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An increasing number of researchers have begun to identify relationships between dimensions of infants’ and toddlers’ temperament and their language development. Proclivities to engage in joint attention have also been implicated in children’s language development. The purpose of the present investigation was to explore whether aspects of children’s temperament typically associated with linguistic performance could be observed to moderate the joint attentional responsiveness of 11- and 14-month-olds in a controlled laboratory setting. Forty-seven infants (22 females, 25 males) were drawn from a larger study investigating infants’ gaze-following abilities, and included 25 11-month-olds and 22 14-month-olds. In a laboratory setting, two identical objects were placed on opposite sides of the room to the right and left of the infant, respectively. Colorful shower curtains served as background contexts for the objects, and differed in pattern. Experimenters looked at either the right or left object, and infants were scored as to whether they followed the gaze of the experimenter during 1) an initial training phase of 8 trials, and 2) a subsequent testing phase of 8 more trials. Background contexts were switched for half the children during test trials. Temperament played a considerable role in moderating children’s gaze-following at both ages, contributing to 15 significant interactions with factors affecting gaze-following. At 11 months, gaze-following was primarily associated with temperament dimensions reflecting surgency and executive control. For example, perceptual sensitivity, a subcomponent of surgency, entered into a significant 3-way interaction [F(1, 21) = 8.00, p = .010] with training phase (initial versus test) and contextual condition (familiar versus novel). Evaluation of the means vis-à-vis post hoc comparisons indicated that children high in perceptual sensitivity decreased their gaze-following over time in both contexts, whereas children low in perceptual sensitivity exhibited a decrease in gaze-following in only the familiar context. At 14 months, in contrast, negative affectivity was primarily involved. Here, low negative affect children exhibited less gaze-following than high negative affect children during the novel test condition, but the reverse obtained in the familiar test condition [F(1, 18) = 4.56, p = .041]. Our results provide additional evidence of the utility of taking children’s temperament into account when exploring their language development. These findings fit within a model of language development in which children’s temperament influences their language development, at least in part, by virtue of its impact on children’s responsiveness to joint attentional bids.

An interesting paradox in the developmental literature has emerged in which fast-habituating babies tend to be temperamentally difficult and fast language learners, even though temperamentally difficult babies tend to be slow language learners. The purpose of the present investigation was to examine whether the paradoxical relationships among habituation, temperamental difficulty, and language acquisition could be mediated partly or wholly by infant attentional focus, because the latter also tends to correlate with temperamental difficulty and vocabulary size. Forty mother–infant dyads were followed from child age 5–20-months. Results replicated those of Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein (Child Develop 1989, 60, 738–751): measures of visual habituation at 5 months were related to 13-month vocabulary. However, relationships between 5-month habituation and 20-month vocabulary were moderated by temperamental attentional focus. For children low in attentional focus, 5-month habituation was related negatively to 20-month productive vocabulary; whereas for children high in attentional focus, early habituation was positively related to later vocabulary. Results are consistent with a model of habituation in which volitional attentional focus overrides basic attentional mechanisms that occur during habituation.

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Researchers have been reporting temperament-language correlations in infants for 10 years. However, in order to identify directions of effects between temperament and language, methodologies besides correlations need to be developed. The “competition attention paradigm” is an effort to sidestep some of the direction-of-effect issues by asking infants to learn novel words in the context of environmental distractions designed to tap into children’s temperaments. The purpose of the present study was to explore whether environmental distracters would differentially impact 15-month-olds’ novel wordlearning as a function of children’s temperamental profiles. Twenty-eight 15-month-olds were asked to learn 4 novel words. Novel word learning consisted of initially familiarizing children with two novel objects, and then mapping a novel label to only one of the novel objects five times. Novel word comprehension was tested by asking children to select the newly-labeled object from the pair of novel objects across 4 test trials. A remotely-controlled mechanical spider competed for children’s attention during object familiarization on two of the words. Half the children were distracted on the first two words, half were distracted on the last two. Temperament was assessed via parental reporting using the Early Child Behavior Questionnaire. The environmental distractions did not impact children’s word-learning directly. However, order of distraction presentation did [F(1, 23) = 7.16, p = .014], such that children who were distracted on the first two words performed higher overall than children who were distracted on the last two. Results involving temperament were complex, yielding many significant interaction effects with factors impacting children’s word-learning. For example, children high in fear demonstrated better word-learning in the absence of the spider than in its presence, whereas the spider had no effect on low-fear children, but only when learning the first word in the pair [F(1, 23) = 5.20, p = .032]. Other temperament factors found to impact novel word-learning included attentional focus, cuddliness, impulsivity, frustration, and high intensity pleasure. The results of the present investigation contribute to a growing body of research linking temperament to word learning. The competition attention paradigm suggest ways through which word learning may be impacted by dimensions of temperament. Although not presentable here due to space limitations, the pattern of results also points to attentional focus as playing a central moderating role over other dimensions of temperament. Finally, the present results are the first to link temperament to language acquisition at 15 months.

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No description available.

The word- and nonword-learning abilities of toddlers were tested under various conditions of environmental distraction, and evaluated with respect to children's temperamental attentional focus. Thirty-nine children and their mothers visited the lab at child age 21-months, where children were exposed to fast-mapping word-learning trials and nonlinguistic sequential learning trials. It was found that both word- and nonword-learning were adversely affected by the presentation of environmental distractions. But it was also found that the effect of the distractions sometimes depended on children's level of attentional focus. Specifically, children high in attentional focus were less affected by environmental distractions than children low in attentional focus when attempting to learn from a model, whereas children low in attentional focus demonstrated little learning from the model. Translationally, these results may be of use to child health-care providers investigating possible sources of cognitive and language delay.

The interplay between child characteristics and parenting is increasingly implicated as crucial to child health outcomes. Based on data from a national birth cohort, this study assessed the joint effects of children's temperamental characteristics and maternal sensitivity on the development of childhood obesity. Infant temperament, assessed by maternal report, was categorized into three types: easy, average, and difficult. Maternal sensitivity, assessed by observing maternal behaviors during mother-child semi-structured interaction, was categorized into two groups: sensitive and insensitive. Child's weight and height were measured longitudinally from age two years to Grade 6 and body mass index (BMI) was calculated. Obese (≥ the 95th percentile) and overweight-or-obese (≥ the 85th percentile) were defined based on sex and age specific BMI percentiles. Generalized estimating equations were used to analyze data. The proportions of children who were obese and overweight-or-obese increased as they got older, 5.47% and 15.58% at 2 years of age, to 18.78% and 34.34% at Grade 6. Children with easy temperament and under the care of a sensitive mother were at the lowest risks of obesity and overweight-or-obesity over childhood. The joint effects of children's temperament and maternal sensitivity on overweight-or-obesity largely depended on childhood phases. For instance, children with difficult temperament and under the care of an insensitive mother had much higher risks during school age but not during early childhood. In conclusion, parents may need to tailor their parenting strategies to particular child temperamental characteristics in order to prevent and control the development of childhood obesity.

Past research has identified links between temperament and language development in young children. A third variable, joint attention, has been linked to both of these domains. In fact, past research has suggested that joint attention may mediate the relationship between temperament and language development in the second year. Although one study has investigated whether toddler initiation of joint attention mediated temperament-language relationships, to my knowledge no researchers have investigated whether responsiveness to joint attentional bids (RJA) may also mediate temperament-language relationships. The purpose of the proposed study is to examine whether RJA might be identified as a mediator of the relationship between temperament and language development. In an archival sample of 60 15-month-olds, RJA, language skills, and temperament were assessed by analyzing RJA behavior during four events, parent report on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI), and scores on the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ). Data will be analyzed during the Spring of 2012. Results of this study will potentially have implications for understanding the role of RJA in temperamentlanguage relationships.