Infancy : the Official Journal of the International Society on Infant Studies

It is well established that infants use various cues to find words within fluent speech from about 7 to 8 months of age. Research suggests that two main mechanisms support infants' speech segmentation: prosodic cues like the word stress patterns, and distributional cues like transitional probabilities (TPs). We tested 6-month-old German-learning infants' use of prosodic and statistical cues for speech segmentation in three experiments. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with an artificial language string where TPs signaled either word boundaries or iambic words-a stress pattern that is disfavored in German...

Background television has been found to negatively impact children's language development and self-regulatory skills, possibly due to decreased parent-child interactions. Most of the research on the relationship between background TV and caregiver-child interactions has been conducted in laboratory settings. In the current study, we conducted home observations and investigated whether infants engage in fewer interactions with family members in homes where background TV is more prevalent. We observed 32 infants at the ages of 8, 10, and 18 months in their home environments, coding for dyadic interactions (e...

Turn-taking interactions are foundational to the development of social, communicative, and cognitive skills. In infants, vocal turn-taking experience is predictive of infants' socioemotional and language development. However, different forms of turn-taking interactions may have different effects on infant vocalizing. It is presently unknown how caregiver vocal, non-vocal and multimodal responses to infant vocalizations compare in extending caregiver-infant vocal turn-taking bouts. In bouts that begin with an infant vocalization, responses that maintain versus change the communicative modality may differentially affect the likelihood of further infant vocalizing...

When infants start mastering their first language, they may start to notice when words are used incorrectly. Around 14-months of age, infants detect incorrect labeling when they are presented with an object which is labeled while still visible. However, things that are referred to are often out of sight when we communicate about them. The present study examined infants' detection of semantic mismatch when the object was occluded at the time of labeling. Specifically, we investigated whether mislabeling that referred to an occluded object could elicit a semantic mismatch...

Parents use joint attention to direct infants to environmental stimuli. We hypothesized that infants whose parents provide more bids for joint attention will display a more complex neural response when viewing social scenes. Sixty-one 8-month-old infants underwent electroencephalography (EEG) while viewing videos of joint- and parallel-play and participated in a free play interaction. EEG data was analyzed using multiscale entropy, which quantifies neural variability. Free play interactions assessed parent alternating gaze, a behavioral mechanism for directing attention to environmental cues...

Caregivers are instrumental in the development of infant emotion regulation; however, few studies have focused on delineating the real-time effectiveness of strategies that caregivers use to reduce infant distress. It is also unclear whether certain caregiver traits facilitate engagement in more successful regulation strategies. This study addressed these gaps by: (1) examining the differential effectiveness of maternal regulatory attempts (MRAs; behavioral strategies initiated by mothers to assist infants with regulating emotional states) in reducing 12- to 24-month-old infants' frustration during a toy removal task; and (2) assessing whether maternal mind-mindedness (mothers' attunement to their infant's mental state) predicted mothers' selection of MRAs...

The progression from crawling to walking in infancy is associated with changes in infant language development. One possible explanation for such change is the infant's language environment. Prior research indicates that caregivers use more action directives with walking infants compared to crawling infants, but the relations of such parental speech with infant vocabulary is unknown. Here, we present findings from day-long home audio recordings (Study 1) and laboratory observations (Study 2) of same-aged crawling and walking infants to explore how caregiver language, specifically action directives, were associated with parent reported infant vocabulary size...

Free play is a natural activity in toddlerhood, depending on environmental conditions like available objects and the social environment. The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences for parents' mental health held the potential to change toddlers' play environment. This cross-sectional study investigated 2-year-olds' (N = 97) free play with objects, and aspects of caregiver mental well-being in three cohorts during the pandemic in Germany. Caregivers reported their positive mental health (PMH), threat perception, perception of current family situation from negative to positive, and workload...

We investigated the temporal impact of multisensory settings on children's learning of word-object and action-object associations at 1- and 2-years of age. Specifically, we examined whether the temporal alignment of words and actions influenced the acquisition of novel word-action-object associations. We used a preferential looking and violation of expectation task in which infants and young children were first presented with two distinct word-object and action-object pairings either in a synchronous (overlapping in time) or sequential manner (one after the other)...

Understanding the factors contributing to sensitive parenting is crucial to optimize infant social and emotional functioning. Research has supported the association between parents' personality and parenting quality, but findings are inconsistent when examining various global personality measures. Further, it is likely that the interaction between parent-level (e.g., personality) and infant-level characteristics (e.g., temperament) are more strongly associated with caregiving quality. Most studies examining predictors of parenting quality have only included mothers, compared to fathers...

Early environments can have significant and lasting effects on brain, body, and behavior across the lifecourse. Here, we address current research efforts to understand how experiences impact neurodevelopment with a new perspective integrating two well-known conceptual frameworks - the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and sensitive/critical period frameworks. Specifically, we consider how prenatal experiences characterized in the DOHaD model impact two key neurobiological mechanisms of sensitive/critical periods for adapting to and learning from the postnatal environment...

To efficiently recognize words, children learning an intonational language like English should avoid interpreting pitch-contour variation as signaling lexical contrast, despite the relevance of pitch at other levels of structure. Thus far, the developmental time-course with which English-learning children rule out pitch as a contrastive feature has been incompletely characterized. Prior studies have tested diverse lexical contrasts and have not tested beyond 30 months. To specify the developmental trajectory over a broader age range, we extended a prior study (Quam & Swingley, 2010), in which 30-month-olds and adults disregarded pitch changes, but attended to vowel changes, in newly learned words...

Research in the U.S. and other Western countries shows that children's early gesture use, which starts prior to verbal communication, is an important predictor of children's later language development. Despite increasing efforts to study gesture use in diverse contexts, most of our knowledge on the role of gesture is largely based on populations of Western countries. In this study, we add to the growing body of international research by examining gesture use by 31 mothers and their 14-month-old infants (12 girls) in South Korea and investigate the gestures used during interaction, and whether early gesture use at 14 months predicts Korean children's later language skills at 36 months...

Efficiently processing information from faces in infancy is foundational for nonverbal communication. We studied individual differences in 5-month-old infants' (N = 517) sustained attention to faces and preference for emotional faces. We assessed the contribution of genetic and environmental influences to individual differences in these gaze behaviors, and the association between these traits and other concurrent and later phenotypes. We found an association between the mean duration of looking at a face (before looking away from it) at 5 months and socio-communicative abilities at 14 months (β = 0...

Elevated psychological distress, experienced by pregnant women and parents, has been well-documented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most research focuses on the first 6-months postpartum, with single or limited repeated measures of perinatal distress. The present longitudinal study examined how perinatal distress, experienced over nearly 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic, impacted toddler socioemotional development. A sample of 304 participants participated during pregnancy, 6-weeks, 6-months, and 15-months postpartum...

Cross-task stability refers to performance consistency across different settings and measures of the same construct. Cross-task stability can help us understand developmental processes, including how risks such as preterm birth affect outcomes. We investigated cross-task stability of attention control in 32 preterm and 39 term infants. All infants had the same chronological age at time of testing (5 months) but varied in gestational age (GA) at birth (30-42 weeks). Infants completed an experimental attention following task with a researcher and a naturalistic play observation with their mothers...

For pregnant women, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented stressors, including uncertainty regarding prenatal care and the long-term consequences of perinatal infection. However, few studies have examined the role of this adverse event on maternal wellbeing and infant socioemotional development following the initial wave of the pandemic when less stringent public health restrictions were in place. The current study addressed these gaps in the literature by first comparing prenatal internalizing symptoms and infant temperament collected after the first wave of the pandemic to equivalent measures in a pre-pandemic sample...

The valid assessment of vocabulary development in dual-language-learning infants is critical to developmental science. We developed the Dual Language Learners English-Spanish (DLL-ES) Inventories to measure vocabularies of U.S. English-Spanish DLLs. The inventories provide translation equivalents for all Spanish and English items on Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) short forms; extended inventories based on CDI long forms; and Spanish language-variety options. Item-Response Theory analyses applied to Wordbank and Web-CDI data (n = 2603, 12-18 months; n = 6722, 16-36 months; half female; 1% Asian, 3% Black, 2% Hispanic, 30% White, 64% unknown) showed near-perfect associations between DLL-ES and CDI long-form scores...

Adults and infants as young as 4 months old orient to pointing gestures. Although adults are shown to orient faster to index-finger pointing than other hand shapes, it is unknown whether hand shapes influence infants' perception of pointing. In this study, we used a spatial cueing paradigm on an eye tracker to investigate whether and to what extent adults and 12-month-old infants orient their attention in the direction of pointing gestures with different hand shapes: index finger, whole hand, and pinky finger...

As infants view visual scenes every day, they must shift their eye gaze and visual attention from location to location, sampling information to process and learn. Like adults, infants' gaze when viewing natural scenes (i.e., photographs of everyday scenes) is influenced by the physical features of the scene image and a general bias to look more centrally in a scene. However, it is unknown how infants' gaze while viewing such scenes is influenced by the semantic content of the scenes. Here, we tested the relative influence of local meaning, controlling for physical salience and center bias, on the eye gaze of 4- to 12-month-old infants (N = 92) as they viewed natural scenes...