What do infancy research and Dr. Pangloss have in common? Find out when Bob McMurray, Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa, joins Eric and Mark for this installment of DeLTAcast. We take a wide-ranging look at the developmental origins of language and tackle other questions big and small—from the reality of the phoneme to where the field of developmental psychology is headed in this best of all possible worlds.

Are you afraid of spiders or snakes? Have you ever wondered where our fears come from? Dr. Vanessa LoBue has been searching for the origins of our deepest fears by studying how they develop in young children. Her findings, which we discuss in this latest edition of DeLTAcast, may surprise you. Vanessa has a blog called The Baby Scientist which has the goal of helping moms (and dads) interpret science.

Parents the world over are fascinated by their newborn’s ability to imitate. But, is this ability an illusion? This month on DeLTAcast, we talk with Virginia Slaughter, a developmental psychologist whose latest findings on newborn imitation surprised even herself. Slaughter, a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, talks with us about the long-simmering controversy over whether babies can or cannot imitate their parents and what it tells us about science, scientists, and ourselves.

What's going on in the science of stuttering? This month, Tricia Zebrowski, Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa, delves into today's big questions in stuttering research with hosts Eric S. Jackson and Mark Blumberg. Why do only some of the children who stutter continue stuttering into adulthood? How is it that stutterers can speak fluently in some contexts but not others? What can we learn from studying the development of stuttering in real-time? They then turn their attention to a recent study using mutant mice and ask: Can mice teach us anything useful about stuttering?

On this second installment of DeLTAcast, Matt Kayser joins hosts Eric S. Jackson and Mark Blumberg to talk about that humble creature, the fly, and what it can tell us about sleep and development. Matt, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, disabuses us of the notion that flies are so simple and evolutionarily distant from mammals that they can't possibly help us understand ourselves. Like humans and all other mammals, flies sleep more when they are young, a fact that Matt is using to probe the brain of these tiny insects to unravel the mysteries of sleep.

John Spencer is the special guest on this inaugural episode of DeLTAcast. John, the founding director of the DeLTA Center, joins hosts Eric S. Jackson and Mark Blumberg to discuss the early days of the DeLTA Center, Mark and John's collection of essays (co-edited with David Shenk) that is soon to be published by Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs), the virtues of the developmental systems perspective, the joys of Manhattans (the cocktail), and much more.