Infancy, the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, emphasizes the highest quality original research on normal and aberrant infant development during the first two years. Both human and animal research are included. In addition to regular length research articles and brief reports (3000-word maximum), the journal includes solicited target articles along with a series of commentaries; debates, in which different theoretical positions are presented along with a series of commentaries; and thematic collections, a group of three to five reports or summaries of research on the same issue, conducted independently at different laboratories, with invited commentaries.

Infancy, the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies, focuses on high-quality original research regarding both normal and atypical infant development during the first two years of life. The journal includes both human and animal studies. In addition to regular-length research articles and brief reports (maximum 3000 words), it features solicited target articles, debates presenting different theoretical perspectives along with commentaries, and thematic collections comprising three to five independent research reports or summaries on the same issue, accompanied by invited commentaries.

《Infancy》是国际婴儿研究学会的官方期刊，专注于高质量的原创研究，涵盖正常和异常的婴儿发展，特别是在生命的前两年。期刊接受人类和动物的研究。除了常规的研究文章和简短报告（最多3000字），期刊还包括特邀的主题文章、辩论（不同理论观点的呈现及其评论）以及专题集合（由三到五篇独立于不同实验室进行的研究报告或总结组成，并附有特邀评论）。

Infancy

Research suggests that non-linguistic sequence learning abilities are an important contributor to language development (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010). The current study investigated visual sequence learning as a possible predictor of vocabulary development in infants. Fifty-eight 8.5-month-old infants were presented with a three-location spatiotemporal sequence of multi-colored geometric shapes. Early language skills were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates CDI. Analyses of children's reaction times to the stimuli suggest that the extent to which infants demonstrated learning was significantly correlated with their vocabulary comprehension at the time of test and with their gestural comprehension abilities 5 months later. These findings suggest that visual sequence learning may have both domain-general and domain-specific associations with language learning.

Carissa L. Shafto

Christopher M. Conway

Suzanne L. Field

Derek M. Houston

Visual Sequence Learning in Infancy: Domain‐General and Domain‐Specific Associations With Language

婴儿期的视觉序列学习：与语言的领域普遍性和领域特定性关联

Each clause and phrase boundary necessarily aligns with a word boundary. Thus, infants' attention to the edges of clauses and phrases may help them learn some of the language‐specific cues defining word boundaries. Attention to prosodically well‐formed clauses and phrases may also help infants begin to extract information important for learning the grammatical structure of their language. Despite the potentially important role that the perception of large prosodic units may play in early language acquisition, there has been little work investigating the extraction of these units from fluent speech by infants learning languages other than English. We report 2 experiments investigating Dutch learners' clause segmentation abilities. In these studies, Dutch‐learning 6‐month‐olds readily extract clauses from speech. However, Dutch learners differ from English learners in that they seem to be more reliant on pauses to detect clause boundaries. Two closely related explanations for this finding are considered, both of which stem from the acoustic differences in clause boundary realizations in Dutch versus English.

Elizabeth K. Johnson

Amanda Seidl

Clause Segmentation by 6‐Month‐Old Infants: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

6个月大婴儿的从句切分：一种跨语言的视角

To successfully understand spoken language, listeners need to determine how words within sentences relate to one another. Although the ability to compute relationships between word categories is known to develop early in life, little research has been conducted on infants' early sensitivity to subcategorical dependencies, such as those evoked by grammatical gender (where the article form is dictated by the noun's gender). This study therefore examines whether French‐learning 18‐month‐olds track such relationships. Using the Visual Fixation Procedure, infants were presented with article–noun sequences in which the gender‐marked article either matched (e.g., la FEM poussette FEM “the stroller”) or mismatched (e.g., le MASC poussette FEM ) the gender of the noun. A clear preference for correct over incorrect co‐occurrences was observed, suggesting that by 18 months of age, children's storage and access of words is sufficiently sophisticated to include the means to track subcategorical dependencies. This early sensitivity to gender information may be greatly beneficial for constraining lexical access during online language processing.

Marieke van Heugten

Anne Christophe

Infants' Acquisition of Grammatical Gender Dependencies

Abstract Three experiments investigated the role of prosodic structure for infants' recognition of embedded word sequences. Six‐month‐olds were familiarized with 2 versions of the same sequence, 1 corresponding to a well‐formed prosodic unit and the other to a prosodically ill‐formed sequence (although a successive word series). Next, infants heard 2 test passages. One included the well‐formed unit, and the other included the ill‐formed sequence. In Experiment 1, infants listened longer to the passage containing the well‐formed unit, suggesting that such units, even when they are embedded, are better recognized. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this better recognition does not depend on an acoustic match between the familiarized sequences and their later embeddings. This suggests that the advantage of the well‐formed unit is at least partially due to infants' use of prosody to parse continuous speech.

Thierry Nazzi

Deborah G. Kemler Nelson

Peter W. Jusczyk

Ann Marie Jusczyk

Six‐Month‐Olds' Detection of Clauses Embedded in Continuous Speech: Effects of Prosodic Well‐Formedness

Recent work showed that infants recognize and store function words starting from the age of 6–8 months. Using a visual fixation procedure, the present study tested whether French‐learning 14‐month‐olds have the knowledge of syntactic categories of determiners and pronouns, respectively, and whether they can use these function words for categorizing novel words to nouns and verbs. The prosodic characteristics of novel words stimuli for noun versus verb uses were balanced. The only distinguishing cue was the preceding determiners versus subject pronouns, the former being the most common for nouns and the latter the most common for verbs, i.e., Det + Noun, Pron + Verb. We expected that noun categorization may be easier than verb categorization because the co‐occurrence of determiners with nouns is more consistent than that of subject pronouns with verbs in French. The results showed that infants grouped the individual determiners as one common class, and that they appeared to use the determiners to categorize novel words into nouns. However, we found no evidence of verb categorization. Unlike determiners, pronouns were not perceived as a common syntactic class.

Rushen Shi

Andréane Melançon

Syntactic Categorization in French‐Learning Infants

法语学习婴儿的句法分类

Speech and co-speech gestures always go hand in hand. Whether we find the precursors of these co-speech gestures in infants before they master their native language still remains an open question. Except for deictic gestures, there is little agreement on the existence of iconic, non-referential and conventional gestures before children start producing their first words. Here, we bridge this knowledge gap by leveraging an ethological method already established for describing speech independent gestures in nonhuman primates, to analyze the spontaneous gestures produced by infants when interacting with their caregivers. We manually annotated video recordings of infant-caregiver interactions (26 h) from the CHILDES platform, to describe the gesture forms, types and functions in six infants from 12 to 15 months of age. We describe 62 gesture forms in the preverbal repertoire. These were categorized into deictic, iconic, non-referential and conventional gesture types, similar to co-speech gesture types. We also find that the type-function relation of preverbal gestures map similarly to type-meaning relation of co-speech gestures. Taken together, our results illustrate linguistic properties of infant gestures in the absence of speech, suggesting them to be precursors of co-speech gestures.

Shreejata Gupta

Eulalie Pequay

Clément François

Isabelle Dautriche

Forms and Functions of Gestures in Preverbal 12‐ to 15‐Months Old Infants

12至15个月大婴儿在语言前阶段的手势形式与功能

ABSTRACT Assessing early vocabulary development commonly involves parent report methods and behavioral tasks like looking‐while‐listening. While both yield reliable aggregate scores, findings are mixed regarding their reliability in measuring infants' knowledge of individual words. Using archival data from 126 monolingual and bilingual 14–31‐month‐olds, we further examined links across these methods at the word level, while controlling for potentially confounding child‐level factors. When data were averaged at the child level, performance on the looking‐while‐listening task correlated well with parent‐reported word production of the same words, as expected. However, mixed‐effects model comparisons suggested that at the word level, looking‐while‐listening performance was significantly predicted by age and total productive vocabulary, but not by parent‐reported knowledge of a word once these factors were controlled for. These findings invite careful consideration regarding the adequacy of these two popular methods for capturing children's idiosyncratic knowledge of individual words.

Melanie López Pérez

Charlotte Moore

Andrea Sander‐Montant

Krista Byers‐Heinlein

Infants' Knowledge of Individual Words: Investigating Links Between Parent Report and Looking Time

婴儿的个体词汇知识：探究父母报告与注视时间之间的关联

ABSTRACT While social withdrawal is a normal defense mechanism displayed by infants to regulate interactions, it can negatively impact infant development when it becomes chronic, leading to delays in motor, cognitive, and communication difficulties in later development. Infant withdrawal was associated with low levels of parental sensitivity (i.e., the capacity of a caregiver to perceive the child signals and to respond to them accurately with an appropriate timing during interactions) in mothers. Few studies have yet been conducted in fathers and even fewer have investigated these questions in both parent–infant dyads within families, so that the joint effects of maternal and paternal sensitivity on infant social withdrawal remain unknown. We investigated within‐ and between‐dyad associations between parental sensitivity and infant withdrawal during interactions with both parents in a sample of biparental families ( n = 61) and their 3‐month old infant. Results showed that higher paternal sensitivity was associated with lower infant withdrawal during father–infant interactions. The same effect was weaker in mothers and only significant when the effect of paternal sensitivity on infant withdrawal during mother–infant interaction was not taken into account. These results offer new insights about the reciprocal influences between the mother–infant and the father–infant relationships.

Hervé Tissot

Antoine Guédeney

Valentin Gonthier

Maëlla Hugonnier

Nicolas Favez

Parental Sensitivity and Infant Social Withdrawal During Mother–Infant and Father–Infant Interactions

父母敏感性与婴儿社交退缩在母婴和父婴互动中的表现

ABSTRACT Human infants seem to make positive social inferences about individuals who imitate others. In three preregistered experiments we test if these inferences include an expectation that imitators will be helpful, and also ask if the inferences infants make are about imitators' dispositions or primarily about their relationships. In each experiment 8‐ to 9‐month‐old infants saw one individual imitate, and another individual not imitate, the same target social partner. When the imitator and non‐imitator had the opportunity to help the target individual they had previously interacted with, infants looked longer when the non‐imitator helped than when the imitator helped. However, when the potential recipient of help was a new social partner, infants' looking did not differ when the imitator or non‐imitator helped. Overall, these results support the hypothesis that infants perceive imitation as prosocial or affiliative and thus expect imitators to be helpful. However, these expectations are limited to inferences about a specific prosocial relationship between the imitator and their target.

Bill Pepe

Lindsey J. Powell

Infants' Expectations for Helping in Imitators

模仿者中婴儿对帮助的期望

ABSTRACT Maternal mind‐mindedness refers to a caregiver's tendency to respond to their infants as individuals with their own thoughts, feelings, desires, and beliefs. Although previous studies have focused on maternal speech in quantifying mind‐mindedness, maternal mind‐mindedness should manifest not only as mind‐related comments but also through non‐verbal behaviors during infant‐mother interactions. In this study, we investigated the relationship between maternal gaze at the infant's face and typical verbal measurement of mind‐mindedness in free‐flowing interactions. Forty 11‐ to 13‐month‐old infants and their mothers participated in the study; the mothers were asked to wear a head‐mounted eye tracker to measure their gaze during infant‐mother free‐play interactions. We measured the proportion of time mothers looked at the infant's face when it was present in the mother's field of view and examined the relationship between the face‐looking proportion and verbal measurement of mothers' mind‐mindedness. Mothers who displayed appropriate mind‐related comments looked at the faces of their infants more frequently. Moreover, their looking was coordinated in a timely manner with appropriate mind‐related comments compared with other comments. Our findings suggest that mothers looking at infants' faces supports comments regarding infants' mental states and shed new light on real‐time behaviors underlying mothers' mentalization processes.

Abbreviation	Infancy.
Journal Impact	1.91
Quartiles(Global)	PSYCHOLOGY, DEVELOPMENTAL(Q3)

ISSN	1525-0008, 1532-7078
h-index	81

Publication Information	Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2000，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:10.00%， Gold OA Rate: 36.47%

Infancy

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