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Agricultural activities in the Caribbean, especially banana cropping, are known for their significant use of pesticides. In particular is chlordecone, which was used between 1972 and 1993 against the banana root borer, Cosmopolites sordidus (Germar, 1824). In this context, “Kannari study: Health, Nutrition and Exposition to Chlordecone in French West Indies” was put in place in 2013–2014 to supplement knowledge about the exposure of the population to chlordecone and other organochlorine pollutants. The data collected comprised a dietary intake description, data from biological samples (blood sample), socioeconomic and demographic information, and data from complementary specific items relative to life habits. A total of 742 subjects (292 in Guadeloupe and 450 in Martinique) were included in the impregnation component of the Kannari study. In this study, chlordecone and organochlorine compounds were detected in almost all participants. This result suggests that exposure to chlordecone is widespread, but also to other organochlorine pesticides. Chlordecone impregnation of the majority of the population appears to have decreased between 2003 and 2013, but various subgroups of the population remain highly exposed. The levels of impregnation are determined by dietary exposure and environmental contamination. However, total consumption of fresh fish (all species combined), especially from informal channels, is the main source of exposure to chlordecone. The serum PCB concentrations measured in the French Caribbean Islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are lower than those observed in metropolitan France in 2007 (French Nutrition and Health Survey (ENNS)). In contrast, the French West Indies population seems more exposed to lindane than the French mainland population, and this exposure also seems more recent.

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.

This study examines and compares prominent characteristics of maternal responsiveness to infant activity during home‐based naturalistic interactions of mother‐infant dyads in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Both culture‐general and culture‐specific patterns of responsiveness emerged. For example, in all 3 locales infants behaved similarly, mothers also behaved similarly with respect to a hierarchy of response types, and mothers and infants manifest both specificity and mutual appropriateness in their interactions: Mothers responded to infants' exploration of the environment with encouragement to the environment, to infants' vocalizing nondistress with imitation, and to infants' vocalizing distress with nurturance. Differences in maternal responsiveness among cultures occurred to infant looking rather than to infant vocalizing and in mothers' emphasizing dyadic versus extradyadic loci of interaction. Universals of maternal responsiveness, potential sources of cultural variation, and implications of similarities and differences in responsiveness for child development in different cultural contexts are discussed.

This study examines and compares prominent characteristics of maternal responsiveness to infant activity during home-based naturalistic interactions of mother-infant dyads in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Both culture-general and culture-specific patterns of responsiveness emerged. For example, in all 3 locales infants behaved similarly, mothers also behaved similarly with respect to a hierarchy of response types, and mothers and infants manifest both specificity and mutual appropriateness in their interactions: Mothers responded to infants' exploration of the environment with encouragement to the environment, to infants' vocalizing nondistress with imitation, and to infants' vocalizing distress with nurturance. Differences in maternal responsiveness among cultures occurred to infant looking rather than to infant vocalizing and in mothers' emphasizing dyadic versus extradyadic loci of interaction. Universals of maternal responsiveness, potential sources of cultural variation, and implications of similarities and differences in responsiveness for child development in different cultural contexts are discussed.

L'apprentissage est le fondement de l'expérience humaine. C'est la trame commune à travers les cultures et les régions du monde, et c'est un lien continu et flexible à travers les différents stades de la vie dans le développement humain. Tout autour du monde, les inégalités d'accès à l'apprentissage et leurs conséquences ont un impact réel sur le revenu, la mobilité sociale, la santé et le bien-être. Le présent ouvrage retrace les chemins suivis par le développement international, depuis ses origines précoloniales, en passant par la montée de l'économie du développement jusqu'à l'émergence du concept d'équité de l'apprentissage.

Tactual discriminative abilities out of the control of vision are studied in 5-month-old infants, and compared with their visual discriminative abilities. The relevance of a habituation/reaction to novelty procedure in the tactual modality is tested. An infant control procedure is used in both modalities on 2 independent samples of 32 infants each. Habituation and discrimination occur tactually as well as visually, the duration of holds decreasing more than the duration of looks. Accumulated holding time is 3 times longer than accumulated looking time. Analogies and discrepancies between tactual and visual habituations are discussed, and the problem of sensory dominance is raised. Such results are basic to studies on cross-modal transfer, from vision to touch as well as from touch to vision.