Pre-linguistic infants need to learn how to produce spoken word forms that have the appropriate intentional effect on adult carers. One proposed imitation strategy is based on the idea that infants are innately able to match the sounds of their own babble to sounds of adults, while another propos strategy requires only reinforcement signals from improve random imitations. Here we demonst knowle...

This research examined the relations among maternal emotionality, biology, and infant outcome and autonomic nervous system reactivity (cardiac vagal tone). The sample consisted of 27 pregnant adolescents and their 3-week-old infants. Measures of anxiety, depression, anger, and saliva cortisol were obtained from the adolescents both pre- and postnatally. Infant outcome measures consisted of gest...

OBJECTIVE To explore the joint and independent effects of gestational weight gain (GWG) and pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) on pregnancy outcomes in a population of Chinese Han women and to evaluate pregnant women's adherence to the 2009 Institute of Medicine (IOM) gestational weight gain guidelines. METHODS This was a multicenter, retrospective cohort study of 48,867 primiparous women fr...

Rates of infant death are one of the most common indicators of a population's overall health status. Infant mortality rates (IMRs) are used to make broad inferences about the quality of health care, effects of health policies and even environmental quality. The purpose of our study was threefold: i) to examine the characteristics of births in the area in relation to gestational age and birthwei...

The frequency of lambda light chain (L) producing cells in immunoglobulin-producing cells that have been generated in vitro from bone marrow pre-B cells was investigated. The frequency of lambda-producing cells obtained in such a culture was three- to eightfold higher than that observed in the culture of mature spleen B cells. These results suggest that the activation of lambda gene at pre-B ce...

MicroRNAs are important negative regulators of gene expression in higher eukaryotes. The miRNA repertoire of the closest human animal relative, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), is largely unknown. In this study, we focused on computational search of novel miRNA homologs in chimpanzee. We have searched and analyzed the chimp homologs of the human pre-miRNA and mature miRNA sequences. Based on a...

AIMS To examine the effect of maternal alcohol use during pregnancy on infant behavioral outcomes and birth weight, and to investigate the differential susceptibility of infant behavioral outcomes and birth weight to prenatal alcohol exposure. METHODS Data on children born to women taking part in the United States National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) (n = 1618) were analyzed using the...

The acoustic analysis of infant cry is used to deduce information on the state of health of new-born babies as well as of children a few weeks old. Crying is the first tool of communication for an infant. These cries seem to be uniform, but there are a lot of differences between two infant‟s cries. Infant cry characteristics reflect the development and possibly the integrity of the central nerv...

Distress-linked activation of the maternal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA)-axis is considered a pathway by which affect regulation impacts the fetal milieu and neurodevelopment. There is little direct evidence for this conceptual model. In 103 women [mean age 27.45 (±5.65) years] at 36-38 weeks gestation, salivary cortisol was measured before/after stress tasks; distress questionnaires wer...