Development of rapid word-object associations in relation to expressive vocabulary: Shared commonalities in infants and toddlers with and without Williams syndrome.

Associative word learning, i.e., associating a word with an object, is an important building block of early word learning for TD infants.

Infants with Williams syndrome detect statistical regularities in continuous speech.

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder associated with delays in language and cognitive development. The reasons for the language delay are unknown. Statistical learning is a domain-general mechanism recruited for early language acquisition.

Developmental origins of the face inversion effect.

A hallmark of adults' expertise for faces is that they are better at recognizing, discriminating, and processing upright faces compared to inverted faces. We investigate the developmental origins of "the face inversion effect" by reviewing research on infants' perception of upright and inverted faces during the first year of life. We review the effects of inversion on infants' face preference, recognition, processing (holistic and second-order configural), and scanning as well as face-related neural responses.

Toddlers with Williams syndrome process upright but not inverted faces holistically.

Holistic processing of upright, but not inverted, faces is a marker of perceptual expertise for faces. This pattern is shown by typically developing individuals beginning at age 7 months. Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare neurogenetic developmental disorder characterized by extreme interest in faces from a very young age.

A U-shaped relation between sitting ability and upright face processing in infants.

A growing body of research indicates connections exist between action, perception, and cognition in infants. In this study, associated changes between sitting ability and upright face processing were tested in 111 infants. Using the visual habituation "switch" task (C.

The Development of Specialized Processing of Own-Race Faces in Infancy.

In this study, we examined developmental changes in infants' processing of own- versus other-race faces. Caucasian American 8-month-olds (Experiment 1) and 4-month-olds (Experiment 2) were tested in a habituation-switch procedure designed to assess holistic (attending to the relationship between internal and external features of the face) versus featural (attending to individual features of the face) processing of faces. Eight-month-olds demonstrated holistic processing of upright own-race (Caucasian) faces, but featural processing of upright other-race (African) faces.

Eight-Month-Old Infants' Perception of Possible and Impossible Events.

This study investigated 8-month-old infants' perception of object permanence in an extension of the rotating screen studies by Baillargeon (1987) and Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman (1985). Using computer-animated stimuli similar to the "live" stimuli used by Baillargeon and her colleagues (Baillargeon, 1987; Baillargeon et al., 1985), 48 8-month-old infants were habituated to 1 of 4 computer-animated events and then tested on all 4 events.