The effect of homonymity on children's use of semantic context to derive word meaning was examined in two studies. Participants were presented with stories that included three types of key words: nonsense words, familiar words used accurately, and homonymous words. Thirty-two preschoolers aged 3;7 to 5;4, 32 second graders aged 7;1 to 8;8, and 16 college students in Study 1 indicated the keys w...

Chronic, non-specific 'toddler diarrhoea' in young children is often accompanied by an increase in plasma prostaglandins, particularly PGF2oa. Although treatment with drugs is generally unnecessary, aspirin is effective in most children with high prostaglandins, and treatment with loperamide is effective in most children with toddler diarrhoea, regardless of the plasma prostaglandin levels. The...

A striking demonstration that sound-object correspondences are not completely arbitrary is that adults map nonsense words with rounded vowels (e.g. bouba) to rounded shapes and nonsense words with unrounded vowels (e.g. kiki) to angular shapes (Köhler, 1947; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Here we tested the bouba/kiki phenomenon in 2.5-year-old children and a control group of adults (n =20 per ...

The present study investigated the validity of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) for a group of toddlers 30 months of age. Study 1 examined the concurrent validity of the CDI for a group of 38 late talkers. Significant correlations were found between the CDI and direct measures of language abilities. Study 2 used likelihood ratio analysis to determine how well the CD...

A head camera was used to examine the visual correlates of object name learning by toddlers as they played with novel objects and as the parent spontaneously named those objects. The toddlers' learning of the object names was tested after play, and the visual properties of the head camera images during naming events associated with learned and unlearned object names were analyzed. Naming events...

Gender color-coding of children's toys may make certain toys more appealing or less appealing to a given gender. We observed toddlers playing with two gender-typical toys (a train, a doll), once in gender-typical colors and once in gender-atypical colors. Assessments occurred twice, at 20-40 months of age and at 26-47 months of age. A Sex × Time × Toy × Color ANOVA showed expected interactions ...

The authors examined the relations of maternal supportive parenting to effortful control and internalizing problems (i.e., separation distress, inhibition to novelty), externalizing problems, and social competence when toddlers were 18 months old (n = 256) and a year later (n = 230). Mothers completed the Coping With Toddlers' Negative Emotions Scale, and their sensitivity and warmth were obser...

When a toddler starts to walk without support, gait kinematics and electromyographic (EMG) activity differ from those of older children and the body displays considerable oscillations due to poor equilibrium. Postural instability clearly affects motor patterns in adults, but does instability explain why toddlers walk with a different gait? Here we addressed this question by comparing kinematics...

Food neophobia is a highly heritable trait characterized by the rejection of foods that are novel or unknown and potentially limits dietary variety, with lower intake and preference particularly for fruits and vegetables. Understanding non-genetic (environmental) factors that may influence the expression of food neophobia is essential to improving children's consumption of fruits and vegetables...

Previous research suggests that children infer the presence of unobserved causes when objects appear to move spontaneously. Are such inferences limited to motion events or do children assume that unexplained physical events have causes more generally? Here we introduce an apparently spontaneous event and ask whether, even in the absence of spatiotemporal and co-variation cues linking the events...