Background: Between 90% and 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents who often need support with how to adapt their communication. Parent-child interaction (PCI) is an important predictor of deaf children's future language development. It is therefore necessary for professionals to assess parents' strengths and needs to identify areas for…

Many Western industrialized nations have high levels of ethnic diversity but to date there are very few studies which investigate prelinguistic and early language development in infants from ethnic minority backgrounds. This study tracked the development of infant communicative gestures from 10 to 12 months (n = 59) in three culturally distinct…

Language development can be framed as the process of learning how to mean (Halliday, 1975). From this perspective, the role of communicative function is central to the language-learning process with development being guided by interaction with experienced others. In the current study, we present a detailed analysis of the communicative functions…

Infant attachment theory is now nearly seventy-years old. Despite debates that developed around the original theory relating to the role of the mother and the potential for emotional flexibility in the infant, its core thesis of the role of the 'Internal Working Model' in human mental health endures. Recent neurophysiological research reveals…

In order for children to understand and reason about the world in an adult-like fashion, they need to learn that conceptual categories are organized in a hierarchical fashion (e.g., a dog is also an animal). While children learn from their first-hand observation of the world, social knowledge transmission via language can also play an important…

Aim: From March 2020, in-person visits to family homes have not been possible within the authors' educational psychology service (EPS) due to the Coronavirus pandemic. This paper outlines how Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) practitioners working within the authors' educational psychology service have adapted their practice to implement VIG…

There is growing research documenting the effects of arts-in-health interventions on diverse participant groups. However, the impact of interventions on facilitators remains largely lacking. Drawing on a case study project, this article reports on a qualitative study to understand the practices, challenges, enablers and impacts for musicians of…

With the aim of promoting empathy in children, Brisch (2012), drawing on his extensive work on attachment and the skills of Parens' (2008) work on aggression theory, developed the programme: Babywatching. This programme is designed as a whole class nurture intervention to reduce Anxiety and Aggression and promote Sensitivity and Empathy…

This study assessed the links between early maternal employment and children's later academic and behavioral skills in Australia and the United Kingdom. Using representative samples of children born in each country from 2000 to 2004 (Australia N = 5,093, U.K. N = 18,497), OLS regression models weighted with propensity scores assessed links between…

Purpose: This study evaluated the pathways between developmental language disorder (DLD), psychosocial risk factors, and the development of emotional difficulties from ages 3 to 11 years within the Millennium Cohort Study. Method: A total of 14,494 singletons (49.4% female) from the Millennium Cohort Study were evaluated within this study. Risk of…

Background: Previous research has largely focused on evaluating the impact of teaching practical parenting skills to parents with intellectual disabilities. Teaching them about the importance and nature of early attachment behaviors has not yet been explored. This study investigates whether knowledge of early attachment behavior of young adults…

Objectives: To explore how much people with Asperger's syndrome know and understand about early attachment behaviors and whether this knowledge can be increased through a DVD. Methods: Adults with Asperger's syndrome who were not parents (N = 28) took part in four experimental conditions: Baseline, pre-intervention, post-intervention, and…

The studies reported here aimed to test the proposal that mind-mindedness is a quality of personal relationships by assessing mind-mindedness in caregiver-child dyads in which the relationship has not spanned the child's life or in which the relationship has been judged dysfunctional. Studies 1 and 2 investigated differences in mind-mindedness…

This study investigated whether the amount and timing of group-based childcare between birth and 51 months were predictive of cognitive development at 51 months, taking into account other non-parental childcare, demographic characteristics, cognitive development at 18 months, sensitive parenting and a stimulating home environment. Children's…

Recent models of the early emergence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) propose an interaction between risk susceptibility and the infant's social environment, resulting in a progressively atypical developmental trajectory. The infant's early social environmental experience consists mostly of interaction with caregivers, yet there has been little…