About the Book

The behavioral and brain sciences are faced with important new challenges at the beginning of the new millennium. The enormous progress in cognitive neuroscience, and the importance of genetic factors and gene-environment interactions in shaping behavioral functions in early childhood, have both underscored the primacy of early experience and development on brain development and function.

The contributors to this volume discuss different paradigms and approaches in infant language and cognition, pushing the frontiers of research by innovatively combining methods, introducing new measures, and demonstrating the use of technologies and measurement approaches that can inform the study of word learning and categorization, gaze, attention, gesture, and physiological functions. The volume offers a blend of theories and empirical evidence to support, refute, or modify them. Most chapters examine the link between theory and methodology, and their appearance together in a single volume serves to inform and engage multiple disciplines, to engage everyone to think across disciplines and paradigms, to embrace the integration of creativity and science as the field continues to study in greater depth and with innovative measures and approaches, the infant pathways to language

This volume is derived from presentations and discussions from a workshop, sponsored jointly by the Merrill Advanced Studies Center, University of Kansas, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, Maryland.