To date, developmental research has rarely addressed the notion that imitation serves an interpersonal, socially based function. The present research thus examined the role of social engagement on 24-month-olds' imitation by manipulating the social availability of the model. In Experiment 1, the children were more likely to imitate the exact actions of a live socially responsive model compared to a videotaped model who could not provide socially contingent feedback. In Experiment 2, the children were more likely to imitate the exact actions of a model with whom they could communicate via a closed-circuit TV system than a videotaped model who could not provide interactive feedback. This research provides clear evidence that children's imitative behavior is affected by the social nature of the model. These findings are discussed in relation to theories on imitation and the video deficit.

We examined children's ability to translate their preverbal memories into language following a period of substantial language development. Children participated in a unique event, and their memory was assessed 6 months or 1 year later. At the time of the event and at the time of the test, their language skills were also assessed. Children of all ages exhibited evidence of verbal and nonverbal memory. Their language skills also improved over the delay. By the time of the test, children of all ages had acquired most of the vocabulary necessary to describe the target event. Despite this, they did not translate preverbal aspects of their memory into language during the test. In no instance did a child verbally report information about the event that was not part of his or her productive vocabulary at the time of encoding. We conclude that language development plays a pivotal role in childhood amnesia.

Infants' imitation of complex actions was examined in three experiments with 24-and 30-month-olds. In all experiments, an adult modeled a series of actions with novel stimuli and the infant's reproduction of those actions was assessed either immediately or after a 24-hour delay. Some infants watched the demonstration live, while other infants watched the same demonstration on television from a pre-recorded videotape. Both 24-and 30-month-olds imitated actions that had been modeled on television; however, their performance was consistently inferior to that of infants of the same age who watched the demonstration live.

What do toddlers learn from everyday picture-book reading interactions? To date, there has been scant research exploring this question. In this study, the authors adapted a standard imitation procedure to examine 18-to 30-month-olds' ability to learn how to reenact a novel action sequence from a picture book. The results provide evidence that toddlers can imitate specific target actions on novel real-world objects on the basis of a picture-book interaction. Children's imitative performance after the reading interaction varied both as a function of age and the level of iconicity of the pictures in the book. These findings are discussed in terms of children's emerging symbolic capacity and the flexibility of the cognitive representation.Keywords: picture books, reenactment, imitation, iconicity, symbols Picture-book reading plays a prominent role in young children's daily activities. From around 1 year of age, many children in Western cultures spend considerable time engaged in joint picturebook reading with their parents (DeBaryshe, 1993;Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman, & Pappas, 1998;Karrass, VanDeventer, & Braungart-Rieker, 2003;Payne, Whitehurst, & Angell, 1994). In a recent large-scale survey, parents of preschool children reported that they own dozens of children's picture books and spend around 40 min a day in picture-book interactions with their children (Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003).Most of the existing research on picture-book reading with toddlers has focused on the nature of the interaction and the relative contributions of parents and children to it (Fletcher & Reese, 2005). Parents use picture books as a teaching event: They point to and label pictures (Murphy, 1978;Ninio & Bruner, 1978), ask questions and provide feedback (DeLoache & DeMendoza, 1987;Ninio & Bruner, 1978), emphasize taxonomic category relations (Gelman et al., 1998), and elaborate on story lines (DeLoache & DeMendoza, 1987;Hayden, Reese, & Fivush, 1996). We know little, however, about what young children learn from these interactions and whether they relate the contents of books to the real world.Although it is widely assumed that toddlers learn a great deal about the world from picture-book interactions, there is reason to believe that this may be a relatively challenging task for very young children. Understanding that pictures in a book may represent real objects requires some level of pictorial competence-the ability to perceive, interpret, and understand the nature and use of pictures (DeLoache, 2002;DeLoache & Burns, 1994;DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, & Troseth, 1996). The development of full pictorial competence takes place gradually over several years.Very young infants can discriminate pictures and objects (DeLoache, Strauss, & Maynard, 1979;Slater, Rose, & Morrison, 1984), but they show little evidence of comprehending a picture as a representation of another entity (DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, Uttal, Rosengren, & Gottlieb, 1998). Nine-month-olds, for example, manually explore pictures in books; they feel, rub, and even...

Some normally developing young children show an intense, passionate interest in a particular category of objects or activities. The present article documents the existence of extremely intense interests that emerge very early in life and establishes some of the basic parameters of the phenomenon. Surveys and interviews with 177 parents revealed that nearly one third of young children have extremely intense interests. The nature of these intense interests is described, with particular focus on their emergence, commonalities in the content of the interests, and the reactions of other people to them. One of the most striking findings is a large gender difference: Extremely intense interests are much more common for young boys than for girls.