It's All in the Interaction: Early Acquired Words Are Both Frequent and Highly Imageable.

Prior studies have found that children are more likely to learn words that are frequent in the input and highly imageable. Many theories of word learning, however, predict that these variables should interact, particularly early in development: frequency of a form is of little use if you cannot infer its meaning, and a concrete word cannot be acquired if you never hear it. The present study explores this interaction, how it changes over time and its relationship to syntactic category effects in children acquiring American English.

Domain-general conflict monitoring predicts neural and behavioral indices of linguistic error processing during reading comprehension.

The ability to detect and respond to linguistic errors is critical for successful reading comprehension, but these skills can vary considerably across readers. In the current study, healthy adults (age 18-35) read short discourse scenarios for comprehension while monitoring for the presence of semantic anomalies. Using a factor analytic approach, we examined if performance in nonlinguistic conflict monitoring tasks (Stroop, AX-CPT) would predict individual differences in neural and behavioral measures of linguistic error processing.

The emergence of separation protest is robust under conditions of severe developmental stress in rural Bangladesh.

The response of 185 infants to their mothers' departure was assessed in a rural area of Bangladesh. Despite their poor health and nutritional status, this group of infants showed the same peak in separation protest around the end of the first year that has been documented for healthier samples in several cultural contexts; correlational analysis suggests that the healthier infants were more likely to display protest. In addition, there was an earlier rise and decline in distress at maternal departure in the first half year of life, not seen in other reports.

Maternal employment, child care, and nutritional status of 12-18-month-old children in Managua, Nicaragua.

Relationships among women's employment, child care strategies, and nutritional status of children 12-18 months of age were examined in 80 Nicaraguan households sampled by randomized block design in 10 low income urban communities. Multiple regression analyses showed that children of employed mothers (56%) fared better in weight/height than those whose mothers were not employed, with and without controlling for socioeconomic status and maternal education, paternal financial support, child care adequacy, and sex and age of the child. Children with inadequate alternate child care (care by a preteen or care at the work place) had lower height for age, even controlling for the same variables and for maternal employment.