Natural disasters create immense challenges for young children by exposing them to a high degree of adversity. Interventions designed to build resilience in the aftermath of a natural disaster may help buffer the negative consequences of these adverse experiences. In this article, we report the results of our quasi-experimental evaluations of two…

Onomatopoeia are frequently identified amongst infants' earliest words (Menn & Vihman, 2011), yet few authors have considered why this might be, and even fewer have explored this phenomenon empirically. Here we analyze mothers' production of onomatopoeia in infant-directed speech (IDS) to provide an input-based perspective on these forms.…

Hearts and Minds on Babies (HMB) is an innovative, attachment-based training for Early Head Start (EHS) staff and parents, developed through a collaboration between university-based researchers and clinicians and community-based EHS educators. This article describes HMB, our collaboration, and lessons learned when infusing infant and early…

This article describes an infant and early childhood mental health-informed therapeutic visitation program that offers clinical support, systems-level advocacy, and developmentally appropriate guidance to families navigating the child welfare and family court systems. The program offers treatment, permanency, and placement planning for infants,…

Retrospective parental reports are common in the developmental science literature, but their validity has been questioned. We investigated the consistency of retrospective maternal recall by comparing original with retrospective maternal reports in three domains (maternal cognitions, mother-reported child and mother behaviors, and observed child…

We compared the structure and the content of mothers' and fathers' infant-directed speech as a function of infant birth order. Seven first-born and four second-born infants were video-recorded during their natural dyadic interactions with their mothers and fathers at home from the second to the sixth month after birth at 15-day intervals.…

A qualitative study of three parents and their toddlers with autism was conducted to investigate the communicative functions underlying parent-toddler interactions and how the instrumental or social nature of one partner's actions influenced the other's engagement. Parent-child interaction videos collected from a separate intervention study were…

Maternal responsive and directive speech to children at ages 0;10 and 2;0 was investigated by applying a procedure frst introduced by Flynn and Masur (2007) to a new language community (Finnish). The issues examined were consistency and stability over time, and also the role of responsiveness and directiveness in child linguistic development at…

A qualitative study of three parents and their toddlers with autism was conducted to investigate the communicative functions underlying parent-toddler interactions and how the instrumental or social nature of one partner's actions influenced the other's engagement. Parent-child interaction videos collected from a separate intervention study were…

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…

Everyday activities are replete with contextual cues for infants to exploit in the service of learning words. Nelson's (1985) script theory guided the hypothesis that infants participate in a set of predictable activities over the course of a day that provide them with opportunities to hear unique language functions and forms. Mothers and their…

The word gap, or the language gap, can be traced back to Hart and Risley's 1995 seminal work on language practices in high- and low-income families, and it is one of the most widely cited explanations for why children from low-income, minority contexts underperform academically in contrast to their white, middle-income counterparts. Despite its…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of one parent's presence on the quality of the interaction between the other parent and their three-month-old infant. Family interactions were observed in a sample of 69 two-parent families. Parental sensitivity was assessed during two sessions, first in a "dyadic" context (D) and then…

Caregiver speech is not a static collection of utterances, but occurs in "conversational exchanges," in which caregiver and child dynamically influence each other's speech. We investigate (a) whether children and caregivers modulate the prosody of their speech as a function of their interlocutor's speech, and (b) the influence of the…

This study tested the impact of child-directed language input on language development in Spanish-English bilingual infants (N = 25, 11- and 14-month-olds from the Seattle metropolitan area), across languages and independently for each language, controlling for socioeconomic status. Language input was characterized by social interaction variables,…