Developmental Psychology

Lany, Jill; Thompson, Abbie; Aguero, Ariel

doi: 10.1037/dev0001084pmid: 35007109

Words influence cognition well before infants know their meanings. For example, three-month-olds are more likely to form visually based categories when exemplars are paired with spoken words than with sine-wave tones, a likely precursor to learning symbolic relations between words and their referents. However, it is unclear why words have these effects. In 3 experiments we tested the hypothesis that exaggerated “showing” gestures used when naming objects, and the resultant cross-modal synchrony between a name and object motion, can affect object categorization. Participants were 119 3-month-old infants (56 were female and 63 were male). According to caregiver report, the sample was composed of European American (N = 114) Black (N = 6), Hispanic (N = 2) and multiracial (N = 6) infants. Participants were growing up predominantly in homes with at least 1 parent who completed a college education or a higher degree (80%), and the remaining 20% completed high school. After replicating evidence that words and tones have different effects on categorization, we found that prefamiliarizing infants with tone-object synchrony leads tones to influence categorization as words do. Moreover, we found that concentrated experience with word-object synchrony enhances the effects that words themselves have on categorization. Thus, temporal structure within caregivers’ communicative behaviors may lead words to facilitate categorization, and ultimately to aid in forming symbolic representations.

Babik, Iryna; Galloway, James Cole; Lobo, Michele A.

doi: 10.1037/dev0001289pmid: 34990201

Early exploratory behaviors have been proposed to facilitate children’s learning, impacting motor, cognitive, language, and social development. This study related the performance of behaviors used to explore oneself to behaviors used to explore objects, and then related both types of exploratory behaviors to motor, language, and cognitive measures longitudinally from 3 through 24 months of age via secondary analysis of an existing dataset. Participants were 52 children (23 full-term, 29 preterm). Previously published results from this dataset documented delays for preterm relative to full-term infants in each assessment. The current results related performance among the assessments throughout the first 2 years of life. They showed that the developmental trajectories of behaviors children used for self-exploration closely related to the trajectories of behaviors they employed to explore objects. The trajectories of both self and object exploration behaviors significantly related to trajectories of children’s motor, language, and cognitive development. Specifically, significant relations to global development were observed for self-exploratory head lifting, midline head and hand positioning, hand opening, and behavioral variability, as well as for object-oriented bimanual holding, mouthing, looking, banging, manipulating, transferring of objects, and behavioral intensity and variability. These results demonstrate continuity among the early exploratory behaviors infants perform with their bodies alone, exploratory behaviors with portable objects, and global development. The findings identify specific self- and object-exploration behaviors that may serve as early indicators of developmental delay and could be targeted by interventions to advance motor, language, and cognitive outcomes for infants at risk for delay.

Arias-Trejo, Natalia; Angulo-Chavira, Armando Q.; Avila-Varela, Daniela S.; Chua-Rodriguez, Fernanda; Mani, Nivedita

doi: 10.1037/dev0001290pmid: 34941301

Research on the early lexical-semantic system has described how toddlers organize word representations based on semantic and phonological features. This study is a longitudinal investigation of the development of this organization during infancy. Middle-high socioeconomic status Mexican toddlers (n = 28, 15 female) were presented with a preferential looking task using an eye-tracker at 18, 21, and 24 months of age, manipulating semantic and phonological lexical links. The experimental task consisted of presenting an auditory label, which was phonologically or semantically related or unrelated, with a displayed target image. Mean proportion of target looking, time-course of fixations, pupillometry, and vocabulary network analysis were used to describe the properties of priming effects. The results showed that phonological priming developed earlier than semantic priming, and that they were produced by behavioral interference. In addition, pupil dilation showed differential use of cognitive effort in critical developmental periods. Finally, the density of vocabulary networks correlated with semantic effects, and vocabulary size and local network features with phonological effects. These findings extend our understanding of the development of the lexical-semantic system during infancy.

Eghbaria-Ghanamah, Hazar; Ghanamah, Rafat; Shalhoub-Awwad, Yasmin; Adi-Japha, Esther; Karni, Avi

doi: 10.1037/dev0001284pmid: 34881963

Oral language proficiency in kindergarten can facilitate the acquisition of reading and writing. However, in diglossic languages, like Arabic, the large gap between the spoken and the formal, modern standard (MSA) varieties of the language may restrict the benefits of oral language proficiency to subsequent literacy skills. Here, we tested, in a randomized controlled study, whether an intervention program, implemented in kindergarten, that familiarized the children with rhymes presented in MSA through recitation, facilitated reading and spelling in first grade. We also tested whether engaging the children in recitation affords an advantage over repeated listening by itself and whether rhymes directly referring to the alphabet impart additional advantages. The children were assigned to one of four intervention conditions (10 sessions, 2 months) wherein they either recited or repeatedly listened to nursery rhymes that were either related or unrelated to the alphabet, or engaged in nonlinguistic activities (control). A year later, all intervention groups read faster compared to a control group (nonlinguistic activity). The two recitation groups gained in reading accuracy, reading efficiency, and spelling; spelling gains were found also in children who only listened to alphabet-related rhymes. The reciting groups were superior to the listening groups in all study measures (reading and spelling). The results suggest long-term contributions from structured interventions based on oral rhyme repetition, in kindergarten, to reading and spelling in first grade. Vocal recitations in kindergarten can benefit the mastering of literacy skills even in a language that differs from the one spoken in the child’s home.

Lavelli, Manuela; Stefana, Alberto; Lee, Sang Han; Beebe, Beatrice

doi: 10.1037/dev0001298pmid: 35113602

Very few studies have assessed infant capacity for bidirectional, contingent communication at birth, and to our knowledge there are none with preterm infants in the neonatal period. Presence versus absence of such interactive contingency makes a difference for our theories of development. We examined whether preterm infants can contingently coordinate behaviors with mothers and fathers in spontaneous communication in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and whether mother–infant versus father–infant engagement and contingency differ. Twenty Italian preterm infants (60% girls, born 27–33 weeks, largely middle-class families) lying in a heated cot in the NICU were videotaped at 35 weeks with mothers, and fathers (counterbalanced), in face-to-face communication. Videotapes were coded on a 1-s time-base with parent and infant engagement scales. Multilevel time-series models evaluated self-contingency (auto-correlation) and interactive contingency (lagged cross-correlation). Mothers (vs. fathers) showed higher levels of engagement, interpreted as more arousing. Fathers (vs. mothers) showed more midrange engagement, interpreted as less “demanding” of infant engagement. Infants were more gaze-on-parent’s-face and gaze-on-environment with mothers than fathers. Fathers interacted contingently with infants, whereas mothers did not. However, infants interacted contingently with mothers, but not fathers. When infants were in lower engagement levels 1 s prior, fathers stayed in lower engagement levels in the current second, closer to infants than mothers. We suggest that fathers were more coordinated because fathers were more able to join the infant’s dampened state. We suggest that infants were more coordinated with mothers because mothers were more socially stimulating, and more familiar. We conclude that preterm infants, shortly after birth, are capable of contingent communication.

Ravindran, Niyantri; McElwain, Nancy L.; Berry, Daniel; Kramer, Laurie

doi: 10.1037/dev0001299pmid: 34990199

Our primary objective was to examine the extent to which moment-to-moment associations between preschool-aged children’s behavior and maternal emotional support differed for mothers showing different levels of parasympathetic engagement. We used behavioral observations of maternal and child behavior and maternal changes in cardiac vagal tone assessed via respiratory sinus arrhythmia in 15-s intervals during a 5-min challenging puzzle task (N = 121 dyads; 65 girls, Mage = 4.42 years). Results from multilevel models showed that increases in children’s defeat (e.g., frustration, task withdrawal) coupled with maternal vagal augmentation (an index of social engagement) in a given 15-s interval predicted increases in maternal support in the next interval, whereas increases in children’s defeat coupled with maternal vagal withdrawal (an index of physiological arousal) in a given 15-s interval did not predict increases in maternal support. Findings suggest that vagal augmentation in mothers may operate together with fluctuations in children’s negative behaviors to predict supportive parenting in real time.

Mills-Koonce, W. Roger; Towe-Goodman, Nissa; Swingler, Margaret M.; Willoughby, Michael T.

doi: 10.1037/dev0001287pmid: 34941304

This study utilized latent profile analyses to identify unique configurations of children’s family-based social experiences during the first 3 years of life and examine differences across profiles with respect to developmental outcomes at 36 and 48 months of age. Seven family process variables were used: maternal emotional functioning, maternal sensitivity, negative controlling parenting, cognitive stimulation, corporal punishment, adult-adult aggression, and household disorganization. Data were collected by the Family Life Project (N = 1,087), a longitudinal study of families living in low-wealth, nonurban areas, for whom the biological mother was the child’s primary caregiver from 6 to 36 months of age. On average, mothers were 26 years of age at 2 months of child age. Approximately 36% of the families lived below the federal poverty limit, and 41% identified as Black; 49% of children were female. Latent profile analyses identified four groups: (a) positive exposure (b) average exposure, (c) problematic adult functioning, and (d) problematic parenting. Comparisons indicate that children in the positive exposure profile had the highest levels of socioemotional and cognitive outcomes compared to overall profiles. Children in the problematic adult functioning and problematic parenting profiles had the most problematic child outcomes, with children in the problematic parenting profile scoring lowest overall. Results indicate that there is configural heterogeneity in family-based social experiences at the highest levels of risk and that exposures to problematic parenting may be more consequential for later child outcomes than exposures to problematic adult functioning in the absence of compromised caregiving.

Chimed-Ochir, Ulziimaa; Bai, Liu; Whitesell, Corey J.; Teti, Douglas M.

doi: 10.1037/dev0001297pmid: 34928631

The second year of life is a time of formative developmental change as basic behavioral systems undergo rapid integration and expansion. This study examined the developmental trajectories of social-emotional (SoE) outcomes and the effects of infant sex and household chaos (HC) on the development of SoE outcomes across the second year of life. The participating families (N = 143) were ethnically homogenous (88% Caucasian) but economically diverse (31% low-to-very-low income). Mothers reported on their children’s SoE outcomes including externalizing, internalizing, dysregulating problem behaviors as well as SoE competence when infants (54% girls) were 12, 18, and 24 months old. At each age point, HC was assessed through observations during home visits and compliance to the study protocols. Multilevel modeling revealed increasing developmental trajectories in all of the domains of SoE outcomes across the second year of life, reflecting the premise that these behavioral systems continue to form and become increasingly part of the infant’s behavioral repertoire as development unfolds. However, compared to infants in less chaotic homes, infants in more chaotic households experienced steeper increases in both externalizing and internalizing problem behaviors across the second year, and girls showed higher levels of internalizing problem behaviors compared to boys. Results emphasize the increasing trajectories of problem behaviors in relation to ongoing chaotic caregiving environment among infants as young as 2 years of age.

Hyun, Sunah; McWayne, Christine M.; Guetterman, Timothy C.

doi: 10.1037/dev0001292pmid: 34881966

Currently, despite the rapid growth of the population of Chinese immigrant families and children in the United States, preschool-aged Chinese-heritage children are an underrepresented group in research. The overarching purpose of this project was to provide a deeper understanding of Head Start Chinese immigrant parents’ beliefs about children’s social-emotional development, the value of play during the preschool period, and the potential role of cultural orientation. The study followed the steps of a mixed methods explanatory sequential design. First, using quantitative data collected from 213 primary caregivers, the study employed a person-centered lens to explore profiles of parents’ cultural orientations and beliefs about play and academics in preschool to better understand the association of these profiles to children’s social competencies. Next, 34 primary caregivers from the quantitative study participated in in-depth, focus group discussions to further explore parents’ perceptions of children’s social behaviors, cultural adjustment experiences, and their perceptions about U.S. preschools. Four reliable profiles were resolved quantitatively and showed within-group variations in patterns of Chinese immigrant parents’ beliefs and cultural orientations that related differentially to children’s social-emotional competencies as evidenced within peer play at home. Qualitative findings corroborated and elaborated the quantitative findings. These results underscored the importance of engaging with Chinese immigrant parents to inform research and program practices.

Bégel, Valentin; Dalla Bella, Simone; Devignes, Quentin; Vandenbergue, Madeline; Lemaître, Marie-Pierre; Dellacherie, Delphine

doi: 10.1037/dev0001293pmid: 35007111

Temporal accounts of Developmental Dyslexia (DD) postulate that a timing impairment plays an important role in this learning disorder. However, DD has been associated with timing disorders as well as other motor and cognitive dysfunctions. It is still unclear whether nonverbal timing skills per se may be considered as independent determinants of DD. In this study, we investigated the independent contribution of predictive timing to DD above and beyond the motor and cognitive dysfunctions typically associated with this disorder. Twenty-one children with DD (aged 8–12, nine females) and 27 controls (14 females) were evaluated on perceptual timing, finger tapping, fine motor control, as well as attention and executive tasks. Participants were native French speakers from various socioeconomic backgrounds. The performance of children with DD was poorer than that of controls in most of the tasks. Predictors of DD, as identified by logistic regression modeling, were beat perception and precision in tapping to the beat, which are both predictive timing variables, children’s tapping rate, and cognitive flexibility. These data support temporal accounts of DD in which predictive timing impairments partially explain the core phonological deficit, independent from general motor and cognitive functioning, making predictive timing a valuable tool for early diagnosis and remediation of DD.