Toddlers displaying extremely inhibited behavior may be at risk for becoming socially withdrawn. However, behavioral inhibition may be a multifaceted characteristic, and its concurrent relation to toddler wariness with peers has not been examined. In this study, 108 toddlers (54 females) and their mothers were observed in novel situations involving unfamiliar settings, adults, and peers. Vagal ...

Children posit unobserved causes when events appear to occur spontaneously (e.g., Gelman & Gottfried, 1996). What about when events appear to occur probabilistically? Here toddlers (M = 20.1 months) saw arbitrary causal relationships (Cause A generated Effect A; Cause B generated Effect B) in a fixed, alternating order. The relationships were then changed in one of two ways. In the Deterministi...

This study characterized early language abilities in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (n = 257) using multiple measures of language development, compared to toddlers with non-spectrum developmental delay (DD, n = 69). Findings indicated moderate to high degrees of agreement among three assessment measures (one parent report and two direct assessment measures). Performance on two of the t...

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, two-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"). But, they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk it") (Arunachalam & Waxman, 2010). We hypothesized that adver...

Between the first and second year, toddlers’ word learning accelerates. Explanations for this “vocabulary spurt” include the emergence of domain-specific constraints and a change from associative to referential learning. What these and other accounts share is that the proposed mechanism is in the toddler’s head. Here, we propose a different explanation: the input during the spurt changes in way...

Early visual object recognition in a world full of cluttered visual information is a complicated task at which toddlers are incredibly efficient. In their everyday lives, toddlers constantly create learning experiences by actively manipulating objects and thus self-selecting object views for visual learning. The work in this paper is based on the hypothesis that active viewing and exploration o...

OBJECTIVES To assess the usual nutrient intakes of 3,273 US infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, aged 0 to 47 months, surveyed in the Feeding Infants and Toddlers Study (FITS) 2008; and to compare data on the usual nutrient intakes for the two waves of FITS conducted in 2002 and 2008. DESIGN The FITS 2008 is a cross-sectional survey of a national random sample of US children from birth throug...

To better understand how toddlers integrate multiple learning strategies to acquire verbs, we compared sensorimotor recruitment and comparison learning because both strategies are thought to boost children's access to scene-level information. For sensorimotor recruitment, we tested having toddlers use dolls as agents and compared this strategy with having toddlers observe another person enact v...

Background: Toddlers with celiac disease are at risk of developmental delay due to frequent hospitalization and food deprivation. But an appropriate program to improve development of these children does not exist. Aim: Determination of the effect of a developmental stimulation program on development of toddlers’ fine motor skills. Methods: This clinical trial conducted on 50 eligible 1-3 year-o...