The effect of the COVID ‐19 pandemic on infant development and maternal mental health in the first 2 years of life
AbstractWe investigated how exogenous variation in exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic during the first year of life is related to infant development, maternal mental health, and perceived stress. Ninety-three socioeconomically diverse pregnant women were recruited before the pandemic to participate in a longitudinal study. Infants ranged in age at the beginning of lockdown (0 –9.5 months old), thus experiencing different durations of pandemic exposure across the first year of life. The duration of pandemic exposure was not associated with family demographic characteristics, suggesting it captured exogenous variability. W...
Source: Infancy - October 15, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Jessica F. Sperber,
Emma R. Hart,
Sonya V. Troller ‐Renfree,
Tyler W. Watts,
Kimberly G. Noble Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
When language ‐general and language‐specific processes are in conflict: The case of sub‐syllabic word segmentation in toddlers
This study further investigated infants' liaison representation, its potential impacts on parsing, and its interaction with the Onset Bias. In Experiments 1 and 2, French-learning 24-month-olds were familiarized with pseudo-words with variable liaison-like versus nonliaison-like onset consonants, preceded by words that cannot trigger those onsets (e.g.,un zonche;un gonche). We found no mis-segmentation as vowel-initial and successful segmentation as consonant-initial. In Experiment 3, when the preceding words could trigger a liaison consonant that matched the onset of the following word (e.g.,unnonche), infants showed a vo...
Source: Infancy - October 14, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Mireille Babineau,
Emeryse Emond,
Rushen Shi Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Seeing a talking face matters: Infants' segmentation of continuous auditory ‐visual speech
AbstractVisual speech cues from a speaker's talking face aid speech segmentation in adults, but despite the importance of speech segmentation in language acquisition, little is known about the possible influence of visual speech on infants' speech segmentation. Here, to investigate whether there is facilitation of speech segmentation by visual information, two groups of English-learning 7-month-old infants were presented with continuous speech passages, one group with auditory-only (AO) speech and the other with auditory-visual (AV) speech. Additionally, the possible relation between infants' relative attention to the spea...
Source: Infancy - October 11, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Sok Hui Jessica Tan,
Marina Kalashnikova,
Denis Burnham Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Infant locomotion shapes proximity to adults during everyday play in the U.S.
AbstractLearning to walk expands infants ’ access to the physical environment and prompts changes in their communicative behaviors. However, little is known about whether walking also shapes infants’ proximity to their adult social partners during everyday activities at home. Here we followed 89 infants (42 boys, 47 girls; 92% White, n ot Hispanic or Latino) longitudinally and documented connections between infant locomotion and infant-adult proximity on two timescales: (1) across developmental time, by comparing data from a session when infants could only crawl to a later session when they could walk(M walk onset = 12...
Source: Infancy - October 1, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Qi Chen,
Joshua L. Schneider,
Kelsey L. West,
Jana M. Iverson Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Associations between observed and reported infant negative affectivity, fear and self ‐regulation, and early communicative development—Evidence from the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study
AbstractSelf-regulation and language are intertwined abilities, but the nature of their relations in early childhood when both skills are still emerging is insufficiently understood. Our knowledge of the relations between early negative affectivity and preverbal and verbal communicative development is still limited. Further, observed and reported temperament capture how aspects of temperament operate in different settings but are rarely used in parallel in studies examining early language. During the period of rapid development, longitudinal studies are needed to identify early risk factors for delayed communicative develo...
Source: Infancy - October 1, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Denise Ollas ‐Skogster,
Pirkko Rautakoski,
David Bridgett,
Eeva‐Leena Kataja,
Hasse Karlsson,
Linnea Karlsson,
Saara Nolvi Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Are infants' preferences in the number change detection paradigm driven by sequence patterns?
AbstractInter-individual differences in infants' numerosity processing have been assessed using a change detection paradigm, where participants were presented with two concurrent streams of images, one alternating between two numerosities and the other showing one constant numerosity. While most infants look longer at the changing stream in this paradigm, the reasons underlying these preferences have remained unclear. We suggest that, besides being attracted by numerosity changes, infants perhaps also respond to the alternating pattern of the changing stream. We conducted two experiments (N = 32) with 6-month-old infants...
Source: Infancy - September 22, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Gisella Decarli,
Manuela Piazza,
V éronique Izard Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Do face ‐to‐face interactions support 6‐month‐olds' understanding of the communicative function of speech?
AbstractInfants by 6 months recognize that speech communicates information between third parties. We investigated whether 6-month-olds always expect speech to communicate or whether they also consider social features of communication, like how interlocutors engage with one another. A small sample of infants watched an actor (the Speaker) choose one of two objects to play with (the target). When the Speaker could no longer reach her target object, she turned to a new actor (the Listener) and said a nonsense word. During speech, the actors were either face-to-face, the Speaker was facing away from the Listener, or the reve...
Source: Infancy - September 21, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Mary Beth Neff,
Alia Martin Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Holistic face processing in 4 ‐ and 7‐month‐old infants
AbstractPrevious studies found an onset of holistic face processing in the age range between 0 –4 and 7 months of age. To validate these studies, the present study investigated infants 4 and 7 months of age with a different experimental approach. In a habituation-dishabituation experiment, the infants were tested with stereoscopic stimuli in which stripes floated above a face, thereby occ luding some parts of the face (amodal completion condition), and stereoscopic stimuli in which the same face parts floated above stripes (modal completion condition). Research with adults indicates that faces are processed holisticall...
Source: Infancy - September 21, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Michael Kav šek,
Martin Heil,
Carl E. Granrud Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Learning limb ‐specific contingencies in early infancy
AbstractMost research with the mobile paradigm has the underlying assumption that young infants can selectively move the limb causing the contingent feedback from the mobile while avoiding irrelevant motor responses. Contrary to this long-held belief, others have argued that such differentiation ability is not fully developed early in life. In the current study, we revisited the traditional mobile paradigm with a contemporary research approach (using high-precision motion capture techniques, a yoked-control design, and a large sample size) to investigate whether response differentiation ability emerges before 5 months of...
Source: Infancy - September 20, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Umay Sen,
Gustaf Gredeb äck Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
The influence of the COVID ‐19 lockdown on infants' physiological regulation during mother‐father‐infant interactions in Switzerland
This study included 36 parents with their 3 month-old infants. Eighteen families met the study authors before the onset of the pandemic (pre-COVID) and 18 met them after its onset, having experienced a period of confinement during the infants' first 3 months of life (COVID). Results showed that the COVID group had no decrease in vagal tone during triadic interactions, whereas the pre-COVID group did. This difference could not, however, be explained by less stressful interactional events in triadic interactions, as the COVID group showed more stressful interactional events in mother-father-infant interactions. (Source: Infancy)
Source: Infancy - September 18, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Valentine Rattaz,
Herv é Tissot,
Nilo Puglisi,
Manuella Epiney,
Chantal Razurel,
Nicolas Favez Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
The real ‐time effects of parent speech on infants' multimodal attention and dyadic coordination
We report on two studies that used head-mounted eye trackers in increasingly naturalistic laboratory environments. In Study 1, 12-to-24-month-old infants and their parents played on the floor of a seminaturalistic environment with 24 toys. In Study 2, a different sample of dyads played in a home-like laboratory with 10 toys and no restrictions on their movement. In both studies, we present evidence that responsive parent speech extends the duration of infants' multimodal attention. This social “boost” of parent speech impacts multiple behaviors that have been linked to later outcomes—visual attention, manual actions,...
Source: Infancy - September 14, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Sara E. Schroer,
Chen Yu Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Lability of prenatal stress during the COVID ‐19 pandemic links to negative affect in infancy
This study leveraged dense ecological momentary assessments from a prenatal randomized control trial to examine patterns of prenatal stress over a 14-week period (up to four assessments/day) in a U.S. sample of 72 mothers and infants. We first examined whether varied features of stress exposure (lability, mean, and baseline stress) differed depending on whether mothers reported on their stress before or during the pandemic. We next examined which features of stress were associated with 3-month-old infants' negative affect. We did not find differences in stress patterns before and during the pandemic. However, greater stres...
Source: Infancy - September 7, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Leigha A. MacNeill,
Sheila Krogh ‐Jespersen,
Yudong Zhang,
Gina Giase,
Renee Edwards,
Amélie Petitclerc,
Leena B. Mithal,
Karen Mestan,
William A. Grobman,
Elizabeth S. Norton,
Nabil Alshurafa,
Judith T. Moskowitz,
S. Darius Tandon,
Lauren Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Tracking the associative boost in infancy
AbstractDo words that are both associatively and taxonomically related prime each other in the infant mental lexicon? We explore the impact of these semantic relations in the emerging lexicon. Using the head-turn preference procedure, we show that 18-month-old infants have begun to construct a semantic network of associatively and taxonomically related words, such as dog-cat or apple-cheese. We demonstrate that priming between words is longer-lasting when the relationship is both taxonomic and associative, as opposed to purely taxonomic, reflecting theassociative boost reported in the adult priming literature. Our results ...
Source: Infancy - September 6, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Kim Plunkett,
Claire Delle Luche,
Thomas Hills,
Caroline Floccia Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Infant regulation during the pandemic: Associations with maternal response to the COVID ‐19 pandemic, well‐being, and socio‐emotional investment
AbstractIn the transition to parenthood, the COVID-19 pandemic poses an additional strain on parental well-being. Confirmed infections or having to quarantine, as well as public health measures negatively affect parents and infants. Contrary to previous studies mainly focusing on the well-being of school-aged children and their parents during lockdown periods, the present study investigated how mothers of infants respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and whether this is related to maternal well-being, maternal socio-emotional investment, and infant regulation. Between April and June 2021, 206 mothers of infants (Mage = 7.14 ...
Source: Infancy - September 4, 2022 Category: Child Development Authors: Tilman Reinelt,
Debora Suppiger,
Clarissa Frey,
Rebecca Oertel,
Giancarlo Natalucci Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research
Issue Information
No abstract is available for this article. (Source: Infancy)
Source: Infancy - August 27, 2022 Category: Child Development Tags: ISSUE INFORMATION Source Type: research
