Evidence that Two‐Year‐Old Children are Sensitive to Information Presented in Arguments

Preschoolers are more likely to endorse testimony supported by strong arguments than by weak, circular ones. Two‐year‐olds exchange arguments with others, but no experiment has demonstrated that they are sensitive to information presented as argument. In the first phase of this study, 2‐year‐olds were shown ambiguous pictures—for instance a bird–fish hybrid—and asked what they thought the picture represented. An informant then contradicted them, providing either a strong argument, a circular argument, or no argument, and the children were asked what they now thought the hybrid was. The second phase was identical to the first, with new hybrids, except that the informant never provided any argument for her position. Finally, in the third phase, the informant left the room and the children were asked again to tell what the hybrids from the first two phases were. On the whole, there was an effect of the amount of information provided in the argument so that children were more likely to endorse labels provided by the informant who had supported her answer with a strong argument in the first phase. Moreover, they generalized the trust granted to informants who provided strong arguments. These results constitute the first experimental demonstration that 2‐year‐olds possess some argument evaluation skills.     

From Syllables to Syntax: Multilevel Statistical Learning by 12‐Month‐Old Infants

To successfully acquire language, infants must be able to track multiple levels of regularities in the input. In many cases, regularities only emerge after some learning has already occurred. For example, the grammatical relationships between words are only evident once the words have been segmented from continuous speech. To ask whether infants can engage in this type of learning process, 12‐month‐old infants in 2 experiments were familiarized with multiword utterances synthesized as continuous speech. The words in the utterances were ordered based on a simple finite‐state grammar. Following exposure, infants were tested on novel grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The results indicate that the infants were able to perform 2 statistical learning tasks in sequence: first segmenting the words from continuous speech, and subsequently discovering the permissible orderings of the words. Given a single set of input, infants were able to acquire multiple levels of structure, suggesting that multiple levels of representation (initially syllable‐level combinations, subsequently word‐level combinations) can emerge during the course of learning.     

Social Engagement Leads 2‐Year‐Olds to Overestimate Others’ Knowledge

Previous research has found that young children recognize an adult as being acquainted with an object most readily when the child and adult have previously engaged socially with that object together. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that such social engagement is so powerful that it can sometimes lead children to overestimate what has been shared. After having shared two objects with an adult in turn, 2‐year‐old children played with a third object the adult could not see. In three out of four conditions, the adult remained co‐present and/or communicated to the child while she played with the third object. Children falsely perceived the adult as being acquainted with the third object when she remained co‐present (whether or not she also communicated) but not when she clearly terminated the interaction by disengaging and leaving. These results suggest that when young children are engaged with a co‐present person they tend to overestimate the other’s knowledge.     

Attachment‐Based Family Therapy With a 13‐Year‐Old Girl Presenting With High Risk for Suicide

This article describes the application of Attachment‐Based Family Therapy (ABFT) to the treatment of a 13‐year‐old female adolescent presenting with high risk of suicide, complicated by a history of depression and sexual trauma. The article begins with an overview of ABFT, including (a) how attachment theory guides treatment; (b) the structure of the clinical model; and (c) the data that provide empirical support. A case example is then presented that exemplifies the primary clinical procedures used to reach therapeutic goals in ABFT, including attachment repair and autonomy/competence promotion. Weekly changes in suicide ideation and depression scores are presented. The article concludes with a discussion about implications for family‐based treatment of suicidal youth.     

2‐Year‐Olds’ Speech Understanding in Multitalker Environments

Infants and toddlers are often spoken to in the presence of background sounds, including speech from other talkers. Prior work has suggested that infants 1 year of age and younger can only recognize speech when it is louder than any distracters in the environment. The present study tests 24‐month‐olds’ ability to understand speech in a multitalker environment. Children were presented with a preferential‐looking task in which a target voice told them to find one of two objects. At the same time, multitalker babble was presented as a distracter, at one of four signal‐to‐noise ratios. Children showed some ability to understand speech and look at the appropriate referent at signal‐to‐noise ratios as low as ?5 dB. These findings suggest that 24‐month‐olds are better able to selectively attend to an interesting voice in the context of competing distracter voices than are younger infants. There were significant correlations between individual children’s performance and their vocabulary size, but only at one of the four noise levels; thus, it does not appear that vocabulary size is the driving factor in children’s listening improvement, although it may be a contributing factor to performance in noisy environments.     

Can 18‐Month‐Old Infants Learn Words by Listening In on Conversations?

Previous research has shown that children as young as 2 can learn words from 3rd‐party conversations (Akhtar, Jipson, & Callanan, 2001). The focus of this study was to determine whether younger infants could learn a new word through overhearing. Novel object labels were introduced to 18‐month‐old infants in 1 of 2 conditions: directly by an experimenter or in the context of overhearing the experimenter use the word while interacting with another adult. The findings suggest that, when memory demands are not too high, 18‐month‐old infants can learn words through overhearing.     

Four‐Year‐Old Children’s Negotiation Strategies to Influence and Deal with a Primary Child Health Care Situation

In Sweden, children’s health and development are promoted through Primary Child Health Care (PCHC) visits. The children participate in these visits from their own perspective through bodily and verbal expressions. This study explores four‐year‐old children’s expressions when they as actors take part in a PCHC situation. The conceptualisation of the children’s expressions reveals various actions that exhibit their affirmative and delaying negotiation strategies to influence and deal with these situations. For PCHC nurses, these findings may encourage to view children as negotiating participants and inspire to sensitivity when inviting children and guiding them through health visits. © 2011 The Author(s). Children & Society © 2011 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited     

The Masculine Habitus as ‘Distributed Cognition’: A Case Study of 5‐ to 6‐Year‐Old Boys in an English Inner‐City,Multi‐Ethnic Primary School

This article provides a case study demonstrating the active role that 5‐ to 6‐year‐old boys in an English inner‐city, multi‐ethnic primary school play in the appropriation and reproduction of their masculine identities. It is argued that the emphasis on physicality, violence and racism found among the boys cannot be understood without reference to the immediate contexts of the local community and the school within which they are located. In making this argument the article draws upon and applies the concept of the habitus and develops this with the notion of ‘distributed cognition’ as proposed in sociocultural theory. Some of the implications of this analysis for working with boys in early years settings are discussed in the conclusion. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s).     

Sensitivity to Social Contingency From Mothers and Strangers in 2‐, 4‐, and 6‐Month‐Old Infants

Infants' sensitivity to changes in social contingency was investigated by presenting 2‐, 4‐, and 6‐month‐old infants with 3 episodes of social interaction from mothers and strangers: 2 contingent interactions and 1 noncontingent replay. Three orders were presented: (a) contingent, noncontingent, contingent; (b) contingent, contingent, noncontingent; and (c) noncontingent, contingent, contingent. Contingency and carryover effects were shown to both mothers and strangers in the different orders of presentation. Infants were more visually attentive to contingent interactions than to the noncontingent replay when contingent interactions occurred prior to the replay, and the infants' level of attention to the noncontingent replay carried over to subsequent contingent interactions. The 4‐ and 6‐month‐old infants showed contingency and carryover effects by their visual attention and smiling. Examination of effect sizes for attention suggests 2‐month‐old infants may be beginning to show the effects. Reasons for age changes in sensitivity to social contingency are discussed.     

Sensitivity to Word‐Final Phonotactics in 9‐ to 16‐Month‐Old Infants

Previous research has shown that infants begin to display sensitivities to language‐specific phonotactics and probabilistic phonotactics at around 9 months of age. However, certain phonotactic patterns have not yet been examined, such as contrast neutralization, in which phonemic contrasts are neutralized typically in syllable‐ or word‐final position. Thus, the acquisition of contrast neutralization is dependent on infants' ability to perceive certain contrasts in final position. The studies reported here test infants' sensitivity to voicing neutralization in word‐final position and infants' discrimination of voicing and place of articulation (POA) contrasts in word‐initial and word‐final position. Nine and 11‐month‐old Dutch‐learning infants showed no preference for legal versus illegal voicing phonotactics that were contrasted in word‐final position. Furthermore, 10‐month‐old infants showed no discrimination of voicing or POA contrasts in word‐final position, whereas they did show sensitivity to the same contrasts in word‐initial position. By 16 months, infants were able to discriminate POA contrasts in word‐final position, although showing no discrimination of the word‐final voicing contrast. These findings have broad implications for models of how learners acquire the phonological structures of their language, for the types of phonotactic structures to which infants are presumed to be sensitive, and for the relative sensitivity to phonemic distinctions by syllable and word position during acquisition.     

Task‐to‐Task Vagal Regulation: Relations With Language and Play in 20‐Month‐Old Children

In this article we report patterns of task‐to‐task vagal tone change across multiple language and play tasks as well as associations between these patterns of task‐to‐task vagal tone change and language and play performance in 20‐month‐old girls and boys. Although initially different in vagal tone suppression during solitary play, girls and boys exhibited similar group patterns of vagal reengagement during successive language and play tasks with their mothers and with an experimenter. In terms of individual differences, vagal suppression during solitary play and vagal reengagement during social interactive tasks predicted language and play performance. Gender differences emerged in patterns of predictive relations: Task‐to‐task vagal changes predicted primarily play performance in girls and language performance in boys. These findings expose the effects of social context on directional changes in task‐to‐task vagal tone and speak to the functional role of appropriate vagal regulation in young children's language and play performance.     

Parent and Child Therapy (PACT) In Action: An Attachment‐Based Intervention for a Six‐Year‐Old With a Dual Diagnosis

This case study explores Parent and Child Therapy (PACT), an attachment‐based intervention for mothers and children experiencing intractable relationship distress originally developed by Heather Chambers (a Child Psychotherapist and Family Therapist working in New Zealand). We describe the use of PACT with a mother—child dyad presenting a history of severe abuse and neglect. The child had been diagnosed with Conduct Disorder and co‐morbid Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. We consider the themes arising in the therapy, the emotional process experienced by the mother and child, the initial outcome and 10‐month follow up. The case study indicates that PACT can be learned and used by practitioners outside of the team that conceptualised and developed it. The case highlights the links between externalising difficulties and attachment disorganisation and points to PACT as a promising treatment for the chronic sequelae of early interpersonal childhood trauma. The need for research and possible directions of this research are discussed.     

Typical and Atypical Development of Visual Attention in 3‐ to 9‐Month‐Old Infants

The interactions between attention and stimulus encoding in infancy were examined using heart rate (HR) and visual habituation measures. At 3, 6, and 9 months of age, infants (N = 119) were habituated to an adult face; longest look (LL) duration was measured as an indicator of encoding speed. Three groups were formed based on LL change from 3 to 9 months: Large Decrease, Small Decrease, and Increase. Using concurrent electrocardiograph recordings, attention was measured through the percentage of looking time in orienting, sustained attention, and attention termination. We partially replicated previous findings regarding developmental patterns of attention in these three groups, notably that these patterns were different for the Increase group. Looks away from the stimulus were also assessed in each attentional phase and, as predicted, HR acceleration phases showed less visual engagement than HR deceleration phases. We also found anomalous behavior for the LL Increase group. In general, this small but distinct group showed similarities at 3 months to the presumably more mature behavior of typical 9 month olds, but by 9 months, they behaved more like typical 3 month olds regarding some, but not all, cognitive measures. These results are discussed in the context of the development of endogenous attention.     

Integration of Thought and Action: Arm Weights Facilitate Search Accuracy in 24‐Month‐Old Children

Search errors are common in cognitive tasks with infants and toddlers, and these errors reveal important insights to the development of competence and performance. Rivière and Lécuyer (2008, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 100, 1) demonstrated that 29‐month‐olds typically make an error during a search task involving invisible displacement. However, performance improves significantly when children wear weighted wrist bands while doing the task. To investigate this phenomenon further, we tested 24‐month‐old children in an identical search task (N = 35). Half the children wore weighted wrist bands, and the rest were in a no‐weight condition. To test how far this phenomenon generalizes, we also tested the same children in a second search task where they needed to find a ball that had rolled behind one of four doors. The results showed that children in the no‐weight condition replicated previous findings of poor performance on both search tasks. Unlike 29‐month‐olds, the 24‐month‐olds in the weighted condition did not immediately show improvement on the search tasks. However, after an initial search attempt, children wearing weights performed significantly better than chance. The findings shed new light on the interplay between thought and action.     

Global‐Before‐Basic Object Categorization in Connectionist Networks and 2‐Month‐Old Infants

A 3‐layered backpropagation connectionist network, configured as an autoassociator, learned to form global (e.g., mammal) before basic‐level (e.g., cat) category representations from perceptual input. To test the predicted global‐to‐basic order of category learning of the network, 2‐month‐olds were administered the familiarization/novelty‐preference procedure and examined for representation of global and basic‐level categories. Infants formed a global category representation for mammals that excluded furniture but not a basic‐level representation for cats that excluded elephants, rabbits, or dogs. The empirical results are consistent with the global‐to‐basic learning sequence observed in the network simulations.     

Phonological Specificity in 12‐ and 17‐Month‐Old French‐Speaking Infants

The literature reports some contradictory results on the degree of phonological specificity of infants’ early lexical representations in the Romance language, French, and Germanic languages. It is not clear whether these discrepancies are because of differences in method, in language characteristics, or in participants’ age. In this study, we examined whether 12‐ and 17‐month‐old French‐speaking infants are able to distinguish well‐pronounced from mispronounced words (one or two features of their initial consonant). To this end, 46 infants participated in a preferential looking experiment in which they were presented with pairs of pictures together with a spoken word well pronounced or mispronounced. The results show that both 12‐ and 17‐month‐old infants look longer at the pictures corresponding to well‐pronounced words than to mispronounced words, but show no difference between the two mispronunciation types. These results suggest that, as early as 12 months, French‐speaking infants, like those exposed to Germanic languages, already possess detailed phonological representations of familiar words.     

A Cross‐Linguistic Study of Word‐Mapping in 18‐ to 20‐Month‐Old Infants

This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant‐controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18‐ to 20‐month‐old English‐, French‐, and Japanese‐speaking infants’ novel words for events. Infants were habituated to two word‐event pairings and then presented with new combinations that involved a familiar word with a new object or motion, or both. Children could map the novel word to both the object and the motion, despite the differential salience of object and motion words in their native language. A control experiment with no label confirmed that both object and motion changes were detectable.     

Peripheral Stimulus Localization by 5‐ to 14‐Week‐Old Infants During Phases of Attention

This study examined the effect of attention in young infants on the saccadic localization of peripheral stimuli. Infants ranging in age from 5 to 14 weeks were tested using a peripheral stimulus detection paradigm. The presence of a central fixation stimulus decreased detection probability, particularly if attention was engaged with the central stimulus. Peripheral stimulus localization usually was accomplished with a single eye movement. When localization was accomplished by multiple eye movements, corrective saccades occurred most frequently and fixed‐amplitude hypometric saccades occurred less frequently. A decrease in the slope of the linear component of the main sequence was found from 5 to 11 weeks of age, and this decrease was independent of attention.