Chapter 5: Exam 1 Flashcards
Schemes
Psychologist Jean Piaget labeled children’s concepts of the world.
Assimilation
Used by children to absorb new events into exiting schemes.
4 Stages of Cognitive Development
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
During early childhood 2-5 years old
Pretend imaginative thinking, capacity for symbolic thought (language) - Concrete operational
In middle childhood, understanding concepts well when they are physically present (like learning addition) - Formal operational
Adolescents, abstract thinking in figurative language (literature and writing), and algebraic expressions. Outside social events and peers present hypothetical thinking as well.
Sensorimotor Stage
1st stage of cognitive development, which leads through infancy and is generally characterized by an increasingly complex coordination of sensory experiences with motor activity.
First two years of cognitive development
(a time when infants progress from responding to events with reflexes, or ready-made schemes, to goal-oriented behavior)
Six Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage
- Simple Reflex
- Primary Circular Reactions
- Secondary Circular Reactions
- Coordination of Secondary Schemes
- Tertiary Circular Reactions
- Invention of New Means Through Mental Combinations
Simple Reflex
1st month after birth is dominated by the assimilation of sources of stimulation into inborn reflexes such as grasping or visual tracking.
Primary Circular Reaction
Repetition of actions that first occurred by chance and that focus on the infant’s own body
(About 1 to 4 months)
Secondary Circular Reaction
Repetition of actions that produce an effect on the environment
(About 4 to 8 months)
Coordination of Secondary Schemes
Can coordinate schemes to attain specific goals beginning to show intentional, goal-directed behavior in which they differentiate between the means of achieving a goal and the goal or end of itself.
(About 8 to 12 months)
Tertiary Circular Reaction
Purposeful adaption of established schemes to new situations
(About 12 to 18 months)
Invention of New Means Through Mental Combinations
Serves as a transition between sensorimotor development and the development of symbolic thought. External exploration is replaced by mental exploration.
(About 18 to 24 months)
Object Permanence
Recognition that objects continue to exist when they are not in view
(an important aspect of sensorimotor development)
Truth or Fiction
For two-month infants, “out of sight” is truly “out of mind”
True
They do not reliably mentally represent the objects they see.
A-not-B error
error made when an infant selects a familiar hiding place (A) for an object rather than a new hiding place, even after the infant has seen it hidden in the new place
(8 to 12 months)
Deferred imitation
The imitation of people and events that occurred in the past (mentally represented behavior patterns)
early as 9 months to 18 months
Information Processing Approach
View of cognitive development that focuses on how children manipulate sensory information and/or information stored in memory.
(infants’ tools include their memory and imitation)
Infant’s memory
- Memory improves dramatically between 2 and 6 months and again by 12 months
*Older infants are more capable than younger ones of encoding information, retrieving information already stored, or both.
Truth or Fiction
One-hour old infant may imitate an adult who sticks out his or her tongue
True
This feat is probably made possible by mirror neurons
Mirror Neurons
They are activated when the individual performs a motor act or observes another individual engaging in the same act.
- Connected with emotions (frontal lobe)
*Active when people experience disgust, happiness, pain, and when they observe another experiencing an emotion - Also with the instinctive human ability to acquire language
Bayley Scales of Infant Development
(intellectual Development among Infants)
- Mental Scale - assesses verbal communication, perceptual skills, learning and memory, and problem-solving skills
- Motor Scale - Assesses gross motor skills, such as the ability to manipulate the hands and fingers
- Behavior Rating Scale - Based on examiner observation of the child during the test. Assesses attention span, goal-directedness, persistence, and aspects of social and emotional development.
* It Remains unclear how well results obtained in infancy predict intellectual functioning at later ages*
Truth or Fiction
Psychologists can begin to measure intelligence in infancy
True
They use items that differ from the kinds of items used with older children and adults
There is always controversy about what researchers are actually measuring when they set out to measure “intelligence.”
Visual Recognition Memory
Kind of memory shown in an infant’s ability to discriminate previously seen objects from novel objects (based on habituation)
*Increase over the first year after birth
- Test of visual recognition hold better promises as predictors of intelligence at older ages.
Prelinguistic
Vocalizations made by an infant before the use of language
- Children develop language according to an invariant sequence of steps, or stage
Truth or Fiction
Infant crying is a primitive form of language
Fiction
In true language, words are symbols for objects or events. Cries may express discomfort, but they are not symbols.
Cooing
Prelinguistic vowel-like sounds reflect feelings of positive excitement
(During 2nd month)
Early parent-child “conversations,” in which parents respond to coos and then pause as the infant coos, may foster infant awareness of taking turns as a way of verbally relating to other people
Babbling
The child’s first vocalizations that have sounds of speech
Frequently combining consonants and vowels, as in a ba, ga, and sometimes dada
Echolalia
The automatic repetition of sounds or words
Intonation
The use of pitches of varying levels to help communicate meaning
- Use patterns of rising and falling that resemble sounds of adult speech*
Development of Vocabulary
Refers to a child’s learning the meanings of words.
Receptive Vocabulary
The number of words one understands
Expressive Vocabulary
The number of words one can use in the production of language
Children’s receptive vocabulary development outpaces their expressive vocabulary
A good predictor of infants’ vocabulary at 24 months
The ability to segment speech sounds into meaningful units-or-words before 12 months
Child’s first word
Typically between the ages of 11 and 13 months
But a range of 8 to 18 months is considered normal.
a. brief short, one or two syllables
b. consistent of a consonant followed by a vowel
c. may take 3 or 4 months to achieve vocabulary of 10 to 30 words after first word
Children may be producing up to 50 words
By about 18 months
- Many are familiar words like no, cookie, mama, hi, and eat.
- Others are functional words like all gone and bye-bye (they are used consistently to symbolize the same meaning*
General and Specific Nominals
More than half (65%) of children first words
General Nominals
Similar to nouns, including to names of objects (car, ball), animals (doggy, cat), and people (boy, girl), but also include both personal and relative pronouns (she, that)
Specific Nominals
Proper nouns such as Daddy and Rover
Rapid Burst in Vocabulary
At about 18 to 22 months
*May increase from 50 to more than 300 words in only a few months
vocabulary spurt could also be a naming explosion due to 75% of the words added during this time are nouns
Overextensions
Use of words in situations in which their meanings become extended
Development of Sentences
Infants’ first sentences are typically one-word utterances, but they express complete ideas and, therefore can thought of as sentences
Telegraphic Speech
Type of speech in which only the essential words are used. (Such as nouns, verbs, and some modifiers)
Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)
The average number of morphemes used in an utterance
Morphemes
The smallest unit of meaning in a language
Maybe a whole word or part of a word, such as a prefix or suffix
Example: Word “walked” consists of two morphemes: the verb “walk” and the suffix “ed,” which changes the verb to the past tense.
Two types of Telegraphic Speech
*Holophrase
*Two-word Utterances
Holophrase
A single word that is used to express complex meanings
*the child may use Mama to signify meanings as varied as “There goes Mama”, “Come Here, Mama”, and “You are Mama.” *
Two-word Utterances
When the child’s vocabulary consists of 50 to 100 words
- Somewhere between 18 to 24 months, telegraphic two-word sentences begin to appear*
In the sentence “That Ball” the word ‘is’ and ‘a’ are implied
Syntax
The rules in a language for placing words in order to form sentences
Models
In learning theory, those whose behaviors are imitated by others
children learn by observation and imitation
Extinction
Decrease in frequency of response due to absence of reinforcement
Shaping
The gradual building of complex behavior through reinforcement of successive approximations to the target behavior
*Parents require that children’s utterances be progressively closer to actual words before they are reinforced
- Reinforcement can accelerate the growth of vocabulary in children
Studies show that language growth in young children is enhanced when adults
- Use “motherse” (infant-directed)
- Use questions that engage the child in conversation
- Respond to the child’s expressive language efforts in a way that is “attuned.”
Example: Say “Yes, your doll is pretty” in response to the child’s statement “My doll” - Gesture to help the child understand what they are saying
- Describe aspects of the environment occupying the infant’s current focus of attention
- Read to the child
- Talk to the child a great deal
Truth or Fiction
You can advance children’s development of pronunciation by correcting their errors.
Fiction
Their vocabulary may not develop as rapidly if you focus on pronunciation.
Psychological Theory
The view is that language learning involves an interaction between environmental influences and an inborn tendency to acquire language.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Neural “prewiring” eases the child’s learning of grammar.
Surface Structure
The superficial grammatical construction of a sentence
Deep Structure
The underlying meaning of a sentence
Brain Structures involved in Language
The basis for functions of the LAD is based in the Left Hemisphere of the cerebral cortex for nearly all right-handed people and 2 out of 3 left-handed people.
Two areas most involved in Speech
*Broca’s Area
* Wernicke’s Area
Aphasia
Disruption in the ability to understand or produce language (damage to either area)
Broca’s Area
Located near the section of the motor cortex that controls the muscles of the tongue and throat and other areas at the face used for speech.
Broca’s Aphasia
An aphasia caused by damage to Broca’s area and characterized by difficulty speaking
(But can understand speech)
Wernicke’s area
It lies near the auditory cortex and is connected to Broca’s area by nerves
Wernicke’s Aphasia
An aphasia caused by damage to Weinicke’s area and characterized by impaired comprehension of speech and difficulty producing the right word
Angular Gyrus
Lies between the visual cortex and Wernicke’s area, translates visual information, such as written words, into auditory information (sounds), and sends it to Wernicke’s area. Problems in this area can cause problems in reading because it is difficult for the reader to segment words into sounds
Critical Period
The period from about 18 months to puberty when the brain is especially capable of learning language AKA: Sensitive Period
