Children experiencing homelessness face particular barriers to accessing early interventions. Our study sought to explore the experiences of families in accessing Early Intervention Program services (EI) while living in a family shelter. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were undertaken with nineteen caregivers who had recently experienced or were contemporaneously experiencing homelessness from three shelter sites in Boston, Massachusetts. Our findings demonstrate the role of the shelter both in inhibiting and promoting access to early intervention. Shelter-related barriers included limited physical space, lack of care continuity amidst frequent relocations, and mistrust due to feelings of stigma. Early interventionists played a crucial role in mitigating challenges but were often unable to fully overcome these and other barriers tied to shelter environments. Effective strategies included flexibility in accommodating shifting schedules, provision of socioemotional support, and proactively linking caregivers to additional upstream resources. Efforts to mitigate shelter-related challenges will require interdisciplinary collaboration at both local and state levels. Further efforts should focus on providing increased continuity of care in a manner that acknowledges the structural barriers of homelessness.

Introduction:Community-based organizations (CBOs) are well-positioned to incorporate research evidence, local expertise, and contextual factors to address health inequities. However, insufficient capacity limits use of evidence-based interventions (EBIs) in these settings. Capacity-building implementation strategies are popular, but a lack of standard models and validated measures hinders progress in the field. To advance the literature, we conducted a comprehensive scoping review. Methods:With a reference librarian, we executed a comprehensive search strategy of PubMed/Medline, Web of Science Core Collection, and EBSCO Global Health. We included articles that addressed implementation science, capacity-building, and CBOs. Of 5527 articles, 99 met our inclusion criteria, and we extracted data using a double-coding process. Results:Of the 99 articles, 47% defined capacity explicitly, 31% defined it indirectly, and 21% did not define it. Common concepts in definitions were skills, knowledge/expertise, and resources. Of the 57 articles with quantitative analysis, 48 (82%) measured capacity, and 11 (23%) offered psychometric data for the capacity measures. Of the 99 studies, 40% focused exclusively on populations experiencing inequities and 22% included those populations to some extent. The bulk of the studies came from high-income countries. Conclusions:Implementation scientists should 1) be explicit about models and definitions of capacity and strategies for building capacity, 2) specify expected multi-level implementation outcomes, 3) develop and use validated measures for quantitative work, and 4) integrate equity considerations into the conceptualization and measurement of capacity-building efforts. With these refinements, we can ensure that the necessary supports reach CBO practitioners and critical partners for addressing health inequities.

How do children reason about people presented over video chat? Video chat is a representation, like a picture; but is also a real social interaction (the partner sees and hears you). Do children understand the nuanced affordances and limitations of video chat? We tested 4-year-old children’s reasoning, asking if a person over video chat (vs. a live person; photograph) could see, hear, feel, and physically interact through the screen. Children judged that a person over video chat can see, but cannot feel nor receive an object, through the screen. The person over video chat was judged to hear more often than a photograph, but less often than a live person. Preschool children are not limited to considering a stimulus fully representational, or fully present; instead, they understand video chat as a medium that blurs the boundaries of representation and reality, allowing for a mixture of life-like affordances and picture-like limitations.

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, 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 in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure.

Recently, Bélanger, Slattery, Mayberry and Rayner showed, using the moving-window paradigm, that profoundly deaf adults have a wider perceptual span during reading relative to hearing adults matched on reading level. This difference might be related to the fact that deaf adults allocate more visual attention to simple stimuli in the parafovea. Importantly, this reorganization of visual attention in deaf individuals is already manifesting in deaf children. This leads to questions about the time course of the emergence of an enhanced perceptual span (which is under attentional control) in young deaf readers. The present research addressed this question by comparing the perceptual spans of young deaf readers (age 7-15) and young hearing readers (age 7-15). Young deaf readers, like deaf adults, were found to have a wider perceptual span relative to their hearing peers matched on reading level, suggesting that strong and early reorganization of visual attention in deaf individuals goes beyond the processing of simple visual stimuli and emerges into more cognitively complex tasks, such as reading.

Semantic preview benefit in reading is an elusive and controversial effect because empirical studies do not always (but sometimes) find evidence for it. Its presence seems to depend on (at least) the language being read, visual properties of the text (e.g., initial letter capitalization), the type of relationship between preview and target, and as shown here, semantic constraint generated by the prior sentence context. Schotter (2013) reported semantic preview benefit for synonyms, but not semantic associates when the preview/target was embedded in a neutral sentence context. In Experiment 1, we embedded those same previews/targets into constrained sentence contexts and in Experiment 2 we replicated the effects reported by Schotter (2013; in neutral sentence contexts) and Experiment 1 (in constrained contexts) in a within-subjects design. In both experiments, we found an early (i.e., first-pass) apparent preview benefit for semantically associated previews in constrained contexts that went away in late measures (e.g., total time). These data suggest that sentence constraint (at least as manipulated in the current study) does not operate by making a single word form expected, but rather generates expectations about what kinds of words are likely to appear. Furthermore, these data are compatible with the assumption of the E-Z Reader model that early oculomotor decisions reflect "hedged bets" that a word will be identifiable and, when wrong, lead the system to identify the wrong word, triggering regressions.