Play is a central discourse in policy and practice pertaining to young children's learning, development and well-being in many countries around the world. Dominant ways of understanding and advocating for play often construct universalising notions of children and childhood, overlooking that play is always-already culturally situated and…

This groundbreaking book looks at the development of mathematical thinking in infants and toddlers, with an emphasis on the earliest stage, from zero to three, when mathematical thinking and problem solving first emerge as natural instincts. The text explores the four precursor math concepts--attribute, comparison, change, and pattern--with an…

There has been limited research on interventions with young children encompassing "interoceptive awareness," the awareness and perception of sensations from inside the body. The information in this phenomenological study examines how participants experienced a bidirectional, reflective, online intervention program on interoceptive…

Research Findings: Multiple factors likely influence the language development of young children growing up in low-income homes, potentially including stressors experienced by parents. Here, we ask: (1) What is the association between stress (i.e., economic hardship and parenting stress) and toddlers' language development? and (2) Does number of…

This paper examines the acquisition of demonstratives (e.g., "that," "there") from a cross-linguistic perspective. Although demonstratives are often said to play a crucial role in L1 acquisition, there is little systematic research on this topic. Using extensive corpus data of spontaneous child speech, the paper investigates…

Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…

This paper used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (N = 1,258) to examine the influence of hilevels of cognitive stimulation from mothers, fathers, and childcare providers at 24 months and children's pre-academic skills at 48 and 60 months in two parent families. Results from path analysis showed direct positive effects of…

Background: Feeding methods used during infancy may impact upon eating behaviors in toddlers and influence the likelihood of developing weight issues. The aim of this study was to compare eating behaviors and food neophobia (defined as the reluctance to eat, or the avoidance of, new foods) in toddlers between three different complementary feeding…

Babies think differently than adults, and understanding how they think can help us see their explosive brain growth in everyday behavior. Infants learn language faster than adults do, use statistics to understand how the world works, and even reason about the minds of others. But these achievements can be hidden by their poor self-regulatory…

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for…

In languages with evidential marking, utterances consist of an informational content and a specification of the mode of access to that information. In this first longitudinal study investigating the acquisition of the Turkish evidential marker "-mIs" in naturalistic child-caregiver interactions, we examined six children between 8 and 36…

Purpose: Studies of infants' early vocalizations have proven helpful in describing the developmental characteristics of various communication disorders. However, few studies have addressed the early vocalizations of infants and toddlers who were later diagnosed, as older children, with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). We refer to these infants…

This study examined gender differences in the early mathematical skills of children at risk of developing mathematical difficulties. Of a total sample of 1091 children (49% girls and 51% boys), we observed authentic children who scored low at 33 months with the assessment material MIO (Mathematics, Individual and Environment). Cut-off for low…

This article is adapted from "Screen Sense: What the Research Says About the Impact of Media on Children Under 3 Years Old" (Barr, McClure, & Parlakian, 2018) and related resources, published online at zerotothree.org/screensense. The authors focus on two growing areas of research: how media use influences parent-child relationships…

The focus of this article is on home visiting in child welfare, an activity which involves a publicly accountable performance of professional tasks in a private space. We specifically examine a recording of a visit by a home learning worker to a mother and her three-year-old child with special needs. In the first part of the article, sequential…