Children raised in a bilingual environment are faced with the daunting task of learning to extract meaning from language input that can differ between caregivers but, depending on the social context, also within caregivers. Here, we investigated monolingual and bilingual toddlers' brain responses to an unexpected language change. We presented 2-3 year old children with picture-word pairs and oc...

The goal of this multi-method study was to examine how child gender and coparenting processes influence associations between family stress and toddlers' social adjustment. The participants, 104 dual-earner couples and their 2-year-old children, were videotaped in their home during a freeplay activity. Mothers and fathers completed questionnaires about stress in their roles as partners, workers,...

Little research has empirically addressed the relationships among parental knowledge of child development, parental attunement, parental expectations, and child independence in predicting the social competence of infants and toddlers with special health care needs. We used baseline data from the Strengthening Families Project, a prevention intervention study that tested Bavolek's Nurturing Prog...

Caregivers must assume responsibility for the safety of infants, toddlers and preschoolers because children at these developmental stages have limited abilities to appraise risk and differentiate unsafe from safe situations. Historically, research on child safety has focused on what safety practices caregivers adopt, why they do so, and how to motivate them to enact better safety practices. 1-6...

Early development of body self-awareness was examined in 57 children at 18, 22, or 26 months of age, using tasks designed to require objective representation of one's own body. All children made at least one body representation error, with approximately 2.5 errors per task on average. Errors declined with age. Children's performance on comparison tasks that required them to reason about the rel...

This study tested Bowlby and Ainsworth's hypothesis that a hierarchy of caregivers exists whereby infants prefer one caregiver over another when distressed. We examined parent gender (mother vs. father), primary caregiver status (defined as the parent who spent most time with the infant and performed most of the caregiving tasks), and role of toddlers' history of attachment security with each p...

The authors' rigorous and ingenious programme of work documents young humans' capacity for prosocial action (Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). Their laboratory findings are corroborated by centuries of observational data, spanning cultures, and historical epochs. Two general questions are raised. Firstly, what are the rules of evidence needed in using comparative data to make claims about the evolut...

Comparison of the effectiveness between Video and toy reinforcer types to motivate infants/toddlers for hearing tests. No significant differences were found between a age groups or gender. Toy reinforcers were found to produce on average 2 more threshold estimates compared to video reinforcers. Variety, color, and animation of animals may have attributed to this difference.

In a previous study, parent-child praise was observed in natural interactions at home when children were 1, 2, and 3 years of age. Children who received a relatively high proportion of process praise (e.g., praise for effort and strategies) showed stronger incremental motivational frameworks, including a belief that intelligence can be developed and a greater desire for challenge, when they wer...

Attention capacities underlie everyday functioning from an early age onwards. Little is known about attentional processes at toddler age. A feasible assessment of attention capacities at toddler age is needed to allow further study of attention development. In this study, a test battery is piloted that consists of four tasks which intend to measure the attention systems orienting, alerting, and...