This study sought to determine why American parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds communicate in different ways with their children. Forty-seven parent-child dyads were videotaped engaging in naturalistic interactions in the home for ninety minutes at child age 2;6. Transcripts of these interactions provided measures of child-directed speech. Children's vocabulary comprehension skill...

Disclosure and lying to mothers and fathers about different activities, as defined within social domain theory, were examined as a function of Latino family values in 109 Puerto Rican lower socioeconomic status middle adolescents (M=15.58 years, SD=1.18) living in the United States. Questionnaires revealed that teens sometimes disclosed to parents about their risky prudential (unhealthy or unsa...

Visual learning depends on both the algorithms and the training material. This essay considers the natural statistics of infant- and toddler-egocentric vision. These natural training sets for human visual object recognition are very different from the training data fed into machine vision systems. Rather than equal experiences with all kinds of things, toddlers experience extremely skewed distr...

Previous studies indicate that English-learning children acquire the distinction between singular and plural nouns between 22 and 24 months of age. Also, their use of the distinction is correlated with the capacity to distinguish nonlinguistically between singular and plural sets in a manual search paradigm (D. Barner, D. Thalwitz, J. Wood, S. Yang, & S. Carey, 2007). The authors used 3 experim...

The current study investigated the interaction of implicit grammatical gender and semantic category knowledge during object identification. German-learning toddlers (24-month-olds) were presented with picture pairs and heard a noun (without a preceding article) labeling one of the pictures. Labels for target and distracter images either matched or mismatched in grammatical gender and either mat...

BACKGROUND It is well documented that friends' externalizing problems and negative parent-child interactions predict externalizing problems in adolescence, but relatively little is known about the role of siblings. This four-wave, multi-informant study investigated linkages of siblings' externalizing problems and sibling-adolescent negative interactions on adolescents' externalizing problems, w...

We examined the range of sexual intentions and behaviors preceding sexual initiation among 211 African-American pre-teens assigned to the control arm of a longitudinal community-based intervention trial. Stage of sexual readiness was assessed using the stage of change construct from the Transtheoretical Model, and patterns of stage movement during a 6-month period were examined. Overall, 90% of...

Three studies (N=144) investigated how toddlers aged 18 and 24 months pass the surprise-mark test of self-recognition. In Study 1, toddlers were surreptitiously marked in successive conditions on their legs and faces with stickers visible only in a mirror. Rates of sticker touching did not differ significantly between conditions. In Study 2, toddlers failed to touch a sticker on their legs that...

Two separate studies examined older siblings' influence on the language exposure and language development of U.S.-born toddlers who were being raised in bilingual homes. The participants in Study 1 were 60 children between 16 and 30 months who had heard English and another language at home from birth; 26 had older siblings and 34 did not. The participants in Study 2 were 27 children, assessed a...