Developmental Lecture Two - Relationships, social understanding and early word learning Flashcards
Use attachment theory to describe and explain the development of relationships in the first year of life.
Attachment theory:
Originally applied to infants.
Came from psychoanalysis and ethology. From Bowlby who took ideas from psychoanalysis and ethology, this approach to thinking about human life being about a battle between unconscious thoughts and drive gained through early experience and this conscious world of behaviour. Ethology - comes from the study of animal behaviour, everything animals do must be evolved and have an evolved meaning and function. E.g. Larenze and the ducklings - first thing they saw when they hatched was Larenze, this human being their caregiver - an innate born-in behaviour demonstrated by the ducklings which would have an evolutionary influence.
“The propensity (the inclination, the desire, the wish to DONT WRITE THESE BRACKETS IN) to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals [is] a basic component of human nature, already present in germinal form in the neonate” (Bowlby, 1988:3). - born ready to make relationships with our caregivers.
Therefore he suggested the theory of
Attachment: a variety of strong emotional bonds, where sense of security is bound up in the relationship. if they are removed form this person, their sense of security drops.
Emphasises the relational basis of all human communication.
Development of parent-child interaction and relationships: According to Bowlby (1969):
Constitutes a specific developmental trajectory (can be movded up or down and goes in a direction, once started it cant stop):
- Early non-intentional infant behaviour attachment behaviours (from birth) e.g. like a reflex, they have a feeling of being hungry and cry, still are behaviours that emerge a facilitating attachment, the caregiver will respond as if its intentional
- Beginnings of intentional attachment behaviours (from 3 months) - a smile after 6 weeks, more evolutionary important, start looking in a way to respond that is more intentional
3= Secure base behaviours (from 6 months) at 6 months, all of those intentional behaviours start to be directed towards a person/persons who the baby is most familair with (a secure base - Bowlby), an attachment figure, the babies sense of security is tied up with one or two or few people
3= Social anxiety behaviours (from six months) when that secure base is not present - trajectory - beginning to create a true relationship with another.
Social anxieties: Stranger anxiety - of an individual of the babies secure base - triggers the secure base wanting that baby back to comfort it.
Rare before 5/6 months.
Usually emerges between 6 – 9 months.
Begins to decline after 12 – 16 months - as long as the secure base is around
Separation anxiety
Begins around 9 months.
Continues for longer!
Appears to be culturally universal (see Kagan & Herschkowitz, 2005).
But responses vary hugely between children!
Use cognitive psychology to describe and explain the development of infants’ social understanding.
Lots of research interest in how children develop the ability to understand thoughts, feelings and desires of others.
“Theory of Mind”.
Very complex area!
Acknowledged that this develops gradually over the first 18 years of life!
But what can babies do around this?
Research: Kovac et al (2010) – eye-tracking study:
Used videos of a ball disappearing behind a screen; baby can see the ball, but an actor on the video watching from the other side cannot.
In some conditions, an invisible wall behind the screen caused the ball to behave unusually.
7 month olds and adults both influenced by where the actor could be expected to look, not by what the ball was doing!
More research: At around 9 months, infants acquire the ability to maintain joint attention (Mundy and Sigman, 2007).
Appears very important for social understanding.
E.g. Phillips et al (2002):
Infants watched video of actor with two stuffed toys.
Actor looks at one and says with a joyful voice, “oooh, look at the kitty!” looking at it, as adults we would isnticnlty follow the joint attention cues and see the actor looking and would know hcih one they were talking about.
12 month olds dishabituated more when actor was then subsequently shown with the other toy - seemed more surprised/expected the second video slowly appearing with the one they had already expressed some positive affect about - seemed to set up an expectation in the baby that the actor would be doing something with the toy afterwards due to his expression towards the toy.
8 month olds did not show this effect - equally as intersted/disinterested in either toy after they had been told about the kitty. Sighted importance of joint attention being part of this process.
- List and define key features of early language learning.
Children understand before they express.
At six months, most babies: - Turn towards the appropriate person when hearing “mummy” or “daddy” (Tincoff & Jusczyk, 1999) - in a nuclear family, UK culture, stuck with one or two caregivers, not culturally representative
- Perform above chance in forced alternative object naming (food/body parts) - will reach for objects when you name them “Show me the pirate” - a forced alternative object choice (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012) - perform atleats above chance on those simple assessments of their understanding.
Between 10-15 months, most children produce their first word - doesn’t mean there’s a problem if they don’t speak by this point - key things around their environment and things that are important to them generally
Then gradual period of learning words/vocabulary acquisition caharctersied by:
Holophrases (a baby compresses two words together into a single word e.g. red ball = rebull) cant use the words separately. Overextension (when a child uses a word that has a specific meaning e.g. calling every man yous ee daddy, overextending the use of the word). under extension, a word that would normally apply to lots of things but is only being used in one context e..g dog, only says it went they see the family dog, not dogs walking on the street, to grandma’s dog, etc.
How does a child learn the name of something?
Through “the mapping problem” / “the problem of reference”, how do we know the whole thing is the rabbit, what if the rabbit means hopping?
- Compare and contrast two sets of theories for explaining the development of infants’ first language skills.
- Constraint-based theories of word learning - infants are born with langauge-pseficifc constraints which help them identify novel referents - we are set up in advance because of various cognitive methods that mean we cant learn words wrong - focused on cognitive psychology theories
Social-pragmatic theories of word learning - pragmatics = social communication - completely socially focused, our words and learning of words come from social clues from people around them form ‘more knowledgeable’ conversational partners which help them identify novel referents. Theories influenced by ideas form Vygotsky
Constraint-based theories: examples
- Children associate new words with objects that they don’t already know the name for e.g. the child already knows the word iPod, they would not associate the word ‘headphones’ with an iPod if they haven’t heard of headphones before when they first hear the word ‘headphones’ = this is called mutual exclusivity bias (Markman, 1989) - the more words you learn the more things you’ve got named in the world and because of this when you hear new words, you can rule them out of things they wont relate to.
- Children associate new words with whole objects, not with parts of objects - e.g. the whole thing are the headphones - show them an object of two things pushed together and make up a name, then check with the child if they have learnt the word as the whole thing or just part of it - whole object bias (Hollich et al, 2007) - shapes the child’s word learning, to mean they make less mistakes when learning new words.
Social-pragmatic theories: example
- joint attention (being able to follow where someone is looking as they speak) e.g. look at the rabbit as it is hopping along. This is a crucial social cue used by children when learning language. Sometimes called “triadic relating” - when these cues aren’t there children make mistakes, important for learning verbs, for more complex social understanding e.g. learning emotions and words around emotions
Different forms of joint attention important for:
- Learning object names (Tomasello and Farrar, 1997)
- Learning verb names (Tomasello and Kruger, 1992)
