How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

Part I: The Basic Account. 1. Language and Cognition: Constructing an Alternative Approach Within the Behavioral Tradition S.C. Hayes, et al. 2. Derived Relational Responding as Learned Behavior S.C. Hayes, et al. 3. Multiple Stimulus Relations and the Transformation of Stimulus Functions D. Barnes-Holmes, et al. 4. Relations Among Relations: Analogies, Metaphors, and Stories I. Stewart, et al. 5. Thinking, Problem-Solving, and Pragmatic Verbal Analysis S.C. Hayes, et al. 6. Understanding and Verbal Regulation D. Barnes-Holmes, et al. 7. Self and Self-Directed Rules D. Barnes-Holmes, et al. 8. Relational Frame Theory: A Precis S.C. Hayes, et al. Part II: Extensions and Applications. 9. Psychological Development Y. Barnes-Holmes, et al. 10. Education Y. Barnes-Holmes, et al. 11. Social Processes B. Roche, et al. 12. Psychopathology and Psychotherapy K.G. Wilson, et al. 13. Religion, Spirituality, and Transcendence D. Barnes-Holmes, et al. Epilogue. References. Index.

Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account Of Human Language And Cognition

This chapter explores the ecology of human development, those forces in the person's environment that affect and influence development. Urie Bronfenbrenner's model of the human ecosystem guides the discussion, making connections between children in families and in communities and the larger society that surrounds them. The human ecosystem model is much like the study of the natural ecology, focusing on the interactions between subjects at various levels of the environment as they affect each other. The interaction between individual and environment forms the basis of an ecological approach to human development. This view sees the process of development as the expansion of the child's conception of the world and the child's ability to act on that world. Risks to development can come from both direct threats and the absence of opportunities for development. Sociocultural risk refers to the impoverishment in the child's world of essential experiences and relationships.

The Ecology of Human Development

If we will observe how children learn languages, we will find that, to make them understand what the names of simple ideas or substances stand for, people ordinarily show them the thing whereof they would have them have the idea; and then repeat to them the name that stands for it, as 'white', 'sweet', 'milk', 'sugar', 'cat', 'dog'.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED335884.pdf

The Structural Sources of Verb Meanings

We review research evidence on the emergence and development of active "self-and-other" awareness in infancy, and examine the importance of its motives and emotions to mental health practice with children. This relates to how communication begins and develops in infancy, how it influences the individual subject's movement, perception, and learning, and how the infant's biologically grounded self-regulation of internal state and self-conscious purposefulness is sustained through active engagement with sympathetic others. Mutual self-other-consciousness is found to play the lead role in developing a child's cooperative intelligence for cultural learning and language. A variety of preconceptions have animated rival research traditions investigating infant communication and cognition. We distinguish the concept of "intersubjectivity", and outline the history of its use in developmental research. The transforming body and brain of a human individual grows in active engagement with an environment of human factors--organic at first, then psychological or inter-mental. Adaptive, human-responsive processes are generated first by interneuronal activity within the developing brain as formation of the human embryo is regulated in a support-system of maternal tissues. Neural structures are further elaborated with the benefit of intra-uterine stimuli in the foetus, then supported in the rapidly growing forebrain and cerebellum of the young child by experience of the intuitive responses of parents and other human companions. We focus particularly on intrinsic patterns and processes in pre-natal and post-natal brain maturation that anticipate psychosocial support in infancy. The operation of an intrinsic motive formation (IMF) that developed in the core of the brain before birth is evident in the tightly integrated intermodal sensory-motor coordination of a newborn infant's orienting to stimuli and preferential learning of human signals, by the temporal coherence and intrinsic rhythms of infant behaviour, especially in communication, and neonates' extraordinary capacities for reactive and evocative imitation. The correct functioning of this integrated neural motivating system is found to be essential to the development of both the infant's purposeful consciousness and his or her ability to cooperate with other persons' actions and interests, and to learn from them. The relevance of infants' inherent intersubjectivity to major child mental health issues is highlighted by examining selected areas of clinical concern. We review recent findings on postnatal depression, prematurity, autism, ADHD, specific language impairments, and central auditory processing deficits, and comment on the efficacy of interventions that aim to support intrinsic motives for intersubjective communication when these are not developing normally.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/3DC59499840534E5455EEDB895666BF6/S0021963001006552a.pdf/div-class-title-infant-intersubjectivity-research-theory-and-clinical-applications-div.pdf

Infant intersubjectivity: research, theory, and clinical applications.

This study compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in French, Italian, German, Japanese, British English, and American English. At every stage of data collection and analysis, standardized procedures were used to enhance the comparability across data sets that is essential for valid cross-language comparison of the prosodic features of parental speech. In each of the six language groups, five mothers and five fathers were recorded in semi-structured home observations while speaking to their infant aged 0;10-1;2 and to an adult. Speech samples were instrumentally analysed to measure seven prosodic parameters: mean fundamental frequency (f0), f0-minimum, f0-maximum, f0-range, f0-variability, utterance duration, and pause duration. Results showed cross-language consistency in the patterns of prosodic modification used in parental speech to infants. Across languages, both mothers and fathers used higher mean-f0, f0-minimum, and f0-maximum, greater f0-variability, shorter utterances, and longer pauses in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech. Mothers, but not fathers, used a wider f0-range in speech to infants. American English parents showed the most extreme prosodic modifications, differing from the other language groups in the extent of intonational exaggeration in speech to infants. These results reveal common patterns in caretaker's use of intonation across languages, which may function developmentally to regulate infant arousal and attention, to communicate affect, and to facilitate speech perception and language comprehension. In addition to providing evidence for possibly universal prosodic features of speech to infants, these results suggest that language-specific variations are also important, and that the findings of the numerous studies of early language input based on American English are not necessarily generalisable to other cultures.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0305000900010679

A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants.

Analysing the gradual learning process through which a child becomes bilingual from early infancy, three stages can be distinguished: (1) the child has one lexical system which includes words from both languages; (2) the child distinguishes two different lexicons but applies the same syntactic rules to both languages; (3) the child has two linguistic codes, differentiated both in lexicon and in syntax, but each language is exclusively associated with the person using that language. Only at the end of this stage, when the tendency to categorize people in terms of their language decreases, can one say that a child is truly bilingual.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0305000900007492

The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children

The goal of this article is to investigate whether the acquisition of some morpho-syntactic aspects inItalian deaf adolescents is simply delayed with respect to hearing children, or whether it followssignificantly different developmental patterns. Twenty-five deaf students (age range: 11-15 years)and a group of 125 hearing controls (age range: 6-16 years) performed four tests, administered inwritten form, relative to different grammatical aspects: plurals, articles, and clitic pronouns. Resultsshowed three different patterns of development depending on the grammatical aspect considered.Deaf children compared to hearing controls showed normal development in the pluralization task,delayed development in the pronoun task, and a qualitatively different pattern in the article task. INTRODUCTION There is now a large body of research demonstrating that congenitally deafchildren acquire a sign language following the same timing and acquisitionpatterns observed in hearing children acquiring spoken languages (Newport M Quigley & King, 1980; Swisher, 1976), prelingual deaf children can learnto speak, but usually do not attain native levels of competence in either the oralor the written form of a spoken language. The combined results of differentstudies point to the following general conclusions about English-speaking deafstudents as compared to hearing students:they produce shorter sentences and avoid complex syntactic structures;they display smaller productive and receptive vocabularies;they display a certain rigidity in the use of particular words;they make errors in the comprehension of written texts containing reversible pas-sives, pronouns, plural noun inflections, and prepositions;they have problems in judging the grammatical correctness of sentences withsubordination, relativization, or pronominalization; and© 198 Cambridg8 e University Press 0142-7164/88 $5.00 + .00

Affixes and function words in the written language of deaf children

The increased and stable presence of immigrant children in preschools and in primary schools in Italy in the last twenty years, makes more and more important the study of the attitudes and behaviours in teachers, parents and children. As it is known, attitudes and behaviours can strongly influence school experience (relationships and achievements) of children from native as well as from immigrant families. Several international studies and surveys showed that children from immigrant families are more likely to drop out from school much before getting a diploma or a professional qualification (Anisef et al., 2010; Brunello & Rocco, 2012; De Witte et al., 2013). The reason for it can be found in their socio-demographic conditions, their insufficient knowledge of the host country language and the inadequacy of educational policies for immigrants. Furthermore, the co-existence in the same school of immigrant children and autochthone children creating a constant intercultural and interethnic contact puts forward the need to handle prejudice development, in view of the social integration of the immigrant children. In this paper we present a study exploring the relationship between personality, educational style and prejudice of parents in native and in immigrant families regarding immigrant children’s social integration. Results show important relations among these parents’ characteristics, together with differences between native and immigrant families. These findings could provide a contribution in implementing adequate intervention programmes supporting the school integration of immigrant children.

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Teachers and Parents Involvement for a Good School Experience of Native and Immigrant Children

Second Language Acquisition in Childhood: Volume 1. Preschool Children . Barry Mclaughlin. Second Edition. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1984. Pp. xiv + 261.

Traute Taeschner

Papers

A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants.

The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children

Affixes and function words in the written language of deaf children

Teachers and Parents Involvement for a Good School Experience of Native and Immigrant Children

Second Language Acquisition in Childhood: Volume 1. Preschool Children . Barry Mclaughlin. Second Edition. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1984. Pp. xiv + 261.