The development of social-emotional skills is crucial in early childhood. Behavior problems in early childhood are risk factors for difficulties throughout childhood and adolescence and beyond. Considering the importance of developing social and emotional skills during early childhood, this study introduced the Papilio-3to6 program into everyday…

Although observational instruments are considered to be the gold standard for measuring toddler childcare quality, large-scale studies often have to rely on interviews or questionnaires. However, it remains unclear whether such reports can serve as reliable indicators for childcare quality. The present study used the ITERS and FCCERS to examine…

Over the last few decades, research has consistently shown that process quality in child care centers and family child care varies substantially, but is mostly at a mediocre level. Based on the NUBBEK sample (National Study on Education, Learning and Upbringing in Early Childhood), an expanded model of process quality tests the influence of…

Findings from previous cross-sectional studies showed that while toddlers around their first birthday imitate selectively, that is, they systematically omit some kinds of target action steps or they copy only the goal, but not the means of the modeled actions, older toddlers imitate more exactly. The aim of the present article is to provide…

Background: Early intervention for children identified as late talkers (LTs) at the age of 24 months is still a controversial issue in research and clinical routine. Previous studies have shown inconsistent results regarding predictors of early lexical deficits on school-age outcomes of late-talking toddlers. Methods: In a five-wave follow-up…

Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that…

Lexical development of bilingual children is influenced by a number of input factors. In the present study, early lexical skills of 25-month old children growing up with Turkish and German were assessed. Parents of 92 children filled out a newly developed list for productive Turkish vocabulary, as well as a vocabulary list for German. A parental…

Social--emotional competences are an important developmental domain for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children and early diagnosis of problems is needed to ensure that DHH children receive appropriate support in this domain. In order to explore the usefulness of an instrument, which was recently developed for very young children, two studies in…

In this pilot study, we ask whether repeated storybook reading is also beneficial for word learning in children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI). We compared 3-year-old German learning children diagnosed with SLI to typically developing children matched on age and socioeconomic status (SES). One week later, children with SLI…

This cross-cultural study investigates how maternal task assignment relates to toddlers' requested behavior and helping between 18 and 30 months. One hundred seven mother-child dyads were assessed in three different cultural contexts (rural Brazil, urban Germany, and urban Brazil). Brazilian mothers showed assertive scaffolding (serious and…

This report investigates tool learning and its relations to executive functions (EFs) in toddlers. In Study 1 (N = 93), 18-, 20-, 22-, and 24-month-old children learned equally well to choose a correct tool from observation, whereas performance based on feedback improved with age. Knowledge transfer showed significant progress after 22 months of…

The present article investigates the acquisition of Manner of Articulation (MoA) contrasts in child language production. We analyzed spontaneous longitudinal speech data of four German and six Dutch 1- to 3-year-olds. The data suggest that the acquisition of MoA contrasts is influenced by various co-occurrence constraints at the word level.…

Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children's input changes their processing preferences for…

The present study investigated young preschoolers' proportional allocation of rewards in 2 different work contexts. We presented 32 pairs of 3.5-year-old peers with a collaborative task to obtain rewards by pulling ropes. In order to establish differences in work input, 1 child's rope was not immediately accessible but had to be retrieved from the…

In this article, Ajay Chaudry and Heather Sandstrom review research on child care and early education for children under age three. They describe the array of early care and education arrangements families use for infants and toddlers; how these patterns have changed in recent decades; and differences by family socioeconomic status, race, and…