We compared the effects of two antecedent strategies commonly used in early childhood settings to increase compliance during activity transitions: a warning condition, in which children were informed of the transition 2 min before it began, and a condition in which children were allowed access to a toy during the transition. Both antecedent interventions were ineffective when implemented alone;...

The question of how children learn the meanings of words has long puzzled philosophers and psychologists. As Quine famously pointed out, simply hearing a word in context reveals next to nothing about its meaning. How then do children learn to understand and use words correctly? Here, we show how learning theory can offer an elegant solution to this seemingly intractable puzzle in language acqui...

Teachers were asked to identify and rank 10 preferred stimuli for 9 toddlers, and a hierarchy of preference for these items was determined via a direct preference assessment. The reinforcing efficacy of the most highly preferred items identified by each method was evaluated concurrently in a reinforcer assessment. The reinforcer assessment showed that all stimuli identified as highly preferred ...

Sudden events and sharp discontinuities in the external world act as powerful attention attractors in adult humans. Does this reflex-like orienting towards targets deviating from their surround occur in early infancy? Here, we present evidence that, during the first months of life, infants orient preferentially towards repetitive visual patterns, rather than towards uniquely deviating targets. ...

and Belief-Based Language Differentiate Joking, Pretending, and Literal Toddler-Directed Speech Elena Hoicka ([email protected]) Psychology Department, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, UK Ruth Campbell ([email protected]) Psychology Department, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, UK

Studies are needed to better understand the broad autism phenotype in young siblings of children with autism. Cognitive, adaptive, social, imitation, play, and language abilities were examined in 42 non-autistic siblings and 20 toddlers with no family history of autism, ages 18-27 months. Siblings, as a group, were below average in expressive language and composite IQ, had lower mean receptive ...

Recent research has shown that by 30 months of age, children can successfully update their representation of an absent object's location on the basis of new verbal information, whereas 23-month-olds often return to the object's prior location. The current results show that this updating failure persisted even when (a) toddlers received visual and verbal information about the prior location but ...

Relations among specific aspects of language (comprehension and production, semantics and utterance length) and relations between language and symbolic play were evaluated when children were 13 and 20 months of age. The contributions of maternal stimulation to toddler performance and whether associations among toddler abilities might be explained by maternal behaviors were also examined. Althou...

From preschool age to adulthood, most humans prefer to help someone who has treated others well over helping someone who has treated others badly. Researchers have recently made opposing predictions about whether such observation-based preferential helping is present when children begin to help in the second year of life. In the present study, 84 toddlers (16-27 months) observed 1 experimenter ...