presents examples of recently published reports from both areas of the laboratory's work. Program I: The Child, the Parent, and the Family Across the First 2+ Decades. The stability of language across childhood is traditionally assessed by exploring longitudinal relations between individual language measures. However, language encompasses many domains and varies with different sources (child speech, parental report, experimenter assessment). This study evaluated individual variation in multiple age-appropriate measures of child language derived from multiple sources and stability between their latent variables in young children across more than 2 years. Structural equation modeling demonstrated the loading of multiple measures of child language from different sources on single latent variables of language at ages 20 and 48 months. A large stability coefficient (r = .84) obtained between the 2 language latent variables. This stability obtained even when accounting for family socioeconomic status, maternal verbal intelligence, education, speech, and tendency to respond in a socially desirable fashion, and child social competence. Stability was also equivalent for children in diverse childcare situations and for girls and boys. Across age, from the beginning of language acquisition to just before school entry, aggregating multiple age-appropriate methods and measures at each age and multiple reporters, children show strong stability of individual differences in general language development. Another study, incorporating the perspectives of adolescent, mother, and father, examined each family member's unique perspective or nonshared, idiosyncratic view of the family. We used a modified multitrait-multimethod confirmatory factor analysis that (a) isolated for each family member's 6 reports of family dysfunction the nonshared variance (a combination of variance idiosyncratic to the individual and measurement error) from variance shared by 1 or more family members and (b) extracted common variance across each family member's set of nonshared variances. Each family member's unique perspective generalized across his or her different reports of family dysfunction and accounted for a sizable proportion of his or her own variance in reports of family dysfunction. In addition, after holding level of dysfunction constant across families and controlling for a family's shared variance (agreement regarding family dysfunction), each family member's unique perspective was associated with his or her own adjustment. In a study of adoptive families, contingencies of three maternal and two infant socio-emotional behaviors that are universal components of mother-infant interaction were investigated at 5 months in mothers who had adopted domestically and who had given birth and their first children. Patterns of contingent responding were comparable in dyads by adoption and birth, although the two groups of mothers responded differentially to the two types of infant signals. Mothers in both groups were more responsive than infants in social and vocal interactions, but infants were more responsive in maternal speech-infant attention interactions. Family type by gender statistical interactions suggested a possible differential role of infant gender in establishing mother-infant contingencies in families by adoption and birth. Five-month-old infants of clinically depressed and non-depressed mothers were familiarized to a wholly novel object and afterward tested for their discrimination of the same object presented in the familiar and in a novel perspective. Infants in both groups were adequately familiarized, but infants of clinically depressed mothers failed to discriminate between novel and familiar views of the object, whereas infants of non-depressed mothers successfully discriminated. The difference in discrimination between infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers is interpreted in light of infants'differential object processing and maternal sociodemographics, mind-mindedness, depression, stress, and interaction styles that may moderate opportunities for infants to learn about their world or influence the development of their perceptual-cognitive capacities. We initiated a prospective study of very young children with cancer, in comparison with matched healthy children, to investigate neurodevelopmental consequences of non-CNS cancers and treatment. Children (<42 months) with non-CNS cancers and matched controls underwent an identical age-appropriate neuropsychological test battery. Children with cancer manifested deficits compared to healthy controls in motor, mental, and language development, but were similar to controls in cognitive representational abilities and emotional relationships in interaction with their mothers. Better physician-rated health status at diagnosis and mother-rated behavioral status 1 month prior to assessment were associated with better motor and mental performance in the cancer group. This study identifies deficits as well as spared functions in children with non-CNS cancers;the results suggest ways parents and healthcare professionals may plan specific remedies to enhance quality of life in young cancer survivors. Program II: Child Development and Parenting in Multicultural Perspective. It is often assumed that young bilinguals are lexically delayed in comparison to monolinguals. A comprehensive comparison of comprehension and production vocabulary in firstborn bilingual and matched monolingual children fails to find any empirical foundation for this assumption. Several raters completed Dutch and French adaptations of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories for children aged 13 and 20 months. At 13 months, bilinguals understood more words than monolinguals;at 20 months, monolinguals knew more Dutch words than bilinguals (combining comprehension and production). There were no group differences for word production or for Dutch word comprehension. Both groups understood and produced the same number of lexicalized meanings;ratios of word comprehension to word production did not differ;inter-individual variation was similar. This study underscores the importance of conducting bilingual-monolingual comparisons with matched groups and suggests that, if individual bilingual children appear to be slow in early vocabulary development, other reasons than their bilingualism should be investigated. In another in a series of studies of acculturating parents in the United States, cultural variation in relations and moment-to-moment contingencies of infant-mother person-oriented and object-oriented interactions were compared in Japanese, Japanese American immigrant, and European American dyads with 5.5-month-olds. Infant and mother person-oriented behaviors were related in all cultural groups, but infant and mother object-oriented behaviors were related only among European Americans. Infant and mother behaviors within each modality were mutually contingent in all groups. Culture moderated lead-lag relations: Japanese infants were more likely than their mothers to respond in object-oriented interactions, European American mothers were more likely than their infants to respond in person-oriented interactions. Japanese American dyads behaved like European American dyads. Interactions, infant effects, and parent socialization findings are set in cultural and accultural models of infant-mother transactions.
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