A talking face provides redundant cues on the mouth that might support language learning and highly salient social cues in the eyes. What drives children's looking toward the mouth versus eyes of a talking face? This study reports data from 292 children who viewed faces speaking English, French, and Russian. We investigated the impact of…

Background: Child care centers are important for children's behaviors. Aims: To examine the cross-sectional associations between child care environmental characteristics and physical activity and sedentary time in children. Methods: Participants were 124 toddlers and 118 preschoolers from 19 centers in Alberta and Ontario, Canada, in the…

Studies on the relationship between bookreading and language development typically lack data about which books are actually read to children. This paper reports on an Internet survey designed to address this data gap. The resulting dataset (the Infant Bookreading Database or IBDb) includes responses from 1,107 caregivers of children aged 0-36…

There is a need to identify children with potential mental health issues early in order to provide "an ounce of prevention." Unfortunately, there are few instruments available to identify emotional and behavioral issues in infants and many never receive intervention. We developed the Brief Child and Family Intake and Outcomes System for…

In December, 2013, revised Alberta child care accreditation standards were released by the Alberta Government in Canada that included a new standard for physical activity and sedentary behavior in accredited child care settings. The main purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the new accreditation standard in increasing physical…

A growing body of theoretical and empirical work has been attempting to answer the questions of how and how much of the effects of children's early experience may depend on their inner characteristics. Theory and evidence suggest that some children, notably those with difficult temperaments, are more susceptible to both negative and positive…

Previous studies have demonstrated that various psychosocial risks are associated with poor cognitive functioning in children, and these risks frequently cluster together. In the current longitudinal study, we tested a model in which it was hypothesized that cumulative psychosocial adversity of mothers would have deleterious effects on children's…

The aim of this study was to investigate the prospective relations between parental psychosocial functioning and toddlers' sleep consolidation. Investigators met with 85 families 3 times, when children were 15 months (Time 1 [T1]), 18 months (T2), and 2 years of age (T3). Mothers and fathers completed questionnaires pertaining to their parenting…

Psychometric and utility studies on Social Emotional Assessment Measure (SEAM), an innovative tool for assessing and monitoring social-emotional and behavioral development in infants and toddlers with disabilities, were conducted. The Infant and Toddler SEAM intervals were the study focus, using mixed methods, including item response theory…

Two experiments examined toddlers' performance on a new task designed to examine the development of body self-awareness. The new task was conceived from observations by Piaget (1953/1977) and theoretical work from Povinelli and Cant (1995) and involved a toy shopping cart to the back of which a small mat had been attached. Children were asked to…

Toddlers (2 to 3 years) and preschool children (5 to 6 years) were repeatedly presented with a six-tone melody, then tested for their discrimination of a variety of pattern features, including the specific component frequencies, successive intervals, and general melodic contour. To manipulate the information-processing demands of the task, the…

A total of 36 normally developing children of 13-30 months of age were evenly divided into three age groups and observed while playing with their mothers. Their communicative behaviors were recorded according to intent and level. Intent was classified as comment, request, and reject; levels were nonverbal, verbal-contextual, and…

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…

We compared health status, anthropometric and psychological development of 123 children adopted before 18 months of age from China, East Asia (Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Cambodia), and Eastern Europe (mostly Russia). Data were collected close to the time of arrival, and 3 and 6 months later. Anthropometric measures included weight,…