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Children abandoned to institutions display a host of developmental delays, including those involving general cognition and language. The majority of published studies focus on children over 3 years of age; little is known about whether these delays may be detected earlier when children undergo rapid lexical development. To investigate the early language development of children raised in institutional settings in the Russian Federation, we compared a group of children in institutional care (n = 36; 8–35 months) to their age‐matched peers raised in biological families, who have never been institutionalized (n = 72) using the Russian version of the CDI. The results suggest that institutionalization is associated with pronounced delays in children's early language development with large and robust effect sizes. Among children with a history of institutionalization, these delays are also associated with difficulties in Daily Living skills, communication, and socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key Clinical Message: This manuscript reports on genomewide epigenetic alterations in cri‐du‐chat syndrome related to a partial aneusomy of chromosome 5. A systematic analysis of these alterations will open up new possibilities for the prognostic evaluation of CDCS patients and the development of new therapeutic interventions for reducing the severity of the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike intelligence, creativity has rarely been investigated from the standpoint of cross-cultural invariance of the structure of the instruments used to measure it. In the study reported in this article, we investigated the cross-cultural invariance of expert ratings of creative stories written by undergraduate students from the Russian Federation and the United States. Analyses of differential rater and item functioning using Many-Facet Rasch Measurement and multiple levels of invariance using confirmatory factor analyses suggested partial measurement invariance of creative ability estimates obtained using this method in two cultures. Russian and U.S. students demonstrated similar overall levels of creativity; however, U.S. students received higher emotionality ratings than Russian students did. The findings are discussed in the context of viewing creativity as at least a partially culturally invariant trait whose manifestation is moderated by culture-specific semantic knowledge and patterns of linguistic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief essay, I comment on the constellation of papers published in the current issue. I argue that it represents the new beginning of the new era for the journal, driven by several considerations. Among these, three are key. First, the collection of articles in this issue is explicitly concerned with the multivariate and multidisciplinary nature of development and developmental science. Second, they explicate this point by providing an overview of several cross-disciplinary methodological approaches and the ways they can be used to study development. Finally, a common thread among the papers appearing in this issue is to attempt to relate and integrate research, practice, and policy in child and adolescent development. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]