Dynamic Skills Theory

This article reports on how symbolic gesturing was applied in a nursery setting. Forms of signing systems have been well documented as contributing to communication, predominately used alongside speech when there is a different mother tongue or a physical impairment (Felix, 2018; Goodwyn and Acredolo, 1993) Symbolic Gesturing (SG), is an emerging area to support pre-verbal infants in communicating more effectively. In this article SG was evaluated as way of reflecting and developing practitioner's emotional responses and initiations with the infants in their care. The narratives of three practitioners using SG were gathered over several months and revealed how SG created further opportunities for reflection regarding the emotional relationships with infants they cared for. SG was considered a valuable approach to enhancing the emotional interactional connections with infants, resulting in closer, more attuned relationships.

Adults' gestures support children's learning in problem-solving tasks, but gestures may be differentially useful to children of different ages, and different features of gestures may make them more or less useful to children. The current study investigated parents' use of gestures to support their young children (1.5-6 years) in a block puzzle task (N = 126 parent-child dyads), and identified patterns in parents' gesture use indicating different gestural strategies. Further, we examined the effect of child age on both the frequency and types of gestures parents used, and on their usefulness to support children's learning. Children attempted to solve the puzzle independently before and after receiving help from their parent; half of the parents were instructed to sit on their hands while they helped. Parents who could use their hands appear to use gestures in three strategies: orienting the child to the task, providing abstract information, and providing embodied information; further, they adapted their gesturing to their child's age and skill level. Younger children elicited more frequent and more proximal gestures from parents. Despite the greater use of gestures with younger children, it was the oldest group (4.5-6.0 years) who were most affected by parents' gestures. The oldest group was positively affected by the total frequency of parents' gestures, and in particular, parents' use of embodying gestures (indexes that touched their referents, representational demonstrations with object in hand, and physically guiding child's hands). Though parents rarely used the embodying strategy with older children, it was this strategy which most enhanced the problem-solving of children 4.5-6 years. Keywords gesture; embodied gesture; informal instruction; parent-child interaction; individual differences; puzzle; problem-solving While it is evident that adults gesture during their verbal interactions with young children, it is not yet clear how gestures might impact children's cognition and learning. Moreover, different types of gestures may achieve different results. Index, or deictic, gestures, such as pointing towards, tapping, and showing a physical object in order to indicate it, may help children to focus their attention on the most relevant components of a task (Bangerter, 2004). Gestures that provide representational information that reinforces or complements

Research on the intersections of young children's emerging communication skills and emotion regulation has increased, following recognition of the link between these skills as they emerge in toddlerhood and the long-term impact of these skills on academic success. However, little is known about how toddlers use gesture and emerging language for emotion regulation. The current study describes toddlers' use of both words and gestures in naturally occurring distressing routines in childcare (diaper change, separation from parents). Seventeen toddlers between 11 and 28 months old were observed over the course of 3½ months in a childcare setting where symbolic gestures ("infant signs") were used as part of daily routines. Results show that toddlers communicated more frequently using gestures than speech, and used a greater range of self-regulatory strategies through gesture than through speech. Moreover, older, verbal toddlers continued to use gestures during heightened distress when they could not find their words. Findings suggest that toddlers use symbolic communication to implement complex and diverse emotion regulation strategies during distressing daily routines, and that gestures provide children with opportunities to employ more diverse emotion regulation strategies than does speech alone, which may ultimately enhance children's abilities to regulate their emotions.

Sensory play is an effective way to encourage experimentation, even with children as young as infants and toddlers. Early childhood is the developmentally appropriate age for acquiring sensory awareness. One of the leading theorists on infant cognitive development is Jean Piaget. He referred to the first two years of life as the sensorimotor stage because at that age infants are primarily involved in explorations involving their movements and senses. Early childhood educators should analyze Piaget's work when designing a stimulating environment containing sensory-rich materials to enhance cognitive development consistent with developmental stages. This article addresses the six sub-stages of sensorimotor development and a variety of activities to help enhance the cognitive development of. infants and toddlers. It will also focus on guidelines for setting up a sensory play program with the emphasis on equipment and materials, and the role of the teacher.

The development of proficient communication skills in infants and toddlers is an important component to child development. A popular trend gaining national media attention is teaching sign language to babies with normal hearing whose parents also have normal hearing. Thirty-three websites were identified that advocate sign language for hearing children as a way of promoting better developmental outcomes. These sites make several claims about the positive benefits of teaching hearing infants and toddlers to sign, such as earlier communication, improved language development, increased IQ, reduced tantrums, higher self-esteem, and improved parent-child bonding. Without endorsing or disparaging these claims, the purpose of this article was to evaluate the strength of evidence cited on websites that promote products to teach young children to use sign language. Cumulatively, 82 pieces of evidence were cited by the websites as supporting research. However, over 90% of these citations were opinion articles without any supporting data or descriptions of products and only eight were empirical research studies relevant to the benefits of teaching sign language to young children with normal hearing. Unfortunately, there is not enough high-quality evidence cited on these websites to draw research-based conclusions about whether teaching sign language to young children with normal hearing results in better developmental outcomes.

When parent and family engagement activities are systemic and integrated across program foundations and program impact areas, family engagement outcomes are achieved, resulting in children who are healthy and ready for school. Parent and family engagement activities are grounded in positive, ongoing, and goal-oriented relationships with families.

Dynamic skill theory was utilized to explain the multiple mechanisms and mediating processes influencing development of self-regulatory and language skills in children at 14, 24, and 36 months of age. Relations were found between family risks, parenting-related stresses, and parent-child interactions that contribute either independently or through mediation to the child's acquisition of self-regulatory skills even when accounting for the influence of language development. Variation in impacts between control and Early Head Start (EHS) intervention samples was compared to explore the sequence of developmental mechanisms over time. Findings indicate that EHS protects parenting, child language, and self-regulatory development from the effects of demographic risks and parenting stress, and thus supports parents to raise healthy children. Dynamic skill theory provides a model for understanding the intersection of social and language development embedded in the varied contexts of family risks, parental stress, and parent-child relationships. Within the dynamic skill framework, development involves an individual's construction of progressively more complex skills. Skills are the The authors thank John Willett, Dick Murnane, Kristen Bub, Kurt Fischer, and the members of the Early Head Start Consortium.

Engaging families of preschool children in partnerships with early childcare providers includes, among other activities, engaging in meaningful conversation, linking parents to needed services, and supporting parents as they capitalize on family protective factors. Early childhood programs struggle to implement systematic processes to support teachers in engaging families and documenting the interactions. This report summarizes the development and implementation of a tool designed to facilitate family engagement with childcare. The study targets a rural, multi-center agency serving Early Head Start families using an inventory called The Family Map. This report provides evidence of the feasibility of implementation, the reliability, and validity of the screening questions, and the range of risk and strengths identified in Early Head Start families served.

The exploration and/or manipulation of objects and materials, referred to as object-oriented play (OOP), is one of the most prominent activities children engage in during early childhood. Especially within early childhood education, it is important to be able to assess and understand OOP, its developmental trajectory, and developmental value. This can support early childhood educators to successfully guide or enrich children’s OOP, so it becomes a context in which learning can take place. During the past decades, three dominant theoretical perspectives have explained and assessed certain (developmental) aspects of OOP: (1) genetic epistemology, (2) cultural historical psychology, and (3) evolutionary psychology. After reviewing the literature concerning OOP according to each theoretical perspective, this paper aims to synthesize these existing theories into a unified theoretical framework. This theoretical framework can be a starting point for future research on OOP in early childho...

Ten-month-old Celia watched her papa make a fire in the woodstove in their living room. Sitting several feet behind him, she watched him crinkle the paper and stack the logs into the stove. The long, bright red lighter lay next to him on the floor. She crawled toward it. From the time she was 6 months old, Celia's mama and papa had been teaching her that the woodstove in the living room was "hot." They used the word repeatedly and paired the word with a gesture: extending one open palm toward, but not touching, the hot object. Celia had begun using this sign when she was 8 months old and used it to describe many different hot objects, including the lighter, showing that she understood the concept "hot." Papa watched out of the corner of his eye as Celia reached toward the lighter, then shook her head and said "No," and then retracted her hand without touching it. She repeated this series of actions again and again: reaching toward the lighter, saying "No" and shaking her head, then retracting her hand. Though very tempted by the bright, fascinating object, Celia successfully prohibited her own inclination by using symbols-both language and gesture-to tell herself not to touch the hot object.

The remarkable papers in this Special Issue underscore the importance of applied research on families in poverty, the opportunities to developmental science of the Early Head Start National Research and Evaluation Project, and the mutual benefits from collaborations between research scientists and program practitioners. This commentary highlights the insights of these papers concerning the consequences of maternal attachment style and mother-child interaction, the challenges of assessing attachment in intervention research, and the program and policy implications of these findings.

The paper presents the detailed examination of the mind-mapping technique as one of the educational tools applied to the methodology for Political Translation classes (the aspect of The Political System of the United States of America) in the academic setting of Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University, Russia). Over the decade there have been numerous disputes on the ways of approaching the problem of second language learning and acquisition within the framework of the key skills of the 21st century. Thus, responding to the emerging issue, the present in-depth analysis defines the skills, the role of motivation, educational context, and digital tools, which predetermine overall educational effectiveness of visual representation of the subject content incorporated into the learning process. By conducting thorough research on the topic this paper aims at bridging the gap between the mind-mapping technique potential in the academic environment and theories on learning within the scope of the present-day skills.

A hypothesized five-stage developmental sequence of self-recognition behaviors was tested in 48 infants between 6 and 24 months of age, and the self-recognition sequence was compared to the development of object permanence. The predicted self-recognition sequence consisted of five tasks that the infants performed in front of the mirror, with later-developing tasks requiring the coordination of a larger number of behaviors relating to the infant's mirror image than earlier-developing tasks. The development of object permanence was assessed with the Uzgiris-Hunt scale, and the object-permanence items were assigned to stages that structurally paralleled the five stages of self-recognition. The self-recognition tasks formed an almost perfect Guttman scale, with 46 out of 48 infants fitting the predicted developmental sequence precisely. This finding thus resolves most of the disagreements in previous research on the development of self-recognition: Previous studies examined different behaviors, which develop at distinct stages in the sequence. Object permanence and self-recognition showed a strong correlation, but there was no consistent relationship between the two skills across age groups.

Children's characteristics, including gender, influence their development by eliciting differential responses from their environments, and by influencing differential responses to their environments. Parenting-related stress, associated with poverty environments, negatively influences children's language, likely through its impact on parent-child interactions, but may impact boys' and girls' development differently. Early intervention represents one tool for supporting development in at-risk toddlers, but gender-differences in effects of intervention are rarely described. The current studies assessed the effects of Early Head Start (EHS) on children's productive vocabulary in the context of parenting stress and examined gender differences in program effects on vocbulary. Data were from the national EHS Research and Evaluation (EHSRE) study (Study 1, N = 3,001), and from a dataset associated with one EHSRE site (Study 2, N = 146) where additional data on productive vocabulary were collected. Study 1 found that at 24 months of age, the EHS program protected girls' productive vocabulary from the negative effects of parenting stress, but had little impact on boys' vocabulary. In Study 2, the local EHS site promoted girls' vocabulary development over time from 14 to 36 months despite the negative effects of parenting stress, and protected boys' vocabulary from the negative parenting stress effects. These results suggest differential ways in which at-risk toddlers are affected by early intervention.

In the last years, researchers have been emphasizing the importance of promoting needs-led, context-specific, user-centered services in the context of child protection. However, policy-makers and service planners around the world largely depend on US-based research evidence of what is effective in the domain of family support. This work presents, in two studies, the process of design and evaluation of a targeted family support intervention that was developed and implemented in Portugal. Following the Common Language Approach to needs assessment (Dartington Social Research Unit, 2001), in study 1 we screened 100 children and their families attending a generalist child care service for risk and protective factors. Four different clusters of needs were identified. One cluster was selected as target-group for the design of a service to match their needs. Results indicated that families in this cluster had socioeconomical disadvantages, a challenging family environment and inadequate parenting practices. Children were showing signs of problematic social behaviors. In study 2 we describe the theoretical process model and the logic model for the intervention, and experimentally evaluate the program's efficacy. Results from pre-post assessments indicate improvements in the intervention group (N = 20) in several areas of parental empowerment and family relations, comparing with the control group (N = 20). This approach to need-service matching seems to be a viable pathway to design needs-led, context-specific, and user-centered services, and to assess their efficacy, thereby informing policy makers and service planners.

When parent and family engagement activities are systemic and integrated across program foundations and program impact areas, family engagement outcomes are achieved, resulting in children who are healthy and ready for school. Parent and family engagement activities are grounded in positive, ongoing, and goal-oriented relationships with families.

While the importance of the oral presentation competence has been widely acknowledged in Higher Education given its relation with professional demands, the potential benefits of the development of such competence in Elementary and Secondary Education remains unclear. Preadolescence could be considered as a transitional period of life, since the individuals in this developmental stage are still concrete thinkers (Meadows, 2012) but they are starting to think in an abstract way. This implies a shift from individuals’ current logic ways of thinking towards more flexible ones when it comes to consider subtle nuances in their meaning making processes.

This research examines the effects of a training program aimed at promoting oral presentation skills with a group of 17 sixth grade’s students (aged 11-12 years). The program  consisted of 15 sessions of two hours each from May 2014 to June 2015. Our research questions are: (1) How does the cognitive stage of the participants influence their experience during the program? and, (2) what are the challenges in operationalizing and describing cognitive changes in the participants on the basis of their final oral presentations?

Data collection consisted of audio and video recordings of the training sessions and the students’ performances when doing their oral presentations, written summaries of the sessions, and audio recordings of the research team meetings. A qualitative research approach based on inquiry based learning (Pedaste et al., 2015) and a holistic content analysis (Lieblich et al. 1998) was adopted to closely examine the audiovisual and textual data in search of relevant topics concerning cognitive development of the participants.

Regarding the influence of the program we identified three main topics: 1) the importance of taking into account the cognitive development of students in order to plan the training; 2) the identification of three different kinds of presenters according to their performance: concrete, transitional and basic abstract; (3) the importance of paying attention to the presence of logical discourse markers, and (4) the presence in the discourse of a narrator self able to manage the distinction between the story told and the storyteller (himself) by organizing the presentation, asking questions to the audience, and reflecting on his own ideas.

According to our results, we see the need to take into account the specific cognitive stage of individuals attending to oral training programs addressed to Secondary and Primary Education students. We also discuss Dynamic Skill Theory (Fischer, 1980; Fischer and Bidell, 2006) as a valuable model in order to describe the variability of the participants in terms of the complexity of their performances when doing an oral presentation. Thus the processes of differentiating and focusing on ideas, compounding and inter coordinating arguments are illustrated from participant presentations. Learning to make an oral presentation in public goes beyond a technical approach which stresses how to structure a discourse and how to manage verbal cues (Hardison, & Sonchaeng, 2005). According to our results this kind of complex competence can also promote cognitive development, and simultaneously it is also constrained by the current stage of the participants.

While the importance of the oral presentation competence has been widely acknowledged in Higher Education given its relation with professional demands, it remains unclear the potential benefits of the development of such competence in Elementary and Secondary Education. This research examines the effects of a training program aimed at promoting oral presentation skills with a group of 17 sixth grade's students (aged 11-12 years). The program consisted of 15 sessions of two hours each over a period of one year. Data collection consisted of audio and video recordings of the sessions and the students' performances when doing their presentations, written summaries of the sessions, and audio recordings of the research team meetings. The holistic content analysis of the data led to the identification of three topics: 1) the importance of taking into account the cognitive development of students; 2) the students' self-regulation of emotions which appeared throughout the process of speaking in public, and 3) the effect of peer support as a collaborative context which facilitated students' performances. The need to include and track the cognitive development of the participants, the management of their emotions as a meaningful element of their talks, and how peer support goes beyond the generation of informational feedback is theoretically discussed.

Keywords: Oral Presentation Skills, Primary Education, Peer support, Developmental Education, Selfregulatory Processes, Inquiry based learning, Qualitative Analysis

The capacity to evaluate other people is essential for navigating the
social world. Humans must be able to assess the actions and inten-
tions of the people around them, and make accurate decisions
about who is friend and who is foe, who is an appropriate social
partner and who is not. Indeed, all social animals benefit from the
capacity to identify individual conspecifics that may help them,
and to distinguish these individuals from others that may harm
them. Human adults evaluate people rapidly and automatically on
the basis of both behaviour and physical features1–6, but the onto-
genetic origins and development of this capacity are not well
understood. Here we show that 6- and 10-month-old infants take
into account an individual’s actions towards others in evaluating
that individual as appealing or aversive: infants prefer an indi-
vidual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a
helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral
individual to a hindering individual. These findings constitute
evidence that preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of
their behaviour towards others. This capacity may serve as the
foundation for moral thought and action, and its early develop-
mental emergence supports the view that social evaluation is a
biological adaptation.

The importance of gesture in everyday life—in conversation, moments of recall, and learning—is often overlooked. In this paper the roles that gesture play in assisting the learning process will be investigated through several cross-sectional studies with a few other supplementary forms of evidence. More specifically, the benefits of using sign and gesture will be examined in regards to helping with encouraging positive learning practices in the form of experimentation, prolonged recall, and reducing the cognitive load placed on our minds as we learn. This paper will look at how the findings of the research can impact how children may be encouraged to learn in the future.

Children's characteristics, including gender, influence their development by eliciting differential responses from their environments, and by influencing differential responses to their environments. Parenting-related stress, associated with poverty environments, negatively influences children's language, likely through its impact on parent-child interactions, but may impact boys' and girls' development differently. Early intervention represents one tool for supporting development in at-risk toddlers, but gender-differences in effects of intervention are rarely described. The current studies assessed the effects of Early Head Start (EHS) on children's productive vocabulary in the context of parenting stress and examined gender differences in program effects on vocbulary. Data were from the national EHS Research and Evaluation (EHSRE) study (Study 1, N = 3,001), and from a dataset associated with one EHSRE site (Study 2, N = 146) where additional data on productive vocabulary were collected. Study 1 found that at 24 months of age, the EHS program protected girls' productive vocabulary from the negative effects of parenting stress, but had little impact on boys' vocabulary. In Study 2, the local EHS site promoted girls' vocabulary development over time from 14 to 36 months despite the negative effects of parenting stress, and protected boys' vocabulary from the negative parenting stress effects. These results suggest differential ways in which at-risk toddlers are affected by early intervention.

... linked to social competence in preschool classrooms (Mendez, Fantuzzo & Cicchetti, 2002; Raver, Blackburn, Bancroft & Torp, 1999). ... to develop internalizing disorders later in childhood (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2004; Shaw, Keenan, Vondra,Delliquadri & ...

Children's characteristics, including gender, influence their development by eliciting differential responses from their environments, and by influencing differential responses to their environments. Parenting-related stress, associated with poverty environments, negatively influences children's language, likely through its impact on parent-child interactions, but may impact boys' and girls' development differently. Early intervention represents one tool for supporting development in at-risk toddlers, but gender-differences in effects of intervention are rarely described. The current studies assessed the effects of Early Head Start (EHS) on children's productive vocabulary in the context of parenting stress and examined gender differences in program effects on vocbulary. Data were from the national EHS Research and Evaluation (EHSRE) study (Study 1, N = 3,001), and from a dataset associated with one EHSRE site (Study 2, N = 146) where additional data on productive vocabulary were collected. Study 1 found that at 24 months of age, the EHS program protected girls' productive vocabulary from the negative effects of parenting stress, but had little impact on boys' vocabulary. In Study 2, the local EHS site promoted girls' vocabulary development over time from 14 to 36 months despite the negative effects of parenting stress, and protected boys' vocabulary from the negative parenting stress effects. These results suggest differential ways in which at-risk toddlers are affected by early intervention.

Home visitation has emerged as a key strategy for promoting child and family well-being in the current policy context. This article examines the effectiveness of the Early Head Start (EHS) home-based program for children and families at the end of the program and 2 years later, with a particular focus on the role of program implementation in the impacts of the EHS home-based program on child and family outcomes. There was a pattern of broad, modest effects of EHS home visiting for both children and parents, which were strengthened if the programs were fully implemented according to federal guidelines. In particular, impacts for children in the cognitive and language domain were documented. Implications of these findings for policy and practice are discussed.

In various domains, experts are found to possess elaborate domain-specific representations they developed over years. In this study, we provide the first systematic attempt to characterise the short- term representations among individuals with different expertise levels. We showed videos of soccer game plays to expert, near-expert and non-expert soccer players and asked them to describe the actions taking place. Verbalisations were coded based on Fischer’s Skill Theory. Monte Carlo permutation tests revealed that players with higher expertise constructed representations of higher complexity (regardless of their specific content). Taking the content of the representations into account, we found that higher expertise soccer players relatively more often included high complexity levels of actions not including the ball and (moving) players on the field. These findings improve our understanding of perceptual-cognitive expertise by demonstrating how actors with different levels of expertise integrate the information they perceive to construct their representations in real time.

This paper provides an overview of recent studies that have investigated the development of pointing behaviors in infants and toddlers. First, we focus on deictic gestures and their role in language development, taking into account the different hand shapes and the different functions of pointing, and examining the cognitive abilities that may or may not be associated with the production of pointing gestures. Second, we try to demonstrate that when a distinction is made between pointing gestures and manipulative activities, the study of children's hand preference can help to highlight the development of speech-gesture links.

This study investigated the production of spontaneous pointing gestures in 26 toddlers, who were observed during free play time at day nursery. Pointing gestures and their different features (e.g., handedness, vocalizations, form and function of gesture) were recorded for a total observation time of 100 hours. Results revealed that the vast majority of pointing gestures were right-handed and accompanied by vocalizations, emphasizing the tight interconnection between speech and gesture from an early stage of development. Whole-hand gestures were more frequently used in imperative contexts, whereas index extensions were more frequently produced in declarative ones. Moreover, the use of declarative gestures and index extensions were found to increase with age. Implications concerning the origins of imperative and declarative pointing are discussed.

This paper provides an overview of recent studies that have investigated the development of pointing behaviors in infants and toddlers. First, we focus on deictic gestures and their role in language development, taking into account the different hand shapes and the different functions of pointing, and examining the cognitive abilities that may or may not be associated with the production of pointing gestures. Second, we try to demonstrate that when a distinction is made between pointing gestures and manipulative activities, the study of children's hand preference can help to highlight the development of speech-gesture links.

Infant-parent interactions are bidirectional; therefore, it is important to understand how infants' communicative behavior elicits variable responses from caregivers and, in turn, how infants' behavior varies with caregivers' responses; furthermore, how these moment-to-moment interactive behaviors relate to later language development. The current study addressed these concerns by observing 10-to 13-month-old infants' interactions with their mothers and measuring their language outcomes when they were 15 months old. The main results were: (1) infants were more likely to combine vocalizations with pointing when mothers were not looking at the target of the point, and when mothers did not respond about the target of the point; (2) infants' combination of vocalization and pointing behavior, especially those produced when mothers were not attending to the target object of the point, related to infants' comprehension skills at 15 months as measured by the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI); (3) maternal follow-in responses were related to infants' improvement in their comprehension and production scores on the MCDI. These results suggest that infants' own prelinguistic communicative acts that are produced differentially as a function of maternal attention and responses, and the maternal responses that they elicit, contribute to infants' subsequent language development.

In communication it is essential for speaker and listener to establish intersubjectivity, or "common ground. " This is especially true in instructional settings where learning depends on successful communication. One way teachers enable intersubjectivity is through the use of gestures. We consider two circumstances in which gestures establish intersubjectivity: (a) making conversational repair and (b) explicitly relating the novel (target) representation to a familiar (source) representation. We also identify two main ways gesture is used in establishing intersubjectivity. Linking gestures are sets of attentionguiding gestures (often deictic gestures) that delineate correspondences between familiar and new representations. Catchments use recurrent hand shapes or movements to convey similarity and highlight conceptual connections across seemingly different entities.

Findings are presented from the first randomized control trial of the effects of encouraging symbolic gesture (or “baby sign”) on infant language, following 40 infants from age 8 months to 20 months. Half of the mothers were trained to model a target set of gestures to their infants. Frequent measures were taken of infant language development and dyadic interactions were scrutinized to assess mind-mindedness. Infants exposed to gesture did not differ from control conditions on language outcomes; thus, no support was found for previous claims that encouraging gesturing with infants accelerates linguistic development. Microgenetic analysis revealed mothers in the gesture training conditions were more responsive to their infants' nonverbal cues and encouraged more independent action by their infant.

Developmental researchers recognize that multiple component skills and social processes underlie children’s communication. Infants’ gestures have catalyzed consideration of non-verbal behaviors as markers of early communicative and social competence. The current study examines infant sign and conventional gesture production to inform debate on developmental and contextual constraints on communicative competence. Based on observations over eight months, we describe the emergence timing of gestures and signs in ten infants’ spontaneous behavior. We test whether two features of gestures and signs, relative frequency of caregiver use and motoric complexity, explain variation in emergence timing. We find that while these features may constrain whether infants produce particular gestures or signs, additional explanatory mechanisms must account for the late emergence of some conventional gestures.

Before first words, children use gestures to communicate and represent concepts. This study investigated two questions: Can infants pair gestures together to create two-gesture sentences? Further, can preverbal children engage in conceptually focused gesturing conversations? I observed 10 infants for 8 months during interactions with caregivers and coded all gesturing behavior. I used longitudinal growth modeling to analyze the developmental trajectories of gesturing sentence and conversation length. Infants formed 2-gesture sentences as early as 9 months and 3-gesture sentences at 1 year. Infants engaged in 4-turn conversations as early as 11 months; maximum gesture conversation length was 16 turns. Infants’ early gesturing frequency and variety predicted later sentence length; however, caregivers’ gesturing sentence length suppressed child’s sentence length.

Children’s characteristics, including gender, influence their development by eliciting differential responses from their environments, and by influencing differential responses to their environments. Parenting-related stress, associated with poverty environments, negatively influences children’s language, likely through its impact on parent-child interactions, but may impact boys’ and girls’ development differently. Early intervention represents one tool for supporting development in at-risk toddlers, but gender-differences in effects of intervention are rarely described. The current studies assessed the effects of Early Head Start (EHS) on children’s productive vocabulary in the context of parenting stress and examined gender differences in program effects on vocbulary. Data were from the national EHS Research and Evaluation (EHSRE) study (Study 1, N = 3,001), and from a dataset associated with one EHSRE site (Study 2, N = 146) where additional data on productive vocabulary were collected. Study 1 found that at 24 months of age, the EHS program protected girls’ productive vocabulary from the negative effects of parenting stress, but had little impact on boys’ vocabulary. In Study 2, the local EHS site promoted girls’ vocabulary development over time from 14 to 36 months despite the negative effects of parenting stress, and protected boys’ vocabulary from the negative parenting stress effects. These results suggest differential ways in which at-risk toddlers are affected by early intervention.

Self-regulation emerges throughout early childhood, and predicts later success in socially and cognitively challenging situations. Vygotsky proposed that symbols, particularly words, serve as mental tools to be used in service of self-regulation. Cross-sectional research indicates a positive but inconsistent association between language and self-regulation skills throughout toddlerhood, but research has not accounted for general cognitive development, nor gender differences in these domains. We used growth modeling of longitudinal data for 120 toddlers collected when children were 14, 24, and 36 months to test the impact of two expressive language skills – spoken vocabulary and talkativeness – on the growth of toddlers’ self-regulation, and to determine whether associations between these domains exist when controlling for cognitive development. Results reveal gender differences in self-regulation trajectories, and in the impact of language on self-regulation. Vocabulary is a better predictor of self-regulation than talkativeness, and both concurrent and prior vocabulary positively predicted children’s levels of self-regulation. When cognitive development was controlled, 24-month vocabulary still predicted the trajectory of self-regulation. Results reveal that, even in early development, words are tools that can be applied to the task of self-regulation, and may be a more necessary tool for boys than for girls at this age.

Dynamic Skills Theory (DST) posits that skills within domains may promote or suppress other skills as they first develop, resulting in spurts of growth in one skill concurrently with regression in another. I test this premise by examining development of two preverbal representational skills: manual pointing and symbolic gestures. Pointing is a robust early communicative gesture, indicating infants’ awareness of others’ attention, but limited in ability to represent infants’ conceptual repertoires as it grows beyond the immediate environment. Symbolic gestures are more specific but less flexible representational tools. Both skills predict language, yet no study has addressed the effects of these skills on each other. I observed the gesturing behavior of 10 infants over 8 months in a gesture-rich environment to test the effects of each skill on the other. Supporting DST, results show early pointing predicted earlier, but not more, symbolic gesturing, while symbolic gesturing did suppress pointing frequency.

Dynamic skill theory was utilized to explain the multiple mechanisms and mediating processes influencing development of self-regulatory and language skills in children at 14, 24, and 36 months of age. Relations were found between family risks, parenting-related stresses, and parent–child interactions that contribute either independently or through mediation to the child’s acquisition of self-regulatory skills even when accounting for the influence of language development. Variation in impacts between control and Early Head Start (EHS) intervention samples was compared to explore the sequence of developmental mechanisms over time. Findings indicate that EHS protects parenting, child language, and self-regulatory development from the effects of demographic risks and parenting stress, and thus supports parents to raise healthy children.

A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. Language serves as a mental tool set for self-regulation, allowing us to reflect on and modify our own behavior. Children as young as 3 years talk out loud to themselves to regulate their behavior, using self-regulatory self-talk. Can preverbal children use infant signs as self-talk for the purpose of self-regulation? The author shares observations from a child development center using the Baby Signs[R] Program. Infants and toddlers use signs to request comfort in regulatory interactions with caregivers, and they use signs when alone to modify their own behavior in emotionally challenging situations. Infant signs provide infants with the cognitive tools to participate actively in their own regulation.