Coping With Early Adversity: Challenges for Infants in Foster Care
Mary Dozier, Department of Psychology, University of Delaware
Chair: David Pederson, University of Western Ontario

Infants who enter foster care have experienced disruptions in their relationships with primary caregivers and often maltreatment at the hands of caregivers. These basic relationship failures occur at a developmental point when infants are fully dependent on caregivers to meet basic needs. In this talk, I will consider what we know about how infants in foster care cope with these challenges, and conditions under which breakdowns in coping are seen. I will give an overview of intervention efforts that target key identified needs of young foster children. In addition to describing our intervention for foster parents, I will discuss modifications to the intervention for adoptive parents and for birth parents.

Parental Influences on Children's Achievement and Engagement in Academic and Other Skill-Based Domains
Jacquelynne S. Eccles, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan
Chair: Richard M. Lerner, Tufts University

In this talk I will present a general model for studying the role that parents play across childhood and adolescence in shaping their children's engagement and performance in school subjects (math, reading, science and English) and in other skill based domains (instrumental music, athletics, and computers). I will also summarize my research findings related to this model.

How Children Come to Believe in What They Cannot Observe
Paul Harris, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Chair: Alison Gopnik, University of California - Berkeley

Children rapidly come to be competent at, and enjoy engaging in, conversations about events that they themselves have not witnessed, or could not witness. I shall argue that children use their imagination to follow such conversations. I also argue that this capacity to make sense of other people's testimony—via the imagination—dramatically enlarges children's scope for knowing about the world. At the same time, it also leads them to believe in various metaphysical possibilities that they have no hope of checking for themselves.

Bilingualism at the Intersection of Research and Social Policy
Kenji Hakuta, School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, University of California - Merced
Chair: Ellen Bialystok, York University

There are many fundamental research questions about bilingualism that are of interest to policy makers: How long does it take children to learn a second language? What are the effects of bilingualism on cognitive and social development? Is there a critical period for second language learning? Does the official social recognition of bilingualism affect the maintenance or loss of the ethnic language? This lecture will draw on such questions and characterize the ways in which research knowledge about these questions have played out in social policy debates about education and the support of native languages.

Autism: From Description and Theory to Diagnosis to Etiology and Treatment (and Back Again)
Catherine Lord, Autism &Communication Disorders Center, University of Michigan
Chair: Marian Sigman, UCLA Medical School

Developmental conceptualizations and descriptions of the social and cognitive deficits that characterize autism spectrum disorders have led directly to the creation of methods for diagnosis and the ability to quantify differences in behavior. These standard diagnostic methods and classifications have contributed to investigations of the etiologies of autism, particularly genetics and brain function and to the development of treatment methods and measures of outcome. Implications of this synergism between description and theory and application will be considered. How findings in these areas have fostered reconsideration of the nature of autistic disorders will be highlighted, particularly as related to the field of developmental psychopathology and the study of both typical and atypical development.

Understanding How Infant Speech Perception Sets the Stage for Language Acquisition
Janet Werker, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
Chair: Richard Aslin, University of Rochester

From the moment they are born, infants show a number of surprising perceptual sensitivities to linguistic information. In this talk, I will review the perceptual biases infants show at birth, describe when and how these biases change as a function of experience listening to one versus another (or several) languages, and how the infants' changing perceptual biases set the stage for language acquisition.