Fifteen mother-child dyads were observed when the children with visual impairments were 20 to 36 months old, and a year later, to investigate the influence of several variables (maternal behavior, home environment, and socioeconomic status) on their development. Results found the influence of maternal behaviors was more significant during the…

Explores the process of language recovery in an English-Spanish bilingual 6-year-old child. Documents the rapid process of recovery that took place and, based on these results, considers the value of maintaining "passive bilingualism" in children. Examines the strategy employed by the family to achieve this. (Author/VWL)

Used data from a family child care study and a licensing study to identify dimensions best predicting global day care quality in over 300 child care homes. Found that caregiver training most consistently predicted global quality. Found no reliable association between care quality and child-caregiver ratio or age-weighted group size recommendations…

Reports results of an acquisition experiment with a group of Spanish-speaking children regarding their knowledge of a semantic restriction that prevents a referring expression from coreferring with a pronoun in certain syntactic configurations if its referent lacks consciousness. Sixteen children participated in a modified Truth-Value Judgment…

Examined influence of newly acquired information on 5- to 7-year-olds' memory and general representation of a personally experienced novel event. Found that advance information specific to the event led to better recall and better integration of the experience into a general event representation both soon after the event and 4 months later.…

Explores factors to consider when implementing cultural awareness activities with young children in schools. Discusses considerations regarding children's awareness of differences and ways in which we can be similar to and different from each other. Play is discussed as a vehicle through which children can learn about others in a natural context.…

Draws from sociolinguistic perspective, human development, school learning, and language policy to discuss conflicting claims about second-language learning in school. Differentiates between cultural context within micro cultures and school content within global macro culture. Asserts that educators should ensure that learners have access to the…

Examines reasons for slowed growth in employer child care over the past two years. Discusses the impact of the economic recession, organizational changes in the largest employer child care management organizations, international acquisitions of the Bright Horizons child care organization, flexible options for the child care benefit, and the…

Argues for the realignment of Shakespeare with the popular forms which influence the social world of young children. Explores what teachers and performers need to learn and unlearn when telling Shakespeare's stories in the company of children. Considers the grounds of creativity for teachers when abandoning prescription in teaching Shakespeare.…

Studied gender effects on false belief development among children ages 2 to 6 years. Found a slight advantage for girls on false belief task performance in both datasets that was apparent in younger but not older children. Language ability could be controlled only in a small subsample and cannot be ruled out as a mediator to this effect. (JPB)

Children (2;10 to 4;7 years) taught passive sentences with forms employing animate patients could produce and comprehend passives better than children taught with forms employing inanimate patients. This indicates that "perspective" is the cognitive counterpart to the formal category of subject and that language acquisition is connected…

This study documented the occurrence of stereotypical behaviors in young children with various handicapping conditions by rating such behaviors in 351 young children with handicaps by caregivers in early intervention programs. Most of the children exhibited at least one stereotypical behavior, and some stereotypical behaviors were differentially…

Two studies investigated the maintenance of focused attention in the first five years of life. Findings revealed changes over age in the way children concentrate and sustain attention spontaneously during free play. Results point to possible developments underlying the increasing duration of focused attention. (RH)

Maltreatment status and mothers' facial behavior predicted children's scores on an emotional expression recognition task. There were positive relations between mothers' and children's expressive behavior. Findings indicate that children's recognition and production of facial expressions depends in part on the expressive environment provided by…

Examines data on homonymy and reduplication from a longitudinal study. Results show that such strategies can appear later in the child's linguistic development than has been proposed, and that the lexical item has to be considered a central unit, beyond the earliest stages, in the acquisition of phonology. (GLR)