Historicity in development : abbreviation in mother-infant communications. 'Historicidad y desarrollo : abreviación en la comunicación madre-infante'.

Monográfico con el título: 'Los mecanismos del cambio cognitivo'. Resumen basado en el de la publicación

Una escola per a tothom. Integració d’un infant de dos anys amb alteracions comunicatives i relacionals.

Exposam la història educativa de tot un curs d’un infant que tenia just dos anys quan començà a una escoleta pública municipal de Menorca. Les dificultats es van evidenciar just a la primera setmana: estava aïllat de tot, no participava de cap context de grup, presentava indiferència pel que passava al seu voltant, pels iguals, tenia greus dificultats per comunicar-se, no explicitava cap demanda. S’exposa el treball fet: des del primer moment, la família, l’escoleta i l’equip d’atenció primerenca vam desplegar recursos organitzatius i humans, així com estratègies d’abordatge terapèutiques, per atendre la seva dificultat. Ara pot gaudir i rendibilitzar en bona mesura la vida de grup d’escola i gestionar amb certa autonomia el seu aprenentatge, tot i que les dificultats que presenta encara són significatives.

Padrins que fan de pares: un dret de l???infant o una obligaci?? de la persona gran?

La responsabilitat de les fam??lies, concretament de les dones, pel que fa a la cura de les persones dependents generalment s???ha ent??s com una tend??ncia natural d???algunes societats tradicionals en qu?? valors com la solidaritat dins l?????mbit privat s???imposen sobre la protecci?? p??blica. Aquest argument est?? relacionat amb el model familista d???estat de benestar propi del sistema de protecci?? espanyol i del estats del sud d???Europa. Des d???una perspectiva diferent, m??s que d???una opci?? es tractaria d???una obligaci?? que recau sobre les fam??lies, a causa d???un sistema ocupacional que no facilita a aquestes ocupar-se dels seus membres i d???un sistema p??blic insuficient. Concretament, en relaci?? amb el paper que assumeixen els padrins en aquestes relacions de solidaritat familiar, al treball es presenten dades que mostren que als pa??sos del sud la freq????ncia en la cura dels padrins als n??ts ??s m??s baixa per?? la cura ??s m??s intensiva. Aquests estudis confirmen que un estat del benestar fort amb un grau elevat de cobertura social no redueix la solidaritat familiar. La inversi?? en pol??tiques familiars afavoreix la solidaritat intergeneracional, en tant que permet una complementarietat entre l???ajuda p??blica i l???ajuda familiar, sense esgotar ni saturar la darrera. A la inversa, la manca o un nivell molt baix d???inversi?? en pol??tiques familiars pot fer m??s prec??ria l???ajuda.

“Jugar” amb un infant autista, li pot permetre obrir-se a l’altre? La pràctica psicomotriu, una manera especial de tractar l’autisme.

Resumen tomado de la publicación

Ajudar l’infant a esdevenir adult, ajudar l’adult a esdevenir infant. La contribució de la pràctica psicomotriu al procés de creixement i de maduració de l’infant i de l’adult.

Resumen tomado de la publicación

Usefulness of the Bayley scales of infant and toddler development, third edition, in the early diagnosis of language disorder

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

The psycholinguistic communication strategies of a mother of a hearing-impaired infant

This paper discusses a study to provide a descriptive analysis of the linguistic environment of a deaf infant during his first year of life.

A longitudinal demographic study of a parent-infant program for hearing-impaired children

This paper is a longitudinal study of the CID Parent-Infant Program, 1966-1976.

Brief and precarious lives: Infant mortality in contrasting sites from medieval and post-medieval England (AD 850-1859)

This study compares the infant mortality profiles of 128 infants from two urban and two rural cemetery sites in medieval England. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of urbanization and industrialization in terms of endogenous or exogenous causes of death. In order to undertake this analysis, two different methods of estimating gestational age from long bone lengths were used: a traditional regression method and a Bayesian method. The regression method tended to produce more marked peaks at 38 weeks, while the Bayesian method produced a broader range of ages and were more comparable with the expected "natural" mortality profiles. At all the sites, neonatal mortality (28-40 weeks) outweighed post-neonatal mortality (41-48 weeks) with rural Raunds Furnells in Northamptonshire, showing the highest number of neonatal deaths and post-medieval Spitalfields, London, showing a greater proportion of deaths due to exogenous or environmental factors. Of the four sites under study, Wharram Percy in Yorkshire showed the most convincing "natural" infant mortality profile, suggesting the inclusion of all births (i.e., stillbirths and unbaptised infants).

Infant vocabulary development assessed with a British communicative development inventory

Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) were collected from 669 British children aged between 1;0 and 2;1. Comprehension and production scores in each age group are calculated. This provides norming data for the British infant population. The influence of socioeconomic group on vocabulary scores is considered and shown not to have a significant effect. The data from British infants is compared to data from American infants (Fenson, Dale, Reznick, Bates, Thal & Pethick, 1994). It is found that British infants have lower scores on both comprehension and production than American infants of the same age.

Modeling infant speech sound discrimination using simple associative networks

Infants' responses in speech sound discrimination tasks can be nonmonotonic over time. Stager and Werker (1997) reported such data in a bimodal habituation task. In this task, 8-month-old infants were capable of discriminations that involved minimal contrast pairs, whereas 14-month-old infants were not. It was argued that the older infants' attenuated performance was linked to their processing of the stimuli for meaning. The authors suggested that these data are diagnostic of a qualitative shift in infant cognition. We describe an associative connectionist model showing a similar decrement in discrimination without any qualitative shift in processing. The model suggests that responses to phonemic contrasts may be a nonmonotonic function of experience with language. The implications of this idea are discussed. The model also provides a formal framework for studying habituation-dishabituation behaviors in infancy.

Watching the infant brain learn words: Effects of vocabulary size and experience

Previous investigations comparing auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to words whose meanings infants did or did not comprehend, found bilateral differences in brain activity to known versus unknown words in 13-month-old infants, in contrast with unilateral, left hemisphere, differences in activity in 20-month-old infants. We explore two alternative explanations for these findings. Changes in hemispheric specialization may result from a qualitative shift in the way infants process known words between 13 and 20 months. Alternatively, hemispheric specialization may arise from increased familiarity with the individual words tested. We contrasted these two explanations by measuring ERPs from 20-month-old infants with high and low production scores, for novel words they had just learned. A bilateral distribution of ERP differences was observed in both groups of infants, though the difference was larger in the left hemisphere for the high producers. These findings suggest that word familiarity is an important factor in determining the distribution of brain regions involved in word learning. An emerging left hemispheric specialization may reflect increased efficiency in the manner in which infants process familiar and novel words. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Modelling seasonally varying data: A case study for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Many time series are measured monthly, either as averages or totals, and such data often exhibit seasonal variability-the values of the series are consistently larger for some months of the year than for others. A typical series of this type is the number of deaths each month attributed to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Seasonality can be modelled in a number of ways. This paper describes and discusses various methods for modelling seasonality in SIDS data, though much of the discussion is relevant to other seasonally varying data. There are two main approaches, either fitting a circular probability distribution to the data, or using regression-based techniques to model the mean seasonal behaviour. Both are discussed in this paper.