Mothers modify their actions when demonstrating objects to infants versus adults. Such modifications have been called infant-directed action (IDA) or "motionese" (Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002). We investigated the IDA features of interactiveness and simplification by quantifying eye gaze, object exchanges, and action units enacted…

This experiment investigated the impact of the path of approach of an object, from head on versus from the side, and the type of imminent contact with that object, a hit versus a miss, on young infants' perceptions of object looming. Consistent with earlier studies, we found that 4- to 5-month-old infants do indeed discriminate hits versus misses.…

To determine whether children with autism (CWA) would selectively imitate intentional, as opposed to accidental actions, an experimenter demonstrated either an "intentional" and an "accidental" action or two "intentional" actions on the same toy [Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello ("1998a") "Infant Behavior and Development, 21," 315-330]. CWA tended…

Previous research has shown that infants match vowel sounds to facial displays of vowel articulation [Kuhl, P. K., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1982). The bimodal perception of speech in infancy. "Science, 218", 1138-1141; Patterson, M. L., & Werker, J. F. (1999). Matching phonetic information in lips and voice is robust in 4.5-month-old infants. "Infant…

The purpose of this study was to characterize cortisol response and regulation associated with shame responding in early childhood and to examine how general the relation between shame and cortisol is. It was predicted that children responding to task failure with shame would show a larger and more prolonged cortisol response than other children.…

Developmental trajectories provide the empirical foundation for theories about change processes during development. However, the ability to distinguish among alternative trajectories depends on how frequently observations are sampled. This study used real behavioral data, with real patterns of variability, to examine the effects of sampling at…

The conditions under which symmetry and equivalence relations develop are still controversial. This paper reports three experiments that attempt to analyze the impact of multiple-exemplar training (MET) in receptive symmetry on the emergence of visual-visual equivalence relations with a very young child, Gloria. At the age of 15 months 24 days…

This paper offers a review of the literature on the role of imitation in the earliest stages of social interaction between babies and familiar partners. The review focuses on the ways in which reciprocal imitation marks familiar relationships that provide special contexts for babies to engage actively and exuberantly in the construction of a…

Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler theorized that freedom of movement facilitates infants' development and learning. The self-education promoted by freedom to move gives an infant a lasting view of herself as a competent learner. Pikler's approach also emphasizes the importance of helping each child feel respected and secure. The author examines…

Although vocalization and mouthing are behaviors frequently performed by infants, little is known about the characteristics of vocalizations that occur with objects, hands, or fingers in infants' mouths. The purpose of this research was to investigate characteristics of vocalizations associated with mouthing in 6 to 9-month-old infants during play…

This reflective essay describes the author's experiences as an observer in a behaviorist infant classroom. The author developed four categories of practice to describe what happened in the behaviorist infant room: (1) curricular focus on training typically developing infants to meet typical developmental milestones, (2) the use of highly…

Purpose: This investigation aimed to examine the development of tongue-jaw coordination during speech from childhood to adolescence. Method: Electromagnetic articulography was used to track tongue and jaw motion in 48 children and adults (aged 6-38 years) during productions of /t/ and /k/ embedded in sentences. Results: The coordinative…

Although it is generally accepted that labels facilitate categorization in infancy, recent evidence suggests that infants and young children are more likely to process visual input when presented in isolation than when paired with nonlinguistic sounds or linguistic labels. These findings suggest that auditory input (when compared to a no-auditory…

This study investigated whether acoustic input, in the form of infant-directed speech, influenced infants' segmenting of action sequences. Thirty-two 7.5- to 11.5-month-old infants were familiarized with video sequences made up of short action clips. Narration coincided with portions of the action stream to package certain pairs of clips together.…

This investigation examined whether infants display "boundary extension"--a tendency to remember more of a visual scene than was presented. Three- to 7-month-olds were familiarized with a photograph of a visual scene, and tested with wide-angle versus close-up views of the scene. Infants preferred the close-up, indicating that they perceived the…