Catherine Tamis-LeMonda

Catherine Tamis-LeMonda is Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, and Human Development. Her research is focused on infant and toddler learning and development among diverse populations in the United States and in Europe, Central Asia and East Asia. Her research considers the development and contexts of young children’s language and communication, object play, cognition, motor skills, gender identity, emotion regulation, and social understanding, and the long term implications of early emerging skills for children’s developmental trajectories. She investigates how skills in different domains reciprocally affect one another and snowball over time (that is, the theoretical construct of “developmental cascades”), and examines the role of socio-cultural context on early development. A core emphasis of this research is on the quality of mothers’ and fathers’ interactions with children –in particular their contingent responsiveness and richness of child-directed language – in relation to children’s development and, conversely, how emerging communicative skills in children influence their everyday learning experiences and interactions with parents.