Chapter 7 Early Childhood: Physical & Cognitive Development Flashcards

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1
Q

What is the ‘corpus callosum?’

A

The thick bundle of nerve fibres which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

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2
Q

What does ‘plasticity’ mean?

A

The tendency of new parts of the brain to take up the functions of injured parts.
* The brain shows plasticity in early childhood.

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3
Q

What are ‘gross motor skills?’

A

Skills employing the large muscles used in locomotion.

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4
Q

What are ‘fine motor skills?’

A

Skills employing the small muscles used in manipulation, such as those in the fingers.

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5
Q

What are ‘nightmares?’

A

Dreams of disturbing and vivid content.

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6
Q

What are ‘sleep terrors?’

A

Frightening dreamlike experiences that occur during the deepest stage of the non-REM stage, shortly after the child has gone to sleep.

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7
Q

What is ‘somnambulism?’

A

Sleepwalking. Sleep walker’s eyes are usually open; if awakened, they may show confusion but are unlikely to be violent.

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8
Q

What are the two elimination disorders?

A

Enuresis and encopresis.

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9
Q

What is ‘enuresis?’

A

Failure to control the bladder (urination) once the normal age for control has been reached. Children would not be considered enuretic unless they wet themselves moe than twice a week after the age of five.
* At five years: 10-15% of children
* At 8 Years: 6-8 % children
* More common in boys than girls; occurs in the deepest stage of sleep
* Associated with physical maturity of the bladder, not emotional or behavioural issues

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10
Q

When do children normally develop ‘controlling the bladder’ (average age)?

A

Most Canadian children are toilet trained between the ages of 2 and 3 years old.

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11
Q

What is ‘bed-wetting?’

A

Failure to control the bladder during the night.

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12
Q

What is ‘encopresis?’

A

Failure to control the bowels once the normal age for bowel control has been reached; is also called soiling.
* More common among boys
* Common during daytime
* Between ages of 7-8 years: 1-2% of children
* Both physical causes (chronic constipation) and psychological (STRESS & anxiety)

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13
Q

What is the ‘preoperational stage?’

A

Piaget’s second stage of development is characterized by inflexible and irreversible mental manipulation of symbols.
* Lasts from ages 2-7 years
* Use of symbols to represent objects and relationships
* Characterized y: pretend play, egocentrism, pre-causal and transductive reasoning, animism, artificialism, and conservation

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14
Q

What is ‘symbolic play?’

A

Play in which children believe that objects and toys are other than what they are’ is also called pretend to play.

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15
Q

What is ‘egocentrism?’

A

Putting onself at the ceter of things such that one is unable to perceive the world from another person’s pov.

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16
Q

What is ‘precausal?’

A

A type of thought in which natural cause-and-effect relationships are attributed to will and other preoperational concepts.

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17
Q

What is ‘transductive reasoning?’

A

Faulty reasoning that links one specific isolated even to another specific isolated event.

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18
Q

What is ‘animism?’

A

The attribution of life and intentionality to inanimate objects.

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19
Q

What is ‘artificialism?’

A

The belief that environmental features were made by people.

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20
Q

What is ‘conservation?’

A

In cognitive psychology, the principle is that properties of substances, such as weight and mass, remain the same (are conserved) when superficial characteristics, such as their shapes or arrangements, are changed.

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21
Q

What is ‘scaffolding?’

A

Vygotsky’s term for the situation in which a child carries out tasks with the help of someone who is more skilled to advance their skills.

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22
Q

What is the ‘zone of proximal development (ZPD)?’

A

The gap between what children are capable of doing now and what they could do with the help of others.

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23
Q

What is ‘theory of mind?’

A

The understanding that people are mental beings that have their own mental states, including thoughts, wishes, and feelings that differ from our own.

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24
Q

What is ‘appearance-reality distinction?’

A

The difference between real events on the one hand and mental events, fantasies, and misleading appearances on the other hand.

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25
Q

What are ‘scripts?’

A

Abstract, generalized accounts of familiar repeated events.

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26
Q

What is ‘autobiographical memory?’

A

The memory of specific episodes or events.

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27
Q

What is ‘rehearsal?’

A

A strategy that uses repetition to remember information.

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28
Q

What is ‘fast mapping?’

A

A process of quickly determining a word’s meaning, which facilitates children’s vocabulary development.

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29
Q

What is ‘overgeneralization?’

A

The application of regular grammatical rules for forming inflections to irregular verbs ad nouns. Reflects accurate knowledge of grammar, not faulty language development.
* In a year or two, ‘mouses’ will be transformed to ‘mice.’

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30
Q

What is ‘pragmatics?’

A

The practical aspects of communication, such as language adaption to fit the social situation. Refers to the practical aspects of communication; children show pragmatism when they adjust their speech to fit the social situation.

31
Q

What is ‘inner speech?’

A

Vygotsky’s concept of the ultimate binding of language and thought. Inner speech originates in vocalization that may regulate the child’s behaviour and become internalized by age 6 or 7.

32
Q

What are the trends in physical development in early childhood?

A
  • Children gain about 5-8 cm (2-3 inches) in height and 2-3 kg (2-6 lbs) in weight per year in early childhood.
  • The brain grows quicker than any other organ due to myelination.
33
Q

What is the right hemisphere associated with?

A

Usually superior in visual-spatial functions, emotional responses, and creative mathematical reasoning.

34
Q

What is the left hemisphere associated with?

A

Relativity is more involved in logical analysis, language, and computation.

35
Q

What are two factors involved in the brain’s plasticity?

A

Growth in new dendrites and the redundancy in neural connections.

36
Q

When does ‘handedness’ normally occur in development?

A

6 months.

37
Q

What are the two types of motor skills? How do they differ?

A

Motor development is often broadly divided into gross motor and fine motor skills. Gross motor skills pertain to skills involving large muscle movements, such as independent sitting, crawling, walking, or running. Fine motor skills involve use of smaller muscles, such as grasping, object manipulation, or drawing

38
Q

Describe ‘gross-motor’ development in early childhood:

A
  • 2 years: runs well straight ahead, walks up stairs two feet to a step, tries to stand on one foot
  • 3 years: goes around obstacles while running, walks up stairs one foot a step, stands on one foot
  • 4 years: turns sharp corners while running, walks down stairs one foot to a step, stands on one foot for 3-8 secs, skips on one foot, rides a tricycle well
  • 5 years: runs lightly on toes, jumps a distance of 1 m, skips on alternative feet, rides a bicycle with training wheels
39
Q

Describe ‘fine-motor’ development in early childhood:

A
  • 2 years: stack 6 cubes, copy vertical & horizontal lines, place simple shapes in correct holes
  • 3 years: stack 9 cubes, copy circles and crosses, copy letters, hold crayons with fingers, not fist, strings beads on the thread
  • 4 years: stacks 10 cues, copies square, prints simple words, uses correct hand grip to hold a pencil
  • 5 years: copies triangle and star, prints name and numbers, traces on paper, laces shows
40
Q

Why might children have a preference for centred placement patterns?

A
  • Hand-eye coordination is still developing
  • Concept of symmetry is evolving, which might explain why a child often considers a drawing in the center of the page to be complete.
41
Q

What is the pattern found in children’s drawings/scribbles?

A

Kellogg identified 20 scribbles that she considered the building blocks of art.

42
Q

What is Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory?

A

Describes learning as a social process and the origination of human intelligence in society or culture. The major theme of Vygotsky’s theoretical framework is that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition.
* Emphasis on the role of social factors in cognitive development.
* Problem solutions are socially generated and learned.
* Key principles: zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding

43
Q

What does ‘lateralization of brain function’ mean?

A

Lateralization of the brain hemispheres refers to a functional dominance of one hemisphere over the other, in which one is more responsible or entirely responsible for controlling a function than the other.
* Basic outline of lateralization is genetically determined.
* Genes dictate functions be lateralized.
* Experience shapes the pace of lateralization.

44
Q

What is left-handedness associated with?

A

It may be related to coming language and health problems, yet a disproportionately large number of artists, musicians, and mathematicians are left-handed.

45
Q

What are the nutritional needs of a child in early childhood?

A

It recommended that young children should focus on food servings rather than caloric intake.
* Less food needed; the child should decide how much to eat
* Many children eat too much sugar and salt

46
Q

Describe trends of obesity in early childhood:

A

Obesity is an issue that begins in early childhood; children who are overweight at five are five times as likely to be overweight at 12 years,
* 14% are overweight
* 6% are obese
* generation XL

47
Q

What are the factors that contribute to being overweight in early childhood?

A
  • Not eating breakfast
  • Drinking more than two glasses of a sugary drink
  • Playing outside for less than an hour a day
  • Watching more than two hours of televison a day
48
Q

Describe trends in health and illness in early childhood:

A

*In developing countries, diarrheal diseases are the leading cause of death and sickness and are almost always related to unsafe drinking water and lack of adequate sanitation.
* Immunization and antibiotics reduce the incidence of disease
* Children are at a greater risk of dying if they live in rural areas, are from lower-income households, and have less educated mothers.
* Accidents are the leading cause of Canadian children (due to curiosity) but motor vehicle accidents specifically

49
Q

What are the effects of second-hand smoke?

A
  • ear infections
  • Asthma
  • cough
  • lung infections
  • SIDS
50
Q

Describe sleep patterns in early childhood:

A
  • 2-3 year olds sleep 10 hours a night with naps during the day
  • Children during early childhood need about 12-14 hours of sleep each day
51
Q

What are the effects of lack of sleep?

A
  • Hyperactivity, aggression, crying, misbehaviour, as well as changes to temperament, appetite, emotional regulation, and learning abilities.
52
Q

Describe Piaget’s preoperational stage:

A
  • Lasts ages: 2-7 years
  • Characterized by the use of symbols
  • Preoperational thinking is characterized by pretend play, egocentrism, pre-causal thinking, confusion between mental and physical events, and the ability to focus on only one dimension at a time.
  • Conservation is lacking because it requires focusing on two aspects of a situation at once.
53
Q

What is an example of Piaget’s preoperational stage?

A

Imitating the way someone talks or moves even when they are not in the room. drawing people and objects from their own life but understanding they are only representations. pretending a stick is a sword or that a broom is a horse during play.

54
Q

Provide an example of scaffolding:

A

Children gain social and language development when caregivers provide appropriate play materials and stimulating experiences. For example, every time parents sit down and review the sounds letters make with their preschool children, scaffolding is occurring.

55
Q

Explain how the theory of mind affects cognitive development:

A

Children come to understand distinctions between external and internal mental events and between appearances and realities.
* At 3: children realize that you gain information through the senses
* At 4: they understand which senses provide certain kinds of information
* Children with a well-developed theory of mind can infer other’s wishes and thoughts that differ from their own; they happen to be better communicators, resolve conflict, and be more popular.

56
Q

Explain the trends in language development in early childhood:

A
  • Preschoolers acquire nine words a day, some of which is due to fast mapping
  • During 3rd year: add articles, conjunctions, possessive adjectives, pronouns, and prepositions in speech
  • Between 3rd and 4th year: children combine phrases and clauses into complex sentences
  • Preschoolers overregularize irregular verbs and nouns as they learn grammar
57
Q

What is Vygotsky’s POV on language development?

A

Inner speech is the ultimate binding of language and thought. Private speech becomes inner speech
* Holds the perspective of an interactionist.

58
Q

What is Piaget’s POV on language development?

A

Believes that cognitive development precedes language development. Children learn words to describe class, category, or schema that they have already created.
* Associated with vocabulary explosion at 18 months: relates the child ability to group a set of objects into two categories such as “dolls” and “cars”

59
Q

What is the ‘Three Mountains Test?’

A
60
Q

What are examples of early childhood ‘egocentrism?’

A
61
Q

What was Piaget’s class inclusion task?

A

Children are shown pictures from two subclasses of a larger class - four cats and six dogs, then asked if there are more dogs or animals,
* pre-operational children say dogs

62
Q

What is ‘class inclusion?’

A

Refers to the inclusion of new objects or categories in the borders of mental classes or categories.

63
Q

What are examples of a child using ‘pragmatics?’

A
  • Children using motherse when talking to someone younger, whether real or imagined.
  • Children show greater formality in their choice of words and syntax when their make-believe games include role-paying high-status figures (like teachers and doctors).
64
Q

What are the stages in Vygotsky’s Theory?

A

Vygotsky believed that vocalizations and thought are separate during most of the first year. During the second year, thought and speech are combined. At 3, a child speaks out loud/instructs themselves. By 6-7 they instead have internal dialogue.
* Primitive Stage
* Naive Psychological Stage
* Egocentric/Private Speech Stage
* Ingrowth Stage

65
Q

What is Vygotsky’s ‘Primitive Stage?’

A

Preintellectual speech and preverbal thought at the level of “behaviour”. Learn through conditioning.

66
Q

What is Vygotsky’s ‘Naive Psychological Stage?’

A

Use of language to communicate; the child’s experience with his/her own body and of objects and the use of tools; increasingly correct use of language structures without the understanding of their logical meaning;

67
Q

What is Vygotsky’s ‘Egocentric/Private Speech Stage?’

A

The symbolic function of language; the use of external signs as aids in the solution of internal problems, counting on the fingers; egocentric speech becomes more and more curtailed and “esoteric”.

68
Q

What is Vygotsky’s ‘Ingrowth Stage?’

A

When external operations turn inward, counting in the head, logical memory, soundless speech. Inner speech in turn becomes more and more abbreviated (e.g. predication, in which the sentences lack a subject, since the subject “is known to the speaker”);
* Internalized of speech routines
* Private discourse to inner discourse
* Inter-mental to intra-mental

69
Q

Describe the trends of language development in early childhood:

A
  • 2-3 yrs: one-word utterances, pivot schema, item0based constructions
  • 3-6 yrs: fast mapping, hammer explosion, phonological awareness, pragmatics
70
Q

What is an ‘interactionist perspective?’

A

An interactionist approach argues that several levels of explanation are necessary to explain a particular behaviour, ranging from lower (biological) to higher levels (social and cultural).

71
Q

What is the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?’

A

Language determines thought; the grammatical and verbal structure of a person’s language influences how they perceive the world. It emphasizes that language either determines or influences one’s thoughts. For example, different words mean various things in other languages.

72
Q

What is the current POV of language development?

A
  • In early stages, cognitive development influences language
  • In later stages, language tends to influence cognitive development
73
Q

What is the recommendation for children in regards to screen time?

A
  • Canadian paediatric society: less than 1 hour per day
  • Consider educational programming, age, time spent
74
Q

What are the potential problems associated with screen time?

A

○ Preschoolers might not be able to process and understand the content
○ Struggle to separate reality and fantasy
○ The more screen time, the less time is spent in physical activity and social interaction
○ Less time for family interaction