Maternal depressive symptoms predict negative child behaviors, including internalizing problems. However, protective factors, such as positive emotionality and positive parenting behaviors, may play an important a role in attenuating associations between maternal depressive symptoms and child behavior problems. This article presents two studies…

Sleep disorders often co-occur with autism spectrum disorder. They further exacerbate autism spectrum disorder symptoms and interfere with children's and parental quality of life. This study examines whether gastrointestinal dysfunctions increase the odds of having sleep disorders in 610 children with idiopathic autism spectrum disorder, aged 2-18…

The expressive lexical skills of 53 Polish bilinguals aged 24-36 months living in the UK and Ireland were assessed using Polish and British English adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. Polish vocabulary scores were compared to those of 53 Polish monolinguals matched for age, gender and parental education. The…

This study explored individual variability in the bilingual vocabularies of 65 Maltese children aged 23-27 months (N = 33) and 30-34 months (N = 32). Most of the participants' direct input consisted of Maltese sentences embedding English words. Bilingualism was present at the societal level. Word production was measured through parental report,…

Early Head Start (EHS) is an evidence-based, federally funded, and community-based program with a two-generation approach to child development for children under age 3 and pregnant women in poverty. The mission of EHS is to support healthy prenatal outcomes; enhance the intellectual, social, and emotional development of infants and toddlers; and…

This article traces the development of adult Pedagogic Strategies with children aged 0-5 years at the Pen Green Centre for Children and Their Families in England. Pedagogical Strategies are a conceptual framework of effective strategies both practitioners and parents "already" have to support children's learning. The methodology was…

Frequency of high-level (showing/pointing) and low-level (coordinated gaze shifts) behaviors on the Early Social Communication Scales are often used as a measure of joint attention initiations (IJA). This study examined the degree to which these skills and response to joint attention (RJA; e.g. gaze following) were differentially related to…

Using multi-level growth modeling, we examined the effect of several measures of maternal input on growth in children's word types from 15-54 months. Mothers and children engaged in a picture description task (N = 77) at 15, 24, 33, and 54 months; the frequency of children's observed word types at each wave was coded and additional independent…

This study investigated how forty-six mothers modified their talk about familiar and unfamiliar nouns and verbs when interacting with their children with Down Syndrome (DS), language impairment (LI), or typical development (TD). Children (MLUs < 2·7) were group-matched on expressive vocabulary size. Mother-child dyads were recorded playing with…

This report summarizes research about development during the first 3 years of life. It highlights research in domains that are foundational for later school readiness and success, including: (1) perceptual, motor, and physical development; (2) social and emotional development; (3) approaches to learning; (4) language and communication; and (5)…

Children adopted from institutions have been studied as models of the impact of stimulus deprivation on cognitive development (Nelson, Bos, Gunnar, & Sonuga-Barke, 2011), but these children may also suffer from micronutrient deficiencies (Fuglestad et al., 2008). The contributions of iron deficiency (ID) and duration of deprivation on…

What are the processes underlying word recognition in the toddler lexicon? Work with adults suggests that, by 5-years of age, hearing a word leads to cascaded activation of other phonologically, semantically and phono-semantically related words (Huang & Snedeker, 2010; Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989). Given substantial differences in…

Defending the Early Years released a survey to better understand the impact COVID-19 has had on young children, their families, and their teachers. Schools, centers, and childcare providers were forced to close their doors as the world implemented social distancing measures to slow the spread of the new deadly virus. This survey was written to…

In the C-not-B task, 2.5-year-old children tend to look for an object in a location to which the hiding agent moved his hand (C) after moving an object from A to B. In three experiments, the authors investigated the nature of the constraints underlying toddlers' performance in this task. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-olds were tested in a new version…

Although virtually all Inuit children in eastern Arctic Canada learn Inuktitut as their native language, there is a critical lack of tools to assess their level of language ability. This article investigates how mean length of utterance (MLU), a widely-used assessment measure in English and other languages, can be best applied in Inuktitut. The…