Papers by Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez
Stemming from an existing pre-registered project, on the role of SES and home activities on early... more Stemming from an existing pre-registered project, on the role of SES and home activities on early language development in 8-36-month-old infants (https://osf.io/r85fw) during the first Covid-19 lockdown period in Spring 2020 (March-September 2020), the current project examines, across 11 countries, the impact of lockdown on infants' well-being. In particular, it aims at evaluating how activities that young children engaged in during lockdown (with or without a parent) and their language skills impacted their well-being (cf. details below), and how infants' well-being impacted their vocabulary gains, in production and comprehension, during lockdown.
Documentation of timeline of project registration
Infancy, 2022
Early executive functions (EFs) lay the foundations for academic and social outcomes. In this par... more Early executive functions (EFs) lay the foundations for academic and social outcomes. In this parent-report study of 575 UK-based 8- to 36 month olds (218 followed longitudinally), we investigate how variation in the home environment before and during the 2020 pandemic relates to infants' emerging EFs. Parent-infant enriching activities were positively associated with infant Cognitive Executive Function (CEF) (encompassing inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility). During the most-restrictive UK lockdown-but not subsequently-socioeconomic status (SES) was positively associated with levels of parent-infant enriching activities. Parents who regard fostering early learning, affection, and attachment as important were more likely to engage in parent-infant enriching activities, yet there was no significant pathway from parental attitudes or SES to CEF via activities. Infant screen use was negatively associated with CEF and Regulation. Screen use fully mediated the effect of SES on CEF, and partially mediated the effect of SES on regulation. Parental attitudes toward early learning, affection, and attachment did not significantly influence screen use. These results indicate that although parental attitudes influence the development of early EFs, interventions targeting attitudes as a means of increasing enriching activities, and thus EF are likely to be less effective than reducing barriers to engaging in enriching activities.
Variation in infants’ home environment is implicated in their cognitive and psycho-social develop... more Variation in infants’ home environment is implicated in their cognitive and psycho-social development. The pandemic has intensified variations in home environments through exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities, and increasing psychological stressors for some families. This study investigates the effects of parental (predominantly maternal) mental health, enriching activities and screen use on 280 24- to 52-month-olds’ executive functions, internalising and externalising problems, and pro-social behaviour; with socioeconomic status and social support as contextual factors. Our results indicate that aspects of the home environment are differentially associated with children’s cognitive and psycho-social development. Parents who experienced sustained mental distress during the pandemic tended to report higher child externalising and internalising problems, and executive function difficulties at follow-up. Children who spent more time engaged in enriching activities with their parents...
High-quality, centre-based Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) benefits toddlers' devel... more High-quality, centre-based Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) benefits toddlers' development. New research investigated the effects of the COVID-19 disruptions on attendance and learning. It showed that ECEC boosted language and thinking skills throughout the pandemic, particularly in children from less advantaged backgrounds. This shows the importance of fully-funded ECEC for developing key skills and for levelling inequalities.
Supplemental material, Frank_AMPPSOpenPracticesDisclosure-v1.0 for Quantifying Sources of Variabi... more Supplemental material, Frank_AMPPSOpenPracticesDisclosure-v1.0 for Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference by The ManyBabies Consortium in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
The Encyclopedia of Child and Adolescent Development, 2020
The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In ... more The ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior-anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two non-adjacent vowels. Experiments 1 and 2 show that a preference for PA over AP (anterior-posterior) words emerges between 10 and 13 months in French-learning infants. Control experiments show that this bias cannot be explained by adjacent or positional preferences. The present study demonstrates that infants become sensitive to non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities between 10 and 13 months, showing the existence of a delay for the acquisition of nonadjacent vocalic regularities compared to equivalent non-adjacent consonantal regularities. These results are consistent with the CV hypothesis, according to which consonants and vowels play different roles at different linguistic levels.
The link between motor development and language acquisition among infants has been extensively ex... more The link between motor development and language acquisition among infants has been extensively explored. Evidence highlights a significant increase in language acquisition with walking onset as reported by parental questionnaires. However, due to discrepancies observed within parental report measures, this link between language and motor development cannot be determined. The present study, therefore, aimed to verify parental questionnaire validity using infant preferential task measures, further examining the influence of locomotor status (crawler vs. walker) on infant language acquisition. 26 infants’ (aged 9 to 17 months) receptive vocabulary was reported using parental responses to the ‘Oxford Communicative Developmental Inventory’ (CDI) – a vocabulary questionnaire. To verify the CDI validity, infants were tested using a preferential looking paradigm in relation to whether parents had reported words known and unknown. Infants watched eight videos; four pairs of reported known wo...
This study examined children’s screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (... more This study examined children’s screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in a large cohort (n=2209) of 8-to-36-month-olds sampled from 15 labs across 11 countries. Caregivers reported that young infants and toddlers with no online schooling requirements were exposed to more screen time during lockdown than before lockdown. While this was exacerbated for countries with longer lockdowns, there was no evidence that the increase in screen time during lockdown was associated with children’s demographics, e.g., age, SES. However, screen time during lockdown was negatively associated with child age and SES and positively associated with caregiver screen time and attitudes towards children’s screen time. The results highlight the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on young children’s screen time.
Infant and Child Development, 2021
High-quality, centre-based education and care during the early years benefit cognitive developmen... more High-quality, centre-based education and care during the early years benefit cognitive development, especially in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. During the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns, access to early childhood education and care (ECEC) was disrupted. We investigate how this period affected the developmental advantages typically offered by ECEC. Using parent-report data from 189 families living in the UK, we explore associations between time spent in ECEC by 8-to-36-month-olds, their socioeconomic background, and their growth in language and executive functions between Spring and Winter 2020. Receptive vocabulary growth was greater in children who continued to attend ECEC during the period, with a stronger positive effect for children from less advantaged backgrounds. The growth of cognitive executive functions (CEFs) was boosted by ECEC attendance during the period, Catherine Davies and Alexandra Hendry are joint first authors.
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedent... more The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged 8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries (from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development, or vocabulary developm...
Infancy, 2020
Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. ... more Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non-verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as they encounter less consistency between words and objects than monolingual infants, and do not always have access to the same word-learning heuristics (e.g., mutual exclusivity). In a preregistered study, we tested the hypothesis that bilingual experience would lead to a more pronounced ability to follow another's gaze. We used a gaze-following paradigm developed by Senju and Csibra (Current Biology, 18, 2008, 668) to test a total of 93 6-to 9-month-old and 229 12-to 15-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants, in 11 laboratories located in 8 | 5 BYERS-HEINLEIN Et aL.
Developmental Science, 2020
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-direct... more From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multi-lab ManyBabies project, we compared lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 385 monolingual infants’ preference for North-American English IDS (cf. ManyBabies Consortium, in press (MB1)), tested in 17 labs in 7 countries. Those infants were tested in two age groups: 6–9 months (the younger sample) and 12–15 months (the older sample). We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, amongst bilingual infants who were acquiring No...
The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and ... more The field of psychology has become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability. Infancy researchers face specific challenges related to replicability: high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations, amongst other factors. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multi-site study aimed at 1) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically-important phenomenon and 2) examining methodological, situational, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult were created using semi-naturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings in North American English. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across XYZ laboratories in North America and Europe using the three common...
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Papers by Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez