Toddlers' emerging ways of achieving social coordinations with a peer

14 peer dyads were observed longitudinally at 16, 20, 24, 28, and 32 months to assess developmental changes in social coordinations (both action-to-action thematic relations and extended games). Each child's movements through the playroom, actions upon play material, vocalizations, verbalizations, and gestures were coded for their relation to the concurrent or immediately prior behavior of the peer: Unrelated, Tangential, Coordinated, Interfering. There was a marked increase with age in acts coordinated with those of a peer, and imitations of the peer's nonverbal actions accounted for most of the developmental change. The use of words to direct the peer in a coordinated way increased with age but remained infrequent. Developmental change in the frequency of games paralleled that for imitative acts, and imitative acts both established and set the theme for most of the games. Thus, imitating another's nonverbal actions is a core behavioral strategy for achieving social coordinations during the developmental period preceding reliance on verbal communication in peer interaction.     

Stability and social-behavioral consequences of toddlers' inhibited temperament and parenting behaviors

A prospective longitudinal design was employed to ascertain whether different types of behavioral inhibition (i.e., traditional, peer-social) were stable from toddler to preschool age, and whether inhibited temperament and/or parenting style would predict children's subsequent social and behavioral problems. At Time 1, 108 toddlers (54 males, 54 females) and their mothers were observed in the Traditional Inhibition Paradigm and in a toddler-peer session; then at age 4 years, 88 children were observed with unfamiliar peers, and maternal ratings of psychological functioning were obtained. How mothers and their toddlers interacted was also observed. Results revealed meaningful connections between toddler inhibition, maternal intrusive control and derision, and nonsocial behaviors at age 4. Both forms of toddler inhibition predicted socially reticent behavior during free play at 4 years. If mothers demonstrated relatively high frequencies of intrusive control and/or derisive comments, then the association between their toddlers' peer inhibition and 4-year social reticence was significant and positive; whereas if mothers were neither intrusive nor derisive, then toddlers' peer inhibition and 4-year reticence were not significantly associated. Thus, maternal behaviors moderated the relation between toddlers' peer inhibition and preschoolers' social reticence.     

Infant imitation and memory: nine-month-olds in immediate and deferred tests

The ability of 9-month-old infants to imitate simple actions with novel objects was investigated. Both immediate and deferred imitation were tested, the latter by interposing a 24-hour delay between the stimulus-presentation and response periods. The results provide evidence for both immediate and deferred imitation; moreover, imitative responding was not significantly dampened by the 24-hour delay. The findings demonstrate that there exists some underlying capacity for deferring imitation of certain acts well under 1 year of age, and thus that this ability does not develop in a stagelike step function at about 18-24 months as commonly predicted. These findings also show that imitation in early infancy can span wide enough delays to be of potential service in social development; actions on novel objects that are observed one day can be stored by the child and repeated the next day. The study of deferred imitation provides a largely untapped method for investigating the nature and development of recall memory in the preverbal child.     

Otitis Media and the Social Behavior of Day-Care-Attending Children

Research has suggested that young children who experience chronic middle ear disease (otitis media) in early childhood may display some initial developmental delays in language development as well as later problems in school. This association between otitis media and developmental problems is hypothesized to be linked to the hearing loss that accompanies frequent or long bouts of otitis media. Recent interest has focused on whether otitis media may be linked to behavioral changes in children, making them less responsive to the environment even when well. This study examined the relation between early otitis media in day-care-attending children and their subsequent behavior in the day-care classroom when the children were well. Findings suggest that day-care-attending children with chronic otitis media in the first 3 years of life play more often alone and have fewer positive and fewer negative verbal interactions with peers than nonchronic children in day-care. There were no differences between chronic and nonchronic otitis media children in their nonverbal behavior. Results may also contribute to our understanding of the development of the socially withdrawn child.     

Judicious imitation: children differentially imitate deterministically and probabilistically effective actions

Three studies look at whether the assumption of causal determinism (the assumption that all else being equal, causes generate effects deterministically) affects children's imitation of modeled actions. These studies show even when the frequency of an effect is matched, both preschoolers (N = 60; M = 56 months) and toddlers (N = 48; M = 18 months) imitate actions more faithfully when modeled actions are deterministically rather than probabilistically effective. A third study suggests that preschoolers' (N = 32; M = 58 months) imitation is affected not just by whether the agent's goal is satisfied but also by whether the action is a reliable means to the goal. Children's tendency to generate variable responses to probabilistically effective modeled actions could support causal learning.     

Attention-seeking during caregiver unavailability and collaboration at age 2

Several theoretical approaches have discussed the role of children's expectations of their parent's responsiveness in explaining motivation to collaborate in acquiring skills. This study attempted to measure these expectations in 102 toddlers (M age = 26.4 months) through observations of attention-seeking (A-S) behaviors during caregiver's restricted availability. Child collaboration was coded during skill-learning tasks (imitation and block building), and parent responsiveness was observed during dyadic activities. Different A-S styles emerged, supporting the existence of both positive and negative expectations of responsiveness. A-S quality statistically mediated the link between parent responsiveness and child collaborative outcomes, even after controlling for temperament and mood. This is the first study to show that toddlers' expectations are a plausible mechanism linking parent responsiveness to child collaboration.     

Maternal Expectations for Toddlers' Reactions to Novelty: Relations of Maternal Internalizing Symptoms and Parenting Dimensions to Expectations and Accuracy of Expectations

OBJECTIVE: Although maternal internalizing symptoms and parenting dimensions have been linked to reports and perceptions of children's behavior, it remains relatively unknown whether these characteristics relate to expectations or the accuracy of expectations for toddlers' responses to novel situations. DESIGN: A community sample of 117 mother-toddler dyads participated in a laboratory visit and questionnaire completion. At the laboratory, mothers were interviewed about their expectations for their toddlers' behaviors in a variety of novel tasks; toddlers then participated in these activities, and trained coders scored their behaviors. Mothers completed questionnaires assessing demographics, depressive and worry symptoms, and parenting dimensions. RESULTS: Mothers who reported more worry expected their toddlers to display more fearful behavior during the laboratory tasks, but worry did not moderate how accurately maternal expectations predicted toddlers' observed behavior. When also reporting a low level of authoritative-responsive parenting, maternal depressive symptoms moderated the association between maternal expectations and observed toddler behavior, such that, as depressive symptoms increased, maternal expectations related less strongly to toddler behavior. CONCLUSIONS: When mothers were asked about their expectations for their toddlers' behavior in the same novel situations from which experimenters observe this behavior, symptoms and parenting had minimal effect on the accuracy of mothers' expectations. When in the context of low authoritative-responsive parenting, however, depressive symptoms related to less accurate predictions of their toddlers' fearful behavior.     

Mastery Motivation in Toddlers with Developmental Disabilities

Prior research on school-age children with mental retardation indicates that they are less motivated on tasks than mental-age-matched peers. In this study, mastery motivation on two tasks was compared for 1- and 2-year-old children with motor impairment ( n = 25), developmental delay ( n = 25), and typical development ( n = 25), matched for mental age. The groups did not differ significantly on any measure of mastery motivation. The relative contribution of premature birth, a history of seizure disorders, severity of cognitive delay, and maternal didactic interaction in predicting mastery motivation was examined for toddlers with developmental delay or motor impairment. Maternal didactic interaction added a significant proportion of variance above and beyond other variables in predicting several aspects of mastery motivation in toddlers with developmental disabilities.     

新时期学前教育课程与游戏的融合路径探究

幼儿思想意识单纯,对身边的一切事物都充满好奇心,善于模仿,热衷于与同龄人一起做游戏.幼儿园教育应注重培养幼儿良好的生活习惯,使其具备一定的交际能力,更好地融入集体和社会,为其健康成长奠定坚实基础.新时期学前教育课程与游戏的融合,符合幼儿的认知特点,能激发幼儿学习兴趣,调动幼儿学习的积极性和主动性,提高教学效率和教学质量...     

Social play as joint action: A framework to study the evolution of shared intentionality as an interactional achievement

Social play has a complex, cooperative nature that requires substantial coordination. This has led researchers to use social games to study cognitive abilities like shared intentionality, the skill and motivation to share goals and intentions with others during joint action. We expand this proposal by considering play as a joint action and examining how shared intentionality is achieved during human joint action. We describe how humans get into, conduct, and get out of joint actions together in an orderly way, thereby constructing the state of “togetherness” characteristic of shared intentionality. These processes play out as three main phases, the opening (where participants are ratified and joint commitments are established), the main body (where progress, ongoing commitments, and possible role reversals are coordinated), and the closing (where the intention to terminate the action is coordinated and where participants take leave of each other). We use this process in humans as a framework for examining how various animal species get into, maintain, and get out of play bouts. This comparative approach constitutes an alternative measure of those species’ possession of shared intentionality. Using this framework, we review the play literature on human children and different social species of mammals and birds in search of behavioral markers of shared intentionality in the coordination of play bouts. We discuss how our approach could shed light on the evolution of the special human motivation to cooperate and share psychological states with others.     

Relation of Rearing Environment to Adaptive Behavior of Egyptian Toddlers

2 questions were explored: (1) Do observed relations found in Western cultures between specific psychosocial environmental factors and toddlers adaptive behavior resemble the pattern of relations found in a non-Western setting? (2) Does the specificity of relations between environment and performance found in Western cultures also operate in a non-Western culture? Subjects were 153 Egyptian toddlers, 18–30 months of age, and their caregivers. Twice a month between 18 and 30 months toddlers were observed in naturalistic interactions with their caregivers, and measures of caregiver behavior and toddler functioning were coded. Replicating previous results from Western cultures, canonical analysis indicated that caregiver vocal stimulation was positively related to indices of toddler behavioral competence, while nonverbal response to vocalization and physical contact stimulation were negatively related. The salience of sib caregivers was also noted. Particularly for the age period between 24 and 29 months, results indicated specificity of environmental action such that measures of caregiver vocal stimulation were uniquely related to measures of toddler vocalization, while caregiver response to distress was uniquely related to toddler emotionality. The present pattern of results suggests at least some degree of cross-cultural generalizability of environment-development relations and of the specificity model of environmental action.     

Across the great divide: bridging the gap between understanding of toddlers' and older children's thinking

Research on very young children's cognitive development differs greatly from research on cognitive development in older children. The differences include the questions that are asked, the methods that are used to address them, the measures that are employed to provide relevant evidence, and the level of detail at which children's knowledge is represented. The research approaches are so different that they create an impression that infants' and toddlers' thinking differs qualitatively from that of preschoolers and older children. This impression, however, may reflect differences in research approaches rather than differences in children's thinking. In the present study, we attempted to bridge this gap by applying to toddlers a type of process analysis that has proved fruitful in studies of older children. Overlapping waves theory, trial-by-trial strategy assessments, and microgenetic methods were used to analyze 1.5- and 2.5-year-olds' problem solving and learning. The results demonstrated that changes in toddlers' strategies could be assessed reliably on a trial-by-trial basis, that the changes followed the basic form predicted by the overlapping waves model, and that analyses of toddlers' strategies could tell us a great deal about both qualitative and quantitative aspects of their learning. A componential analysis of learning that previously had been applied to older children also proved useful for understanding toddlers' learning. The analysis specified that cognitive change frequently involves five components: acquisition of new strategies; strengthening of the strategies in their original context; improved mapping of strategies onto novel problems; increasingly refined choices among variants of the strategies; and increasingly skillful execution of the strategies. Independent measures of these components indicated that strategic development in toddlers involves improvements in all five components. Analyses of individual differences in learning showed that the effects of distal variables, such as age and sex, could be partially explained in terms of their influence on mastery of the components, but that the distal variables exercised additional direct effects as well. The process of learning in toddlers closely resembled that of older children in other ways as well. Like older children, toddlers use multiple strategies over the course of learning; their choices among strategies are quite adaptive from early on; their choices become progressively more adaptive as they gain experience with the task; they switch strategies not only from trial to trial but within a single trial; their transfer of learning from one problem to the next is primarily influenced by structural relations between problems but also is influenced by superficial features; they show utilization deficiencies early in learning that they gradually overcome; and they show individual differences in learning that fall into a few qualitatively distinct categories. Perhaps most striking, the 1.5- and 2.5-year-olds emerged as active learners, who continued to work out the lessons of previous instruction in the absence of further instruction. That is, they integrated the lessons of their own problem-solving efforts with the previous instruction in ways that magnified the initial effects of the instruction. Overall, the findings indicated that the gap can be bridged; that theories, methods, measures, and representations of knowledge typically used with older children can improve our understanding of toddlers' problem solving and learning as well.     

Vision for action in toddlers: the posting task

Three experiments examine 18- to 24-month-old (N = 78) toddlers' ability to spatially orient objects by their major axes for insertion into a slot. This is a simplified version of the posting task that is commonly used to measure dorsal stream functioning. The experiments identify marked developmental changes in children's ability to preorient objects for insertion, with 18-month-olds failing completely and 24-month-olds succeeding easily. In marked contrast, 18-month-olds preorient their empty hands for insertion into the same slots. This developmental dissociation between aligning hands and aligning objects to slots suggests that the key developmental change is in action with the goal of object-to-object alignment versus action on an object.     

仿译的必要性、可行性及其实践路径

从原语和译语中既存语言之间的相似度而言,英汉互译基本方法有三种:套译、仿译和创译.为了让翻译更接地气,有效地促进中外文化交流,仿译有其必要性.互联网、语料库的出现,又为仿译在翻译中的广泛应用提供可能.通过借助语料库等途径,仿译的可行性已经成为现实性.仿译的具体应用方式主要包括类别模仿、熟语模仿和行文模仿.仿译在实际应用...     

Paternal play with toddlers: Recreation and creation

The purpose of the paper is threefold. First, it presents empirical data about paternal and maternal games displayed with toddlers in a play situation with polyvalent objects. Both parents proposed predictable routines through conventional games. But differences in parental games also occurred, as fathers proposed new ways of using the objects through non conventional games more than mothers did. Second, those results are interpreted in terms of paternal specific contributions to development. In fact, in such play situations with toddlers, paternal behaviors are more destabilizing than maternal ones. Last, we discuss whether paternal irregularities in such play situation with objects may favor cognitive development, as well as structurant maternal regularities in the same situation. More generally, the complementary contributions of maternal and paternal perturbations in different kind of situations (play, language development) are questioned.     

The Effects of Reciprocal Imitation on Teacher–Student Relationships and Student Learning Outcomes

Neuroscientific and developmental psychological research in imitation has yielded important insights into building teacher–student relationships and enhancing students' learning. This study investigated the effects of reciprocal imitation on teacher–student relationships and students' learning outcomes in one‐on‐one teacher–student interactions. In a within‐subjects design, participants learned eight English vocabulary words under two conditions: one condition paired with teacher's imitative behaviors and the other with teacher's random behaviors. Students' self‐rating surveys and quiz scores on new words were assessed. When the teacher imitated the students' behaviors in interactions, the students reported significantly higher perceptions of rapport, more confidence in and satisfaction with learning outcomes, and had significantly higher quiz scores. Results had important implications for teachers in using imitation as an effective teaching tool to build teacher–student relationships and enhance students' learning.     

Mother-Child Play: Sequential Interactions and the Relation between Maternal Beliefs and Behaviors

This investigation of mother and toddler play had 2 goals. The primary goal was to examine the types of play mothers introduce in direct response to their toddlers' play. A secondary and exploratory goal was to examine the relation between maternal knowledge about child play and actual maternal play behaviors. 50 mothers and their 21-month-old toddlers were observed at home during free play. Mother and child exploratory, nonsymbolic, and symbolic play were coded. Sequential analyses revealed that mothers adjusted their play to their children's play level by responding to their children with play that was either at the same level or at a higher level than their children's play. Furthermore, mothers who were more knowledgeable about early play development more often responded to their children's play by introducing higher level play. These findings suggest that mothers tend to play with their toddlers in ways that might promote their child's development, and that mothers with more knowledge about play development provide their children with appropriately challenging play interactions.     

模仿式古镇旅游的真实性创造——以云南省楚雄州彝人古镇为例

随着旅游多样化发展,传统旅游资源已难以满足现代旅游者的需求,以彝人古镇为例,模仿式旅游资源随之应运而生。对旅游古镇的研究,虽然已有的研究内容及视角等都具有多样性,但从真实性视角对新出现的模仿式古镇进行的研究却知之甚少。彝人古镇是模仿式的,它没有原生文化系统却以彝族文化为依托,不是真实的传统古镇却给游客真实的旅游体验,所以,模仿式古镇的开发是值得倡导的,只是在开发时必须遵循文化的本质,避免文化因旅游而变迁或遗失。     

Toddlers' use of force against familiar peers: a precursor of serious aggression?

Possible precursors of serious aggression were identified in toddlers' use of force against peers. Instances of grabbing objects and hitting peers were recorded in a sample of 66 British 18- to 30-month-olds, observed at home with familiar peers and seen again 6 months later. Mothers rated aggressiveness in the context of other personality traits. Girls and boys did not differ in average levels of aggression, nor were they rated differently by the mothers. However, the observed rate of hitting peers and mothers' ratings of aggressiveness were stable over 6 months for girls, but not for boys. Toddlers who were especially sensitive to peers' possible intentions hit their peers more often. They were also more likely to use force proactively, 6 months later.