Many of the phenomena underlying shape recognition can be derived from the greater sensitivity to nonaccidental properties of an image (e.g., whether a contour is straight or curved), which are invariant to orientation in depth, than to the metric properties of an image (e.g., a contour's degree of curvature), which can vary with orientation. What enables this sensitivity? One explanation is th...

Synchrony has been broadly conceptualized as the quality of the parent-child dyadic relationship. Parenting, factors that compromise caregiving quality, and child characteristics have all been theoretically linked to synchrony, but little research has been conducted to validate such associations. The present study examined correlates of synchrony including parenting, maternal psychological reso...

Recent research suggests that infants and toddlers succeed at a wide range of non-elicited-response false-belief tasks (i.e., tasks that do not require children to answer a direct question about a mistaken agent's likely behaviour). However, one exception to this generalization comes from verbal anticipatory-looking tasks, which have produced inconsistent findings with toddlers. One possible ex...

Routinely collected weight measurements from 4665 Plymouth children born 1996-97 were compared with the British Growth Reference Charts (BGRC). The children were 0.33 SDS heavier on average than the reference population at 24-30 months, an actual excess of 460 g.

Using data from a racially and ethnically diverse sample of low-income mothers of 2-year-old children participating in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (N = 883), the authors examined fathers' education and employment, mother-father relationship, and mothers' relationships with kin in the household to explain variation in nonresident father involvement across racial and ethn...

Prior studies indicate that children vary widely in their mathematical knowledge by the time they enter preschool and that this variation predicts levels of achievement in elementary school. In a longitudinal study of a diverse sample of 44 preschool children, we examined the extent to which their understanding of the cardinal meanings of the number words (e.g., knowing that the word "four" ref...

Researchers have long been interested in the relationship between handedness and language in development. However, traditional handedness studies using single age groups, small samples, or too few measurement time points have not capitalized on individual variability and may have masked 2 recently identified patterns in infants: those with a consistent hand-use preference and those with an inco...

In gender-marking languages, the gender of the noun determines the form of the preceding article. In this study, we examined whether French-learning toddlers use gender-marking information on determiners to recognize words. In a split-screen preferential looking experiment, 25-month-olds were presented with picture pairs that referred to nouns with either the same or different genders. The targ...

This study investigated the importance of emotion-eliciting context (positive and negative) and mother's behaviors (constrained and involved) on toddlers' emotion regulation behavioral strategies, emotional expressiveness and intensity, during three episodes eliciting fear, frustration/anger and positive affect. Fifty-five children between 18 and 26 months of age and their mothers participated ...

Adults' causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can represent the possibility that acting to bring about the first event might generate the second. Here we show that although toddlers (mean age: 24 months) readily learn predictive relationships between physically connect...