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In late infancy and early toddlerhood, joint attention ability is widely recognized as a crucial foundation for children's vocabulary development, though the exact nature of its contribution remains debated. This study investigates associations between joint attention and subsequent vocabulary development, as well as the possible moderating role of supportive parental behaviors. Seventy children and their families participated in this longitudinal study, which began when the children were 10 months of age. Parents completed the Swedish Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) at four age points (10, 12, 18, and 24 months) to assess receptive and expressive vocabulary growth. Children participated in lab-based assessment of joint attention abilities at 10, 12, and 18 months. Additionally, at 10 and 12 months, parent-child dyads participated in two semi-structured lab assessments to evaluate the quality of parental supportive behaviors during interactions with their child. Primary analysis showed no significant effects of joint attention on subsequent receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, a significant interaction was found between a child's ability to respond to joint attention cues and parental supportive behaviors on receptive vocabulary. These findings indicate that parental supportive behaviors play a crucial role in promoting the development of children's receptive vocabulary.

Gaze following in infancy allows triadic social interactions and a comprehension of other individuals and their surroundings. Despite its importance for early development, its ontology is debated, with theories suggesting that gaze following is either a universal core capacity or an experience-dependent learned behavior. A critical test of these theories among 809 nine-month-olds from Africa (Uganda and Zimbabwe), Europe (Sweden), and Asia (Bhutan) demonstrated that infants follow gaze to a similar degree regardless of environmental factors such as culture, maternal well-being (postpartum depression, well-being), or traumatic family events (related to war and/or climate change). These findings suggest that gaze following may be a universal, experience-expectant process that is resilient to adversity and similar across a wide range of human experiences-a core foundation for social development.

Early childhood educators’ math anxiety and its relation to their frequency of pedagogic actions was examined through a questionnaire completed by 352 participants (aged 21–65) representative of the Swedish municipality where the study was conducted. Our sample contained 189 certified preschool teachers and 163 preschool caregivers who significantly differed in their ratings reported for math teaching anxiety. Results revealed that certified preschool teachers who reported higher levels of math anxiety also reported teaching and talking about mathematics content less frequently. When controlling for certified preschool teachers’ gender and age, years of work in preschools, and whether they work only with younger (1–3), older (4–6) or with both groups of children (1–6-year-old), certified preschool teachers’ general math anxiety and math teaching anxiety predicted their reported frequency of math teaching and frequency of conversations about numbers, patterns, and geometric concepts with peak strength in gatherings, excursions and situations designed to teach mathematics to preschool children. Preschool caregivers’ math anxiety measures and their reported frequency of pedagogic actions did not display statistically significant relations. Findings showed setting specific associations between certified preschool teachers general math anxiety, math teaching anxiety and their avoidance of mathematics content, highlighting the importance of early childhood educators’ awareness of math anxiety, its nature, and consequences for teaching practices.

How do children construct a concept of natural numbers? Past research addressing this question has mainly focused on understanding how children come to acquire the cardinality principle. However, at that point children already understand the first number words and have a rudimentary natural number concept in place. The question therefore remains; what gets children's number learning off the ground? We therefore, based on previous empirical and theoretical work, tested which factors predict the first stages of children's natural number understanding. We assessed if children's expressive vocabulary, visuospatial working memory, and ANS (Approximate number system) acuity at 18 months of age could predict their natural number knowledge at 2.5 years of age. We found that early expressive vocabulary and visuospatial working memory were important for later number knowledge. The results of the current study add to a growing body of literature showing the importance of language in children's learning about numbers.

During the first 2 years of life, an infant's vocabulary grows at an impressive rate. In the current study, we investigated the impact of three challenges that infants need to overcome to learn new words and expand the size of their vocabulary. We used longitudinal eye-tracking data (n = 118) to assess sequence learning, associative learning, and probability processing abilities at ages 6, 10, and 18 months. Infants' ability to efficiently solve these tasks was used to predict vocabulary size at age 18 months. We demonstrate that the ability to make audio-visual associations and to predict sequences of visual events predicts vocabulary size in toddlers (accounting for 20% of the variance). Our results indicate that statistical learning in some, but not all, domains have a role in vocabulary development.

Background: The quality of children's early home learning environment has an influence on their cognitive development, preliteracy skills, and subsequent educational outcomes. Early intervention programs that promote positive parenting behaviors and child cognition have great potential to positively influence children's school readiness and thereby support social equality. One often advocated parental practice for promoting child language and cognition is interactive book sharing.

Methods: We have conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effects of a parent-child interactive book sharing intervention on early child language, cognition, and parental behaviors. Participating caregivers and their 10-month-old child were randomized to an interactive book sharing intervention group (n = 59) or to an active control group (n = 56). The intervention was delivered by a facilitator to small groups of parent-child dyads on a weekly basis over 5 weeks. The primary outcomes were child language and socio-cognition; secondary outcomes were child executive function and parental scaffolding, sensitivity and reciprocity during book sharing, and problem-solving tasks. Data were collected at baseline, post-intervention, and at 6 and 12 months post-intervention.

Discussion: The Roadmap to Executive function and Language (REaL) trial aims to evaluate the impact of a brief early parenting intervention on key factors for child development, including child cognition and parental behaviors. If this intervention is beneficial for child outcomes, that would be of significance for the development of early interventions to promote child development.

The development of gaze following begins in early infancy and its developmental foundation has been under heavy debate. Using a longitudinal design (N = 118), we demonstrate that attachment quality predicts individual differences in the onset of gaze following, at six months of age, and that maternal postpartum depression predicts later gaze following, at 10 months. In addition, we report longitudinal stability in gaze following from 6 to 10 months. A full path model (using attachment, maternal depression and gaze following at six months) accounted for 21% of variance in gaze following at 10 months. These results suggest an experience-dependent development of gaze following, driven by the infant's own motivation to interact and engage with others (the social-first perspective).