The durations of gazes at and away from mother’s face, however, were not predicted by one another. This pattern suggests that infants exhibit distinct and temporally stable levels of interest in social and nonsocial features of the environment. In this report, we discuss the implications of these results for parents, for experimental research using looking time measures, and for our understanding of infants’ developing communicative abilities. “
“Infants’ early communicative repertoires include both words and symbolic gestures. The current study examined the extent to which infants

organize words and gestures in a single unified lexicon. As a window into lexical organization, eighteen-month-olds’ (N = 32)

avoidance of word–gesture overlap was examined and compared with avoidance of word–word overlap. The current study revealed that when presented with novel words, infants avoided lexical overlap, U0126 mapping novel words onto novel objects. In contrast, when presented with novel gestures, infants sought overlap, mapping novel gestures onto familiar objects. The results suggest that infants do not treat words and gestures as equivalent Selleck CH5424802 lexical items and that during a period of development when word and symbolic gesture processing share many similarities, important differences also exist between these two symbolic forms. “
“Most words that infants hear occur within fluent speech. To compile a vocabulary, infants therefore need to segment words from speech contexts. This study is the first to investigate whether infants (here: 10-month-olds) can recognize words when both initial exposure and test presentation are in continuous speech. Electrophysiological evidence attests that this indeed occurs: An increased extended filipin negativity (word recognition effect) appears for familiarized target words relative to control words. This response proved constant at the individual level: Only infants who showed this negativity at test had shown

such a response, within six repetitions after first occurrence, during familiarization. “
“This paper examines the relative merits of looking time and pupil diameter measures in the study of early cognitive abilities of infants. Ten-month-old infants took part in a modified version of the classic drawbridge experiment used to study object permanence (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985). The study involved a factorial design where angle of rotation and presence or absence of an object were crossed. Looking time results are consistent with previous work and could suggest object permanence if one ignored data from all cells of the factorial design. When all cells are considered, the data rather suggest a perceptual interpretation. Dynamic changes in pupil diameter uniquely support this interpretation, illustrating which aspects of events (and when) infants primarily respond to.