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Potentially serving as the primary national literacy initiative, the Reading Seed Programme (RSP) by PUSTAKA Negeri Sarawak aims to enculturate a reading culture from an early age. For instance, RSP was invented to promote reading culture by having the pregnant mother read to their infant until the child was three years old. The process is vital to helping children learn to read from a young age and eventually empower them to be independent readers for life. Particularly, the objectives of RSP are to promote reading habits by getting parents to read to their children, strengthen a child's vocabulary, and develop their confidence, especially in reading. Thus, this paper is primarily designed to investigate the demographic differences between RSP participation and the programme's objectives, i.e., reading habits, parent's engagement, vocabulary ability, and confidence development. To assess how well the RSP achieved its goal of assisting toddlers in developing their confidence as readers. An online survey yielded 385 completed responses, representing a 92.33% response rate among RSP participants. The key findings indicated that the age of the child, mode of joining the programme, and year received the RSP's kits are the most important indicators of the usefulness of the programme (RSP and RSP's kits) and the programme's objectives attainment, especially in straightening the child's vocabulary and comprehension and developing their confidence, especially in reading and knowledge. Nonetheless, the results of this study highlighted the novelty of the early literacy programme of the RSP in cultivating the reading culture, parent-child engagement in reading, and preparing children to acquire knowledge.

Maria Montessori's work remains popular and influential around the world. She provided fascinating descriptions of her observations of children's learning. Yet at the heart of her work is a lacuna: the issue of how children learn their first language. For Montessori, it was a marvel, a miracle--but a mystery. We argue that the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a way forward. With the clearer view offered by Wittgenstein's reminders, we propose that Montessori's work can be reevaluated to better understand Montessori's contribution, child development and, in particular, how children acquire a first language.

Background: This article emerged from a larger qualitative study, which revealed that children continue to be exposed to a complex range of risk factors with devastating consequences for their well-being. Gaps in services further hinder their development. The study concluded that there is a need for multidisciplinary teams to implement an early childhood home-visiting programme, and that such a programme would hold many potential benefits for the young and vulnerable children. Aim: This article presents a set of guidelines that can be used to support good outcomes for an early childhood home-visiting programme for vulnerable children aged 0-2 years. Setting: The study is set in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Methods: The guidelines were developed over three phases of the study, which used an intervention research design. Results: The guidelines emerged as a number of practice principles and include: engagement and advocacy; the recruitment of a multidisciplinary workforce; training of the home-visiting workforce; implementation of the programme; and monitoring and evaluation of the programme. Conclusion: The article suggests that the guidelines hold promise for both supporting the well-being of vulnerable children and shaping a programme that is preventative, focussed on early intervention, and both multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. Contribution: The guidelines are intended as a support to those working in the fields of both early childhood and vulnerable children, and can be used alongside the existing services.

Previous research shows that infants of parents who are more likely to engage in socially contingent interactions with them tend to have larger vocabularies. An open question is "how" social contingency facilitates vocabulary growth. One possibility is that parents who speak in response to their infants more often produce larger "amount of language input," which accelerates vocabulary growth. Another possibility is that the "simplicity of contingent language input" is especially suitable to support early word learning. A third possibility is that more evidence of the communicative nature of language, achieved through "frequent contingent responses," helps infants build a link between their own words or vocalizations and others' behaviors. This link may lead to a better understanding of the communicative nature of language and further language advances, including vocabulary growth. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we analyzed the relations between parent-infant interactions when infants were 9 months and their vocabulary size at 12 months, using a naturalistic corpus. Our findings show that the frequency of parents' verbal contingent responses predicts receptive vocabulary size at 12 months and this predictive relation is unlikely to be due to the amount of language input or the simplicity of language within socially contingent interactions.

Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and languages. Very little evidence has accumulated on infants learning languages spoken in Asia, which accounts for most of the world's population. The present study examined the developmental trajectory of Korean-learning infants' sensitivity to a native stop contrast during the first year of life. The Korean language utilizes unusual voiceless three-way stop categories, requiring target categories to be derived from tight phonetic space. Further, two of these categories--lenis and aspirated--have undergone a diachronic change in recent decades as the primary acoustic cue for distinction has shifted among modern speakers. Consequently, the input distributions of these categories are mixed across speakers and speech styles, requiring learners to build flexible representations of target categories along these variations. The results showed that among the three age groups--4-6 months, 7-9 months, and 10-12 months--we tested, only 10-12-month-olds showed weak sensitivity to the two categories, suggesting that robust discrimination is not in place by the end of the first year. The study adds scarcely represented data, lending additional support for the lack of early sensitivity and prolonged emergence of native phonology that are inconsistent with learners of predominant studies and calls for more diverse samples to verify the generality of the typical perceptual narrowing pattern.

Infants are immersed in a world of sounds from the moment their auditory system becomes functional, and experience with the auditory world shapes how their brain processes sounds in their environment. Across cultures, speech and music are two dominant auditory signals in infants' daily lives. Decades of research have repeatedly shown that both quantity and quality of speech input play critical roles in infant language development. Less is known about the music input infants receive in their environment. This study is the first to compare music input to speech input across infancy by analyzing a longitudinal dataset of daylong audio recordings collected in English-learning infants' home environments, at 6, 10, 14, 18, and 24 months of age. Using a crowdsourcing approach, 643 naïve listeners annotated 12,000 short snippets (10 s) randomly sampled from the recordings using Zooniverse, an online citizen-science platform. Results show that infants overall receive significantly more speech input than music input and the gap widens as the infants get older. At every age point, infants were exposed to more music from an electronic device than an in-person source; this pattern was reversed for speech. The percentage of input intended for infants remained the same over time for music while that percentage significantly increased for speech. We propose possible explanations for the limited music input compared to speech input observed in the present (North American) dataset and discuss future directions. We also discuss the opportunities and caveats in using a crowdsourcing approach to analyze large audio datasets. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/lFj_sEaBMN4

The ability to predict upcoming events is essential in infancy because it enables babies to process information optimally and have successful goal-directed interactions with their environment. In this article, we examine how infants generate predictions in perception, cognition, and action, and address whether and how their predictions are motivated and affected by their motor development. Our synthesis of research demonstrates that infants form predictions in the perception, cognition, and action domains based on perceived statistical information, pre-existing and newly generated knowledge, and internal motor models. Our analysis reveals that infants' increasing fine and gross motor experiences have a moderating impact on the elaboration of the different bases for predictions. Based on this, we conclude that new motor experiences enable infants to constantly improve the bases from which they generate and update their predictions.

Communication is commonly viewed as connecting people through conscious symbolic processes. Infants have an immature communication toolbox, raising the question of how they form a sense of connectedness. In this article, we propose a framework for infants' communication, emphasizing the subtle unconscious behaviors and autonomic contingent signals that convey drives, emotions, and a sense of connection, facilitating the formation of primal social bonds. Our developmental model emphasizes the importance of diverse modes of communication and their interplay in social interactions during infancy. The framework leverages three levels of communication--autonomic, behavioral, and symbolic--and their different maturational pathways. Initially, infants' social communication relies on autonomic responses and a dynamic behavioral repertoire, which evolve during the first year of life, supporting the emergence of symbolic communication. This extended communication framework highlights infants' role as proactive communicating agents and allows for tracing communicative developmental cascades back to their origins.

Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive changes. To test these theories, English-French monolingual and bilingual children with different exposure to each language were studied. Dense, longitudinal data were analyzed from 45 infants aged 16-30 months, whose expressive vocabulary was measured on a total of 617 occasions in English and/or French. Single-language (English and/or French), concept (number of concepts lexicalized across both languages), and word (sum of both languages) vocabulary scores were computed. Infants' exposure to each language and their exposure balance were measured using a language exposure questionnaire. Logistic curves were fitted to each infant's data to estimate the timing (midpoint) and steepness (slope) of the vocabulary spurt in single-language, concept, and word vocabularies. Seventy-six percent of infants showed a spurt in at least one vocabulary type, and bilinguals were less likely to show one in their nondominant than their dominant language. For single-language vocabulary, infants with more exposure to a language had earlier spurts. For combined vocabularies (concept and word), monolinguals and unbalanced bilinguals had earlier and steeper spurts than balanced bilinguals. Results better support the predictions of accumulator models than cognitive theories and show that infants follow different vocabulary acquisition trajectories based on their language background.

Infants' preference for vowelharmony (VH, a phonotactic constraint that requires vowels in a word to be featurally similar) is thought to be language-specific: Monolingual infants learning VH languages show a listening preference for VH patterns by 6 months of age, while those learning non-VH languages do not (Gonzalez-Gomez et al., 2019; Van Kampen et al., 2008). We investigated sensitivity to advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo) in 40 six-month-old multilingual infants (21 girls) in Ghana, West Africa (an understudied population), all learning Akan, Ghanaian English, and most of them several other understudied African languages (e.g., Ga, Ewe). We hypothesized that infants learning both ATR harmony and nonharmony languages would demonstrate sensitivity to ATR harmony. Using the central fixation procedure, infants were presented with disyllabic nonwords that were either harmonic (e.g., puti) or nonharmonic (e.g., pet[open-mid back rounded vowel]) based on their ATR features. Infants demonstrated sensitivity to ATR harmony with a familiarity preference, listening longer to harmonic syllable sequences than nonharmonic ones. The relative amount of exposure to (an) ATR harmony language(s) did not modulate the preference. These results shed light on our understanding of early multilingualism: they suggest that early sensitivity to VH in multilinguals may be similar to monolingual infants learning other types of VH, irrespective of simultaneous experience with non-VH languages. We conclude with reflections on studying infant language acquisition in multilingual Africa.

The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be advanced. Here, we demonstrate an asynchronous workflow for conducting violation-of-expectation (VoE) experiments, which is fully "hands-off" for the experimenter. We first replicate four classic VoE experiments in a synchronous online setting, and show that VoE can generate highly replicable effects through remote testing. We then confirm the accuracy of a state-of-the-art gaze annotation software, iCatcher+ in a new setting. Third, we train parents to control the experiment flow based on the infant's gaze. Combining all three innovations, we then conduct an asynchronous automated infant-contingent VoE experiment. The hands-off workflow successfully replicates a classic VoE effect: infants look longer at inefficient actions than efficient ones. We compare the resulting effect size and statistical power to the same study run in-lab and synchronously via Zoom. The hands-off workflow significantly reduces the marginal cost and time per participant, enabling larger sample sizes. By enhancing the reproducibility and robustness of findings relying on infant looking, this workflow could help support a cumulative science of infant cognition. Tools to implement the workflow are openly available.

Musical communication between adults and children is a widely studied phenomenon in the field of music education and psychology. In the research carried out to date, a variety of methodological designs have been used, based mainly on the perceptions of adults, to investigate the different aspects of these musical interactions. Thus, there is little information about the characteristics of participation in the parent-infant relationship considering both adults and children's musical behaviours. The aim of the study in which this article is framed was to identify the characteristics of parent and child participation in musical interactions involving vocal expression in the family environment, with the particularity of the data having being obtained directly from their everyday communication scenarios. The participants were five families with at least one child younger than 36 months. Data was collected by means of an audio recording device (DLP) associated with LENA® software. This article describes a tool for analysis that was designed and validated according to the particularities of the data. The MICAD - "Musical Interaction among Children and Adult Descriptors" - integrates characteristics of elements of both adult-child communication and the musical content present in their encounters. Thanks to the analysis provided by the MICAD it is possible to reach a deeper understanding of participants' individual behaviours and distinguish different models of musical interaction between children and adults.

New motor skills can shape how infants communicate with their caregivers. For example, learning to walk allows infants to move faster and farther than they previously could, in turn allowing them to approach their caregivers more frequently to gesture or vocalize. Does the link between walking and communication differ for infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whose communicative and motor development differs from their neurotypically developing peers? We prospectively followed two groups of infants longitudinally during the transition from crawling to walking: (1) N = 25 infants with no family history of ASD; and (2) N = 91 infants with an older sibling with ASD. Fifteen infants were later diagnosed with ASD, and 26 infants showed a language delay (but did not receive an ASD diagnosis). After learning to walk, infants without ASD or language delay showed considerable changes in their communication: They gestured more frequently, and increasingly coordinated their gestures and vocalizations with locomotion (e.g., by approaching a caregiver and showing a toy). Infants with language delay showed similar but attenuated growth in their communication. However, infants later diagnosed with ASD did not display enhanced communication after they began to walk.

This article explores the applicability of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a language assessment measure for Georgian child language, as to-date, Georgian, a morphologically rich language with numerous inflectional categories, experiences an extensive lack of instruments for early language assessment. To this end, a set of guidelines for calculating Georgian MLU was developed based on the analysis of a longitudinal corpus of two Georgian-speaking children aged 12-35 months. This was supported by the findings of previous studies on Georgian acquisition. Furthermore, the guidelines were used to compare MLU in morphemes (MLU-m) with MLU in words (MLU-w) and MLU in syllables (MLU-s) to determine the most suitable method for assessing morphological development in Georgian. These results indicate that MLU-m closely aligns with the description of language development in Georgian children. MLU-s is useful for demonstrating early linguistic development, while MLU-w correlates with age but does not capture changes within words over time. Further testing on a larger corpus is needed to refine the guidelines for more accurate assessment of Georgian-speaking children.

This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they performed above chance in all other scenarios, including plural third-person subjects and sentences with overt full DP subjects. This is reminiscent of the results of Pérez-Leroux for Spanish. In experiment 2, with the same design but involving numeral distractors, children's performance was above chance level across all conditions from age 3 to 4. Then, in experiment 3, we moved to a younger age range with the help of eye-tracking techniques. The findings revealed that infants at 22 months had the ability to parse subject--verb agreement in sentences with third-person null subjects, and at 19 months there was evidence of parsing for third-person plural null subjects. These findings are inconsistent with the perception of children grappling with syntactic agreement computation. We argue that instances of underperformance in subject--verb agreement parsing identified in the literature often stem from task-related and pragmatic issues rather than core syntactic delay. If so, the putative asymmetry between early production of verbal inflection and late comprehension disappears; rather, the results suggest early establishment of matching operations and mastery of language-specific agreement properties before production starts.

Language development can be framed as the process of learning how to mean (Halliday, 1975). From this perspective, the role of communicative function is central to the language-learning process with development being guided by interaction with experienced others. In the current study, we present a detailed analysis of the communicative functions used in interaction with prelinguistic infants aged 10-12 months from three cultural groups living in the United Kingdom. The findings indicate that caregivers from all three groups used a wide range of communicative acts when interacting with their infants, ranging from directives to discussions of inner thoughts and feelings. In addition, we identified significant differences in the frequency with which different communicative acts were used across our three groups. The study complements the positive contributions made by pivotal studies on language socialisation by highlighting the diversity and variation of caregiver speech at the functional level.

Objectives: Among Aboriginal children, the year between birth and 1 year of age has the highest mortality rate compared with any other age. Prompt administration of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) leads to better outcomes and a lower likelihood of ongoing sequalae. Current education on infant CPR is not provided to parents except in certain circumstances in a neonatal intensive care unit. Currently, there are no identified CPR education courses specifically available for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, meaning that current infant CPR education courses are not culturally responsive. Design: Partnering with an Aboriginal community from the Bindjareb region of the Western Australian Noongar nation, the researchers used a co-design approach and an Aboriginal Participatory Action Research (APAR) design to explore how to deliver culturally safe and responsive infant CPR community education. This resulted in the development of the Koolangka Infant Life Saving Education Framework (KILSEF), which can be used to guide future planning and delivery of culturally safe and responsive community level infant CPR education. Results: The study findings identified that members of the Aboriginal community were very interested in receiving infant CPR education, but the barriers identified from mainstream CPR course delivery need to be removed for the community to benefit from culturally responsive ways of learning. Culturally responsive community CPR education should be provided in culturally safe places and the focus of learning should be on the practical applications of CPR and less on the academic pre-reading and written requirements. Explanations should be provided in lay terms and patience is required to communicate ideas in ways that facilitate understanding, and the course may need to be delivered over several days to accommodate community participant availability. Conclusion: Addressing Aboriginal community concerns and barriers allowed for the implementation of culturally responsive infant resuscitation education which was highly valued by community members and led to increased community confidence and participation in CPR education.

This study investigates the reasons behind the decision to send children aged under three to ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) and the causes that may explain why some families send their child to ECEC once they reach the age of two while others decide to do so at an earlier age. To answer the first question posed a probit model is used, while to answer the second query a Heckprobit model is estimated to take into account possible selection bias. The data for this study was taken from an unpublished database compiled by the Spanish National Institute for Educational Evaluation, which gathers information from 1,166 children schooled in the Infant Education stage. The results of our estimations show that the decision to enroll children under three in ECEC services depends fundamentally on the sociodemographic characteristics of the mother (educational level, employment situation and age), on household size (if it is a large family) and on the availability of ECEC services in the area in which the child lives. Our study has also shown that the only variable regarding factors that explain the differences in the age of access to ECEC services, two or under two, is the importance that parents place on their children developing empathy towards others. On the basis of our results, the study offers recommendations aimed at the progressive universalization of this initial educational stage.

Emphasis on continuous infant sleep overnight may be driven by parental concern of risk to child mental health outcomes. The Mercy Pregnancy and Emotional Wellbeing Study (MPEWS) examined whether infant sleep at 6 and 12 months postpartum predicts anxiety disorders at 2-4 years, and whether this is moderated by maternal depression, active physical comforting (APC) or maternal cognitions about infant sleep. Data included 349 women and infants. Infant sleep was measured using the Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire and child anxiety disorders by the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment. The risk of developing generalised anxiety or social phobia disorders at 3-4 years was reduced by 42% (p = 0.001) and 31% (p = 0.001), respectively, for a one standard deviation increase in total sleep at 12 months. No other infant sleep outcomes were associated. Maternal depression, APC and cognitions about infant sleep did not significantly moderate these relationships. Focus may need to be on total infant sleep, rather than when sleep is achieved.

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in many contexts. There is limited scholarship, however, in the fields of Developmental Psychology and Early Childhood Education exploring the implications of generative AI for babies and young children. In this Perspectives piece, we discuss potential use cases, opportunities, and risks for the application of AI in early childhood. Our insights are informed by extensive discussion with stakeholders and by desk research carried out in our roles as academics and analysts in a social innovation foundation. Our aim is to stimulate nuanced and informed discourse on the topic of generative AI in early childhood that can inform innovation in both research and practice.

It is known that infant-directed speech (IDS) plays a key role in language development. Previous research, however, has also identified significant variability across societies in terms of how often IDS occurs. For example, some studies report very little IDS in non-western, small-scale societies -- including children growing up in small-scale societies in Tanna, Vanuatu. This is surprising given that IDS is widely assumed as a common feature of human caregiving based on research conducted in urbanised populations which are more well-studied. Here, we propose that IDS is only one of a suite of important caregiving behaviours that are produced during interactions with infants, which may vary by culture, perhaps being replaced by other, non-verbal infant-directed behaviours (IDB). We will examine previously collected data consisting of 94 semi-structured 10-min video observations of caregivers and their 18--24 month-old children in rural Tanna, Vanuatu and urban Vancouver, Canada to identify and compare the proportion of time caregivers spend engaging in IDS and IDB during these interactions, both within and between societies. We define IDS as caregiver speech or vocalisations during the interaction with the infant, and we define IDB as non-verbal behaviours that are produced with the infant during the interaction. This study aims to take a step towards a more generalised understanding of language development in children, moving beyond the urban and western societies in which our understanding of development is currently based, and the predicted results will aid in recognising different developmental pathways within multi-cultural communities.

Research has shown the importance of responsive caregiving for fostering positive development early in life; however, tools measuring these interactions are often impractical for larger scale intervention trials and in settings with resource constraints. The present study provides reliability and validity evidence from Sindh, Pakistan for a tool developed to quantify responsive caregiving. Data were collected from 200 randomly selected households on responsive caregiving, sociodemographic characteristics, early learning, and early child development. The results indicated that the responsive care tool can be feasibly administered in less than 5 min in a low-resource setting. An exploratory factor analysis found that the tool's indicators reliably loaded onto two distinct factors, responsive interactions and caregiver-initiated interactions, accounting for 96.01% of the underlying variation in scores. A confirmatory factor analysis reflecting input from modification indices showed satisfactory fit statistics and adequate factor loadings (all above 0.70). Internal consistencies of the two factors were also high, with alphas of 0.93 and 0.83, respectively. Convergent validity of the responsive interactions factor was demonstrated by a strong and positive correlation with measures of psychosocial stimulation, early learning, maternal education, and household wealth. Predictive validity of the responsive interactions factor was demonstrated by a strong and positive association with child development. The caregiver-initiated interactions factor was significantly and negatively associated with psychosocial stimulation and child development. The resulting evidence provides programs with an open access, observational, reliable, and valid measure to quantify responsive caregiving at the program level in low-resource settings.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relations among children's symbolic functioning at 15 months, joint attention at 24 months, expressive communication at 24 and 36 months, and executive functioning at 36 months. With the sample from rural areas in the United States collected by the Family Life Project (N = 1,008), a longitudinal data analysis was conducted. The results of structural equation modeling suggested that children's symbolic functioning at 15 months and children's executive functioning at 36 months was directly related to each other. These two variables were also indirectly related to each other through joint attention at 24 months and expressive communication at 24 and 36 months. Psychological distancing and verbal and nonverbal communication were used to explain the role symbolic functioning plays in the development of executive functioning during the second and the third years of children's lives.

CDKL5 deficiency disorder (CDD) results in early-onset epilepsy and lifelong cognitive and motor impairments. With no validated measure for communication in CDD, this study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales-Developmental Profile Infant Toddler Checklist (CSBS-DP ITC). Caregivers (n = 150; affected individuals aged 1-29 years) completed the CSBS-DP ITC. Distribution of scores indicated a floor effect. There was poor divergent validity for the three-factor model but goodness of fit and convergent validity data were satisfactory for the one-factor model. Individuals with poorer overall functional abilities scored lower on the CSBS-DP ITC. Test-retest reliability was excellent. The floor effect could explain the very high reliability, suggesting problems as a sensitive outcome measure in clinical trials for CDD.

It is known that the rhythms of speech are visible on the face, accurately mirroring changes in the vocal tract. These low-frequency visual temporal movements are tightly correlated with speech output, and both visual speech (e.g., mouth motion) and the acoustic speech amplitude envelope entrain neural oscillations. Low-frequency visual temporal information ('visual prosody') is known from behavioural studies to be perceived by infants, but oscillatory studies are currently lacking. Here we measure cortical tracking of low-frequency visual temporal information by 5- and 8-month-old infants using a rhythmic speech paradigm (repetition of the syllable 'ta' at 2 Hz). Eye-tracking data were collected simultaneously with EEG, enabling computation of cortical tracking and phase angle during visual-only speech presentation. Significantly higher power at the stimulus frequency indicated that cortical tracking occurred across both ages. Further, individual differences in preferred phase to visual speech related to subsequent measures of language acquisition. The difference in phase between visual-only speech and the same speech presented as auditory-visual at 6- and 9-months was also examined. These neural data suggest that individual differences in early language acquisition may be related to the phase of entrainment to visual rhythmic input in infancy.

Being looked at is an important communicative signal, and attenuated responses to such direct gaze have been suggested as an early sign of autism. Using live eye tracking, we examined whether direct gaze elicits different gaze responses in infants at ages 10, 14 and 18 months with and without later autism in real-life interaction. The sample consisted of 169 infants: 35 with elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis, 94 without subsequent diagnosis and 40 with typical likelihood of autism. Infants in all groups tended to look more towards the adult's face shortly after the direct gaze occurred. Neither how much nor how quickly the infants responded to the direct gaze differentiated the without elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis and with elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis groups. Infants in the typical likelihood group looked more at the face after the direct-gaze event than infants in the two elevated likelihood groups, but this result is tentative. In an exploratory analysis, infants in the elevated likelihood of autism and subsequent diagnosis group looked away quicker from faces with direct gaze than infants in the typical likelihood group, but this measure did not correlate with dimensional autism or differentiate between the two elevated likelihood groups. The current results suggest that attenuated behavioural responses to direct gaze in infancy are neither strong nor specific early markers of autism.

Sustained attention (SA) is an endogenous form of attention that emerges in infancy and reflects cognitive engagement and processing. SA is critical for learning and has been measured using different methods during screen-based and interactive contexts involving social and nonsocial stimuli. How SA differs by measurement method, context, and stimuli across development in infancy is not fully understood. This 2-year longitudinal study examines attention using one measure of overall looking behavior and three measures of SA--mean look duration, percent time in heart rate-defined SA, and heart rate change during SA--in N = 53 infants from 1 to 24 months across four unique task conditions: social videos, nonsocial videos, social interactions (face-to-face play), and nonsocial interactions (toy engagement). Results suggest that developmental changes in attention differ by measurement method, task context (screen or interaction), and task stimulus (social or nonsocial). During social interactions, overall looking and look durations declined after age 3-4 months, whereas heart rate-defined attention measures remained stable. All SA measures were greater for videos than for live interaction conditions throughout the first 6 months, but SA to social and nonsocial stimuli within each task context were equivalent. In the second year of life, SA measured with look durations was greater for social videos compared to other conditions, heart rate-defined SA was greater for social videos compared to nonsocial interactions, and heart rate change during SA was similar across conditions. Together, these results suggest that different measures of attention to social and nonsocial stimuli may reflect unique developmental processes and are important to compare and consider together, particularly when using infant attention as a marker of typical or atypical development.

Pacifier use during childhood has been hypothesized to interfere with language processing, but, to date, there is limited evidence revealing detrimental effects of prolonged pacifier use on infant vocabulary learning. In the present study, parents of 12- and 24-month-old infants were recruited in Oslo (Norway). The sample included 1187 monolingual full-term born (without visual, auditory, or cognitive impairments) infants: 452 (230 girls; 222 boys) 12-month-olds and 735 (345 girls; 390 boys) 24-month-olds. Parents filled out an online Norwegian Communicative Development Inventory (CDI), which assesses the vocabulary in comprehension and production for 12-month-old infants and in production only for 24-month-old infants. CDI scores were transformed into age- and sex-adjusted percentiles using Norwegian norms. Additionally, parents retrospectively reported their child's daytime pacifier use, in hours, at 2-month intervals, from birth to the assessment date. Maternal education was used to control, in the analyses, for the socio-economic status. We found that greater pacifier use in an infant's lifespan was associated with lower vocabulary size. Pacifier use later in life was more negatively associated with vocabulary size than precocious use, and increased the odds of being a low language scorer. In sum, our study moves beyond the findings of momentary effects of experimentally induced "impairment" in articulators' movement on speech perception and suggests that, from 12 months of age, constraints on the infant's speech articulators (pacifier use) may be negatively associated with word comprehension and production.

Frontiers pioneered an alternative model of publishing: Rather than libraries paying subscription fees to publishers to give library communities access to journals full of articles written, reviewed and edited (at no or modest cost to the publishers) by their own faculty, they instead charge the authors to publish articles that are then made freely available to the world. Some libraries responded by supporting faculty authors directly or negotiating fee reductions with Frontiers, and Frontiers also provides breaks to authors who do not have access to publishing funds. The enterprise has grown to over 170 journals across all fields of science, and the articles are highly cited. The Frontiers acceptance criteria is that the research be scientifically sound and cogently presented. The editor's view of potential impact or importance is disregarded. The public gets to decide on that.

This study investigated the extent to which sensory responsivity in infancy contributes to adaptive behavior development among toddlers at high-familial likelihood for autism. Prospective, longitudinal data were analyzed for 218 children, 58 of whom received an autism diagnosis. Results indicated that sensory profiles at age one year (hyperresponsivity, sensory seeking) were negatively associated with later adaptive behavior, particularly for socialization, at age 3 years regardless of diagnostic status. These results suggest that early differences in sensory responsivity may have downstream developmental consequences related to social development among young children with high-familial likelihood for autism.

Despite consensus on the importance of early detection and intervention for autistic children, health disparities exist, limiting access to timely services. One specific service type in the United States is Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Part C Early Intervention programs, which are federally funded interventions for children birth-to-three with developmental delays. This study aimed to assess access to Part C, Early Intervention services for children who were evaluated for autism spectrum disorder and to examine factors that predicted parent-reported access to these services. This study extracted sociodemographic and service access data from the medical records of 709 children aged 12-40 months who were evaluated for autism spectrum disorder. Results showed that only 50% of the sample had reportedly accessed Part C, Early Intervention services. Those who identified as Black had decreased odds of having accessed Part C, Early Intervention, relative to those who identified as White, while those with a lower age of first parent concern had increased odds of having accessed Part C, Early Intervention. When inputting the independently significant variables into the model, both variables, identifying as Black and a lower age of first concern, remained significantly associated with accessing Part C, Early Intervention. Future work should investigate how these disparities come to be.

Few studies examine the effectiveness of community-based early interventions in unselected samples of autistic children, especially those from minoritized backgrounds. These types of studies require attention to strategies for recruitment, retention, data collection, and support for community providers beyond those used in university-based trials. We conducted a pilot trial of Project ImPACT, a promising caregiver-mediated naturalistic developmental behavioral intervention, in partnership with the early intervention system in a poor, large city. We assessed recruitment and retention strategies, training protocol, and measurement battery. We recruited representative provider and family samples, and had good measure completion among retained participants. Retention varied by study arm, providers had relatively poor fidelity to the intervention despite substantial support, and our measures did not appear sensitive to change. Lessons learned include the need for (a) a ramp-up training period prior to starting the study, (b) intensive implementation supports, and (c) additional strategies for family retention.

Background: Despite evidence on their short-term effectiveness, the long-term effects of group-based parenting interventions are unclear, programs are hard to scale up, and effects on parents of infants and toddlers are mixed. Objective: We evaluate the impact of a parenting intervention, "Crianza Positiva," that combines 8 group sessions with a 6 months e-messaging component. The program targets parents of infants and toddlers, is designed to be scalable by using low-cost delivery formats and a structured framework, and relies on a "top up" module to sustain the effects. Methods: We analyze video-recordings of a free play activity to rate the quality of child-caregiver interaction. We compare outcomes across three arms: (a) workshop + messages, (b) workshop only, and (c) a weekly unstructured playgroup. Because assignment to treatment is not random, we use inverse probability weighting to address initial unbalances and differential attrition. Our sample includes 442 disadvantaged families with infants/toddlers enrolled in early childhood centers in Uruguay. Results: Results show significant and sustained benefits of the program on child-caregiver interaction quality, with medium effect sizes in the affective (d = 0.44) and teaching dimensions (d = 0.59). Conclusions: The data suggest that group parenting interventions may help improve the childrearing environment among parents of children aged 0-2. Due to its protocolized design and the low cost of integrating it into early-childhood centers, the program has a potential for widespread implementation. Still, definitive conclusions are precluded by the evaluation design. Future randomized designs are needed.

Background: Drawing on the family stress model (Conger and Donnellan in Ann Rev Psychol 58:175-199, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.58.110405.085551), parenting programs typically support caregivers' nurturing and cognitively stimulating practices to mitigate the effects of poverty on child development, with small-to-moderate intervention effect sizes. Objective: This study evaluated a nonrandomized parenting program in Turkiye for low-income pregnant women and mothers of infants. The program utilized home visiting (HV) implemented by local municipalities for the first time. It was hypothesized that program mothers would engage in cognitively-stimulating practices more often at child age 9 months, and thereby expand their child's vocabulary at 18 months of age. Subgroup analyses based on maternal depression were also conducted. Methods: Using a quasi-experimental design, 526 mothers were allocated to one of two groups: HV intervention (n = 282, 77% pregnant) vs. control (n = 244, 69% pregnant). Mothers completed questionnaires on family and environmental risk at enrollment (T1), on depression and stimulating parenting at infant age 9 months (T2), and child vocabulary at 18 months (T3). Results: HV mothers reported stimulating parenting more frequently than controls at T2. Enrollment in HV predicted larger child vocabulary at T3 through stimulating parenting at T2. Subgroup differences were not detected. Conclusions: Results suggested that HV is a promising strategy to offer parent coaching to economically disadvantaged Turkish families. Though the present study made statistical adjustments to minimize group nonequivalence in baseline, selection bias might pose a threat to internal validity. A randomized controlled trial is warranted to examine its impact more rigorously prior to wider scale implementation.

Teaching an infant manual signs is beneficial as it promotes early communication, improves socialization, and can functionally replace behaviors such as crying and whining. Improving early communication also may reduce the probability of an infant engaging in dangerous behavior, like unsafe climbing. The purpose of this study was to extend Thompson et al. (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 40:15-23, 2007) by teaching an 8-month-old infant, who was noted to display developmental delays, to sign for "help" when preferred items were inaccessible. Similar to Thompson et al., delayed prompting and differential reinforcement was efficacious in teaching the infant to sign for "help," and the skill generalized to situations that were previously associated with unsafe climbing. However, undesirable generalization of signs for "help" when the infant could independently access the items was observed. Additional teaching was necessary to ensure signing for "help" occurred under appropriate antecedent control.

Independent locomotion is associated with a range of positive developmental outcomes, but unlike cognitive, linguistic, and social skills, acquiring motor skills requires infants to generate their own input for learning. We tested factors that shape infants' spontaneous locomotion by observing forty 12- to 22-month-olds (19 girls, 21 boys) during free play. Infants were recruited from the New York City area, and caregivers reported that 25 infants were White, six were Asian, four were Black, and five had multiple races; four were Hispanic or Latino. All infants played in four conditions: two environmental conditions (gross-motor toys, fine-motor toys) crossed with two social conditions (alone, together with a caregiver). Infants moved more in the gross-motor toy conditions than in the fine-motor toy conditions. However, the effect of playing with a caregiver differed by toy condition. In the gross-motor toy conditions, playing with a caregiver did not affect how much infants moved, but in the fine-motor toy conditions, playing with a caregiver further depressed infant locomotion. Infants with more walking experience moved more with gross-motor toys but not with fine-motor toys. Differences in the amount of locomotion between conditions were related to how infants used toys and the interactions between infants and caregivers.