The study aims to clarify the relation between maternal sensitivity and infant attachment security during the first two years of life. A systematic search has been carried out in six databases (Medline, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus and Psychology and Behavioural) between January 2010 and February 2023. The terms used for the…

Musical communication between adults and children is a widely studied phenomenon in the field of music education and psychology. In the research carried out to date, a variety of methodological designs have been used, based mainly on the perceptions of adults, to investigate the different aspects of these musical interactions. Thus, there is…

Research has shown that the quality of mother-infant interactions, as measured by mother-infant synchrony, is associated with infants' vagal tone, a physiological indicator of emotion regulation. However, little is known about the association between the infant's vagal tone and the quality of father-infant interactions. Existing literature…

Dialogic reading (DR), first described in Whitehurst et al. (1988), is a specific reading technique that encourages parents to involve the child actively in verbal and nonverbal interactions during shared book reading. The well-known acronyms for DR techniques include CROWD (completion, recall, open-ended questions, wh-questions and distancing)…

We compared speech acts and complexity of maternal speech to firstborn dizygotic twin and singleton infants. Nine twins and nine singletons were video-recorded at home in spontaneous face-to-face interactions with their mothers, from the 2nd to the 6th month. Continuous micro-analysis revealed that (a) open-ended questions, direct requests,…

Caregivers' goals influence their interactions with their children. In this preregistered study, we examined whether directing parents to "teach" their baby versus "learn" from their baby influenced the extent to which they engaged in intrusive (e.g., controlling, adult-centered rather than child-centered), sensitive, warm, or…

As infants interact with the object world, they generate rich information about object properties and functions. Much of infant learning unfolds in the presence of caregivers, who talk about and act on the objects of infant play. Does mother joint engagement correspond to real-time changes in the complexity and duration of infant object…

We compared dyad-focused maternal speech (protoconversations and maternal speech describing the dyad) in interactions of mothers with their twin and singleton infants. Nine twins and nine singletons, coming from urban areas of Crete (Greece), were video-recorded at home in spontaneous face-to-face interactions with their mothers, from the 2nd to…

We examined the communicative intentions behind parents' deictic gesture use with high-risk infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 17), high-risk infants who were not diagnosed with ASD (n = 25), and low-risk infants (n = 28) at 12 months and assessed the extent to which the parental deictic gesture intentions predicted…

Purpose: To investigate the language environments experienced by preterm-born infants, this study compared the linguistic and interactive features of parent--infant conversations involving 2-year-old preterm- and term-born infants. The study also explored how mother-infant and father-infant conversations may be differentially affected by…

Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary growth in English-acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months…

This study aimed to investigate how mothers and infants contribute mutually to breastfeeding. The spontaneous interactions of 20 breastfeeding dyads were video-recorded at home, at 2, 4, 6, 9 and 12 months of infants' life. Mothers' and infants' gaze and tactile behaviour, facial expressions of emotion, and dyadic expressions were continuously…

The authors examine the relationships between home play and learning--measured by reading and teaching practices at home--among low-income families, including those with mental health issues. Based on a large database from the Family Map Inventory, a screening tool for home visiting programs, the authors' findings revealed that play-related…

Parental mobile device use while parenting has been associated with reduced parental responsiveness and increased negative affect among children. However, it remains unclear whether it can interfere with the process of acquiring social communication skills. Thus, this study sought to experimentally examine whether maternal mobile phone use while…

The relation between maternal behavior and neurocognitive development is complex and may depend on the task context. We examined 5-month-old infant frontal electroencephalogram (EEG), maternal intrusiveness (MI) evaluated during two play contexts at 5 and 10 months, and a battery of executive function (EF) tasks completed at 48 months to evaluate…