When the World Pivots: Changes in Infant Negative Affect Trajectories Following the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Research on the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on infant emotional development has produced mixed results, often limited by methodological constraints, such as not having access to data prior to and after pandemic onset. This study helps overcome these limitations by analyzing data from 330 infants (51% female; 54% White, non-Hispanic) across five points in the first 2 years of life, from October 2016 to August 2021. Multilevel growth models indicated that negative affect decreased following pandemic onset, contrary to the expected and observed increase in negative affect prior to the pandemic.

Testing the relationship between preferences for infant-directed speech and vocabulary development: A multi-lab study.

From early on, infants show a preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and exposure to IDS has been correlated with language outcome measures such as vocabulary. The present multi-laboratory study explores this issue by investigating whether there is a link between early preference for IDS and later vocabulary size. Infants' preference for IDS was tested as part of the ManyBabies 1 project, and follow-up CDI data were collected from a subsample of this dataset at 18 and 24 months.

Constructing the "Family Personality": Can Family Functioning Be Linked to Parent-Child Interpersonal Neural Synchronization?

Introduction: Early child development occurs within an interactive environment, initially dominated by parents or caregivers, and is heavily influenced by the dynamics of this social context. The current study probed the neurobiology of "family personality", or family functioning, in the context of parent-child dyadic interaction using a two-person neuroimaging modality.

Methods: One hundred and five parent-child dyads (child mean age 5 years 4 months) were recruited.

Translational Approaches to Bilingualism and Multilingualism Research.

Bilingualism and multilingualism provide a unique lens for exploring how human experiences influence language and cognition. This editorial presents a collection of studies on the relationship between bilingualism/multilingualism and cognition in typically developing and neurodiverse populations. The articles assembled in this issue synthesize findings from diverse linguistic populations (e.

Effects of environmental diversity on exploration and learning: The case of bilingualism.

Bilingual environments provide a commonplace example of increased complexity and uncertainty. Learning multiple languages entails mastery of a larger and more variable range of sounds, words, syntactic structures, pragmatic conventions, and more complex mapping of linguistic information to objects in the world. Recent research suggests that bilingual learners demonstrate fundamental variation in how they explore and learn from their environment, which may derive from this increased complexity.

Presence at a distance: Video chat supports intergenerational sensitivity and positive infant affect during COVID-19.

COVID-19 disrupted infant contact with people beyond the immediate family. Because grandparents faced higher COVID-19 risks due to age, many used video chat instead of interacting with their infant grandchildren in person. We conducted a semi-naturalistic, longitudinal study with 48 families, each of whom submitted a series of video chats and surveys, and most (n = 40) also submitted a video of an in-person interaction.

The development of the object sequencing imitation task to measure working memory in preschoolers.

We developed a new object sequencing imitation (OSI) task for preschoolers. We parameterized the task to test the effects of working memory load in 56 3- to 5-year-old children in a museum. We tested individual groups of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds on both "low" (2- to 4-step) and "high" (3- to 5-step) memory load sequences on two variants of the task.

Patterns of mutual exclusivity and retention: A study of monolingual and bilingual 2-year-olds.

When children learn their native language, they tend to treat objects as if they only have one label-a principle known as mutual exclusivity. However, bilingual children are faced with a different cognitive challenge-they need to learn to associate two labels with one object. In the present study, we compared bilingual and monolingual 24-month-olds' performance on a challenging and semi-naturalistic forced-choice referent selection task and retention test.

The development of gaze following in monolingual and bilingual infants: A multi-laboratory study.

Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non-verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always have access to the same word-learning heuristics (e.