Nevena Dimitrova

University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, Faculty of Social Work (HETSL | HES-SO)

L’accès à des services de soutien pour les parents d’enfants présentant des troubles neurodéveloppementaux permet d’augmenter le potentiel de développement de l’enfant et de réduire les charges mentales, physiques, financières et organisationnelles des familles. L’objectif de cette étude est d’identifier les besoins perçus par les parents de Suisse...

Older children with online schooling requirements, unsurprisingly, were reported to have increased screen time during the first COVID-19 lockdown in many countries. Here, we ask whether younger children with no similar online schooling requirements also had increased screen time during lockdown. We examined children’s screen time during the first C...

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 activit...

Production and comprehension of gesture emerge early and are key to subsequent language development in typical development. Compared to typically developing (TD) children, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit difficulties and/or differences in gesture production. However, we do not yet know if gesture production either shows simila...

A preterm birth represents a stressful event having potentially negative long-term consequences. Thirty-three children born preterm (<33 weeks gestational age) and eleven full-term children participated in a nine-year longitudinal study. Perinatal Risk Inventory (PERI) was used at birth to assess the perinatal stress. Salivary cortisol, collected f...

Background: Inborn errors of metabolism (IEMs) refer to rare heterogeneous genetic disorders with various clinical manifestations that can cause serious physical and psychological sequelae. Results of previous studies on the impact of an IEM on health-related quality of life (HR-QoL) were incongruent and only few studies considered more broadly the...

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 exace...

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 activit...

Although infants' social gaze has specific communicative functions, it remains unclear what they are. In this conceptual analysis paper, we provide a theoretical framework for the study of the functional aspects of eye gaze in early childhood. We argue that studying the communicative functions of infants' eye gaze involves three premises: the centr...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produce fewer deictic gestures, accompanied by delays/deviations in speech development, compared to typically-developing (TD) children. We ask whether children with ASD—like TD children—show right-hand preference in gesturing and whether right-handed gestures predict their vocabulary size in speech. Our...

Across cultures, people associate colours with emotions. Here, we test the hypothesis that one driver of this cross-modal correspondence is the physical environment we live in. We focus on a prime example – the association of yellow with joy, – which conceivably arises because yellow is reminiscent of life-sustaining sunshine and pleasant weather....

I address the importance of interactions between the infant/young child and their social partners in psychological development. Although, in his theoretical postulates, Piaget acknowledged the "other," in this target article, Ratcliff omits any consideration of how social partners contribute to the infant's discovery of her own body and agency.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or with Down syndrome (DS) show diagnosis-specific differences from typi- cally developing (TD) children in gesture production. We asked whether these differences reflect the differences in parental gesture input. Our systematic observations of 23 children with ASD and 23 with DS (Mages = 2;6)—compared t...

Background: Very preterm (VPT) birth refers to an early stressful event putting children at heightened risk for emotional difficulties. However, there is an important individual variability, leaving unexplained why some VPT children do not develop emotional difficulties, while others develop such difficulties in the early years or later in life....

Baby sign but not spontaneous gesture predicts later vocabulary in children with Down Syndrome – CORRIGENDUM - ŞEYDA ÖZÇALIŞKAN*, LAUREN B. ADAMSON, NEVENA DIMITROVA, JHONELLE BAILEY, LAUREN SCHMUCK

Gesture comprehension remains understudied, particularly in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have difficulties in gesture production. Using a novel gesture comprehension task, Study 1 examined how 2- to 4-year-old typically-developing (TD) children comprehend types of gestures and gesture-speech combinations, and showed better compr...

Typically developing (TD) children refer to objects uniquely in gesture (e.g., point at cat) before they produce verbal labels for these objects (“cat”; Bates et al., 1979). The onset of such gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words, showing a strong positive relation between early gestures and early words (Iverson & Goldin‐Meadow, 2005)...

Children express their burgeoning abilities in referential communication initially in gesture. Parents frequently provide verbal labels for the referents children express only in gesture but not yet in speech, which, in turn boosts children’s subsequent vocabulary development. In this chapter, we ask wheth- er the link between early gesture and ear...

Typically-developing (TD) children frequently refer to objects uniquely in gesture. Parents translate these gestures into words, facilitating children's acquisition of these words (Goldin-Meadow et al. in Dev Sci 10(6):778-785, 2007). We ask whether this pattern holds for children with autism (AU) and with Down syndrome (DS) who show delayed vocabu...

Research with typically developing children suggests a strong positive relation between early gesture use and subsequent vocabulary development. In this study, we ask whether gesture production plays a similar role for children with autism spectrum disorder. We observed 23 18-month-old typically developing children and 23 30-month-old children with...

Early spontaneous gesture, specifically deictic gesture, predicts subsequent vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. Here, we ask whether deictic gesture plays a similar role in predicting later vocabulary size in children with Down Syndrome (DS), who have been shown to have difficulties in speech production, but strengths in...

Suite à une naissance prématurée, les parents vivent un stress parfois intense et l’enfant expérimente un début de vie particulier où les contacts corporels proches sont quelque peu entravés. Ces éléments peuvent marquer la mise en place de la régulation émotionnelle chez le petit enfant. Les capacités de mentalisation s’ancrent au moins en partie...

Developmental psychology researchers examine the temporal relationships of social and communicative behaviors, such as how a child responds to a name call, to understand early typical and atypical development and to discover early signs of autism and developmental delay. These related behaviors occur together or within close temporal proximity, for...

Background: At the one word-stage, typically developing (TD) children often produce gestures conveying unique information not found in the accompanying speech (e.g., “eat”+point at cookie); and parents provide labels for the referents indicated in gesture, translating their children’s gestures into words. Importantly, approximately 75% of the refer...

Background: Children refer to objects with their hands (e.g., point at cat) before they can produce verbal labels for these objects (“cat”; Bates et al., 1979). Importantly, the onset of such deictic gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words in typically developing (TD) children, showing a strong positive relation between early deictic ge...

Children use gesture to refer to objects before they produce labels for these objects and gesture-speech combinations to convey semantic relations between objects before conveying sentences in speech-a trajectory that remains largely intact across children with different developmental profiles. Can the developmental changes that we observe in child...

Caregivers modify their communication when interacting with infants, and these modifications have been related to children's language development. However, the factors influencing caregivers' modification of gestures are understudied. This study examined whether infants' object knowledge, considered as common ground shared with the caregiver, relat...

Intentional communication, including early gestures produced by infants, implies sharing meanings about the communicative referent. Despite this general assumption, intentional communication in infancy is majorly apprehended as an instrumental activity consisting of using others in order to obtain a goal (i. e. social tool use, Bates, 1976). Relyin...

The aim of this paper is to bring into consideration a way of studying culture in infancy. An emphasis is put on the role that the material object plays in early interactive processes. Accounted as a cultural artefact, the object is seen as a fundamental element within triadic mother‐object‐ infant i...

The risk of adverse psychological outcomes in adult victims of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse (CSA) has been documented; however, research on possible mediating variables is still required, namely with a clinical perspective. The attachment literature suggests that secure interpersonal relationships may represent such a variable. Twenty-eigh...

The long-term implications of sexual abuse in childhood or adolescence (CSA) have been relatively well documented regarding attachment (disorganized attachment in childhood, unresolved trauma in adulthood), stress reactions (altered patterns of stress reactivity under experimental conditions), and psychopathology. Attachment has been shown to media...

The aim of this paper is to present McHale's coparenting scale,a self-administered questionnaire enabling assessment of the quality of coparenting, and first steps in structural and construct validation of the French version. A total of 41 French speaking Swiss families and 84 US families completed this questionnaire and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale...

Role reversal, whereby a child attempts to meet her parent's adult needs for parenting, intimacy, or companionship, has been identified as a risk factor for developmental disturbances. It has been defined from diverse perspectives as a child attachment strategy, a parent - toddler relational disturbance, and a boundary disturbance between parents a...