Mealtime conversations between parents and their 2-year-old children in five cultural contexts.

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children ( = 99 families) during mealtime across five cultural settings (Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Germany, and Japan) and coded the amount of talk and gestures as well as their conversational embedding (interlocutors, function, and themes).

The Development of Context-Sensitive Attention in Urban and Rural Brazil.

Human perception differs profoundly between individuals from different cultures. In the present study, we investigated the development of context-sensitive attention (the relative focus on context elements of a visual scene) in a large sample ( = 297) of 5- to 15-year-olds and young adults from rural and urban Brazil, namely from agricultural villages in the Amazon region and the city of São Paulo. We applied several visual tasks which assess context-sensitive attention, including an optical illusion, a picture description, a picture recognition and a facial emotion judgment task.

Maternal socialization goals and the spontaneous prosocial behavior of children in rural contexts.

The purpose of this descriptive-correlational study was to investigate possible associations between maternal socialization goals and prosocial behavior (spontaneous helping) among children living in a rural context. This study involved 39 dyads of mothers, aged 17 to 48 years (M = 24.28 years, SD = 5.

Relationship between gender and psychomotor performance of children in Belém, Brazil.

This study aimed to analyze the neuropsychomotor performance of children by implementing the Denver Developmental Screening Test-II (DDST-II). We evaluated a sample of 318 children aged 36 to 48 months. Results indicated that girls performed better in three of the four areas analyzed in the test: Personal-Social (p < 0.

Cultural Influences on Toddlers' Prosocial Behavior: How Maternal Task Assignment Relates to Helping Others.

This cross-cultural study investigates how maternal task assignment relates to toddlers' requested behavior and helping between 18 and 30 months. One hundred seven mother-child dyads were assessed in three different cultural contexts (rural Brazil, urban Germany, and urban Brazil). Brazilian mothers showed assertive scaffolding (serious and insistent requesting), whereas German mothers employed deliberate scaffolding (asking, pleading, and giving explanations).

[Health and disease processes among institutionalized children: an ecological vision].

This article discusses aspects of health and disease processes among children attended in a child shelter of the city of Belém between 2004 and 2005. The data were collected from documental sources and through interviews with technicians of the institution. From a total of 287 children, 49.