outcome test scores was accounted for by rate of word use, rate of vowel babble, and behavior problems. (Author/DB)

Communication samples were collected from 15 normally developing children (ages 11-27 months) during the prelinguistic, single-word, and multiword stages, using both structured and unstructured contexts. Significantly more requests were used during the structured context, but no significant difference was found between the numbers of comments used…

An experimental analysis of imitation was conducted to examine the influence of response topography on generalization of imitation across three response types with four children (ages two to four) with autism. The study found that imitation generalized from reinforced training models to nonreinforced probe models within a response type but did not…

This study examined behaviors reflecting mastery motivation in 17 young (ages 2 and 3) children with moderate and severe cognitive delays. Results supported the application of the mastery motivation model to this group of children who used mastery behaviors significantly more often than lower level exploratory behaviors. Use of mastery behaviors…

A newly revised parent questionnaire for the assessment of vocabulary and syntactic development, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory-Toddlers, was evaluated. Concurrent validity correlations demonstrated high validity for parent report in both domains and some ability to differentially assess the two. (Author/DB)

A 1-year followup of 10 children with delayed onset of early speech skills found that all 4 children who were still delayed had been delayed in language comprehension and gesture tasks the previous year whereas the 6 children who had "caught up" had demonstrated age-appropriate language comprehension and gesture usage earlier. (Author/DB)