This final report describes activities of Project INSITE, a 3-year home intervention program delivering services to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with deaf blindness or other multidisability sensory impairments. The family centered model features the use of early intervention professionals known as parent advisors who visit homes weekly to…

Discusses the value of tool-use activities to help toddlers develop emerging skills, experience creative expression, and understand means-end relationships. Provides examples of opportunities for using objects as tools, including language acquisition, self-help activities, dramatic play, sensory experiences, and object manipulation. (DST)

The Early Learning Accomplishment Profile (Early LAP) provides a systematic method for observing children's functioning in the birth to 36-month age range in order to assist teachers, clinicians, and parents in assessing individual skills development in six developmental domains: gross motor, fine motor, cognition, language, self-help, and social…

This document is comprised of the four issues in the second volume of a quarterly journal for parents of children in Montessori infant and toddler programs. The May 1998 issue contains an article on Treasure Baskets which are designed for non-mobile babies who can sit up, an article discussing the personal growth of a Montessori teacher who became…

Analyzes monolingual Spanish- and German-speaking children's production of target consonant clusters at early stages of acquisition from a phonological representational perspective. At the beginning stages, target clusters are reduced to a single consonantal position, due to lack of branching of the syllable constituents. At later stages, cluster…

The order in which wh-questions are acquired in the production and comprehension of two Korean one-year-olds is analyzed and compared. Consistencies in acquisition order are to be based on universals of cognitive development, while discrepancies in acquisition order were attributed to differences in interactive styles across caregivers and…

It is argued that the correct placement of sentential negation with respect to model auxiliaries in Swedish is an example of delayed acquisition resulting from a parametric preference in Universal Grammar. A syntactic analysis is proposed for four recognized stages in the acquisition of negative word order in Swedish. (Contains 41 references.)…

Discusses the concept of "Velcro time": a period in infants' lives when they show an increased interest in books and in their primary caregiver, and particularly, in his or her use of speech. (BB)

Articulatory precision and fluency criteria for identifying formulaic expressions, sublexical forms, and target lexemes in linguistic productions are defined and applied to the analysis of two Danish children's language development. Results are compared to application of standard distributional and frequency criteria in the tabulation of mean…

Patterns of development in language and play for full term and preterm children from 6 to 54 months and the effects of maternal parenting strategies (i.e., maintaining attentional focus, use of directiveness) were examined. Significant risk differences in the growth of both language and play were found. The high risk children were more likely to…

The newborn is amazingly equipped to acquire language and literacy--these early years are the foundation upon which later learning is built. Drawing on current research, the authors of this book examine the elements of beginning language and literacy and look at how families, programs, and communities can encourage beginning language and literacy…

This issue highlights six distinct studies. The first study examines the inclusion of literacy props and teacher mediation on the literacy behaviors of young children. The second explores the relationship of amount of talk, diversity of talk, and complexity of talk on the language acquisition of young preschool children who are learning a second…

Based on research in infant sign language, this book teaches parents methods of communicating with their infants through the use of simple bodily movements that signify objects, events, and needs. Noting that communication between parent and child can flourish between 9 months and 30 months, when a baby's desire to communicate outstrips the…

Does early child care hinder or enhance infants' and toddlers' social and cognitive development? This longitudinal study investigated whether: (1) child care is related to qualities of mother-child interaction and the child's cognitive and language development in the first 3 years of life; (2) the child care environment interacts with the home…

This orientation manual includes a compilation of activities, curriculum, records, and operating procedures of ongoing infant and toddler group care demonstration projects. The current status of three day care units is described: the Infant Day Care Unit, the Toddler Day Care Unit, and the Toddler Enrichment Unit. The manual serves as a basic…