Developmental psych Flashcards
What are the seven enduring themes of developmental psychology?
- Nature & nurture
- The active child
- Continuity and discontinuity
- Mechanisms for change
- Socio-cultural contexts
- Individual differences
- Research and children’s welfare
Why study developmental psychology?
• Understand human nature ○ Nature and nurture ○ Continuity and discontinuity ○ Mechanisms for change • Shape social policies ○ Individual differences ○ Socio-cultural contexts ○ Research and child welfare • Enrich lives of others ○ Active child ○ Active person
What is Erik Erikson’s theory of ego development?
- ego development is a process (something we learn over time)
- Develops in a psychosocial way (psychosocial = interaction of internal selves and outside world)
According to Erik Erikson, what is ego development?
- Lifelong
- Multi-dimensional (biological, personal, social)
- Driven by crises (crises are not emergencies, they are tasks or challenges to be resolved)
- Cyclical - not linear –> don’t necessarily move on from issues in life they can reoccur
- Virtue = positive outcome if you positively deal with crises
What are the 8 dialects of the ego?
- Infancy (0-1)
- Dialectic between trust and mistrust
- Virtue: hope (Erik says it is the most important virtue in the world)
○ Toddlerhood (1-3) - Dialectic between autonomy and shame
- Virtue: Will
○ Early-mid childhood (3-6) - Dialectic between Initiative and guilt
- Virtue: purpose
○ Mid-late childhood (6-11) - Dialectic between industry and inferiority
- Virtue: competence
○ Adolescence (11-19) - Dialectic between identity and confusion
- Virtue: fidelity (accepting others despite differing perspectives)
○ Young adulthood (20-39) - Dialectic between intimacy and isolation
- Virtue: love
○ Middle adulthood (40-60) - Dialectic between generativity and stagnation
- Virtue: care
○ Late adulthood (60+) - Dialectic between integrity and despair
- Virtue: wisdom
According to Erikson, why do we need friends?
○ Share speculations ○ Play benevolent authority to each other ○ Being each other's co-conspirator ○ Serve as an applauding audience ○ Act as a cautioning chorus
What is Piaget’s theory on sources of continuity in cognitive development?
○ Children born mentally active
○ Constructivist
○ Children construct their knowledge based on
environmental experiences
○ Proposed continuous and discontinuous pathways
When does a child have cognitive equilibrium?
When what the child sees is what it thinks it is based on previous knowledge
When does a child experience cognitive assimilation?
When what a child sees is not what they think it is, leading them to modify their existing schemas
When does a child experience cognitive accommodation?
When the child uses new adapted schema to correctly recognise differences
-accommodation continues to develop over childhood
What is the theory of discontinuous cognitive development?
Develop in stages - one is qualitavely different from another (eg butterfly)
What are Piaget’s stages of childhood development?
- Sensorimotor (0-2 years)
- Pre-operational thought (2-6 years)
- Concrete operational (7-12 years)
- Formal operational (12+)
What is involved in the sensorimotor stage of development according to Piaget?
□ Children use physical skills and senses to explore world around them
□ Infants born with reflexes
□ Moves from reflexive response to problem solving
□ Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
- Start to repeat pleasurable activity
□ Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months)
- Intentionally repeat actions to trigger response
□ Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months)
- Trial and error experimentation
□ Object permanence (12-18 months)
- Understanding that objects exist when they
can’t see it
- Shift from infants understanding world based
on here and now to understanding that they
can represent something in their mind
What is involved in the pre-operational thought stage of development according to Piaget?
□ Children use symbols (words and images to represent objects but does not reason logically)
□ Child begins to develop mental representations (and operational thought)
□ Can use objects with dual purpose (using imagination)
□ Imaginative play
□ Preconceptual stage (2-4 years)
- Increased use of verbal representation but
speech is egocentric
□ Intuitive stage (4-6 years)
- Speech becomes more social, less egocentric
- Perceptive taking task
What is involved in the concrete operational stage of development according to Piaget?
□ Children can think logically about concrete objects □ Able to manipulate mentally internal representations □ Abilities: - Seriation - Inductive reasoning - Transitivity - Classification - Reversibility - Perspective-taking - Conservation
What is involved in the formal operational stage of development according to Piaget?
□ Children can think abstractly
□ Understand that there are different ways of doing things
□ Piaget thought this was final stage
What are the problems with Piaget’s theory?
- Focused on inabilities rather than abilities
- Less attention on social context
- Focused on decontextualied rather than every day problems
- Says little about language development
- Suggests that intellectual development is largely complete by age 12
What is the ‘Information Processing Accounts’ theory of cognitive development?
○ Focuses on quantitative changes with age
○ Sees humans as computers - limited by our memory capacity, speed of processing, strategies and knowledge that we use to solve problems
○ Exposed to things in our environment which enter our sensory register, are encoded through our perception into temporary memory storage (short term memory and working memory), then we learn(or save) these memories and they move into our long-term memory (in Permanent storage), access active memories (in permanent storage) into working memory
○ Executive control processes (eg attention, planning, and organisation) help guide what we pay attention to in the environment
○ Through repetition and training that we develop knowledge
○ Development is continuous
What is Vygotsky’s Sociocultural theory of cognitive development?
○ Looks at how interaction is important in development
○ Zones of proximal development (where child gets help from a more knowledgeable other and thereby learns through scaffolding)
○ The interaction between child and more knowledgeable other is key in the child’s development
○ Important parts of this interactive process:
- Intersubjectivity
□ Meeting of minds - two people focusing
on same topic, mutual understanding
- Joint attention
□ Tritactic relationship between child, other
person and object of interest
○ Social environment and culture are very important in child development
What are the processes involved in play?
-Cognitive processes • Affective processes • Interpersonal processes • Problem-solving processes • Pretend play development
What are the aspects of cognitive processes that are involved in play?
- Functional play (first two years)
□ Description: Simple, repetitive movements,
sometimes with objects or own body e.g shoveling
sand, pushing a toy, jumping up and down
□ Areas of development: Cause and effect relationship,
permanence of object, sensorial/psychomotor
□ Abilities: experimentation, exploration, imitation - Pretend play (3-8 and 8-15 years)
□ Description: Substitutes make-believe imaginary and
dramatic situations for real ones eg playing ‘house’
or ‘superman’
□ Areas of development: symbolic/representative,
pretending, language, problem solving
□ Abilities: invention, imagination, interpretation of
roles, imitation, self-monitoring, theory of mind - Constructive play (3-15)
□ Description: manipulation of objects to construct
something, eg building with blocks
□ Areas of development: psychomotor, goal-directed,
planning, problem solving, spatial cogntion
□ Abilities: Invention, imagination, hypothesis-making,
self-monitoring - Games with rules (6-15)
□ Description: play is more formal and is governed by
fixed rules eg hopscotch, hide-and-seek
□ Areas of development: understanding and
adhesion
to conventions, strategic thought, social and meta-
social
□ Abilities: competition, collaboration, team work
What is the triage of impairments that characterises Autism Spectrum Disorder?
- Social relationships
- Rigidity of thought, behaviour, and play
- Social communication
how do children with Austism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) respond to play?
○ Often don’t engage in socio dramatic pretend play
-In a study:
□ Children with ASD had lower ToM and executive
functioning scores
□ Children with ASD did not initiate as much
spontaneous play and scaffolded play
□ More likely to engage in scaffolded play than
spontaneous play
What are Human Figure Drawings used to asses?
○ Fine motor and cognitive skills
○ Observations about the child’s personality and relationship capacity
○ Insight into how child perceives the world
○ Interpret meaning (projective tests)
What are the stages of Human Figure Drawings?
○ 2 years
- Scribbling
○ 3 years
- Start to draw person (no torso - arms and legs out of
head)
○ 4 years
- More details: accessories, clothes
○ 6 years
- More spatial - draw what they know about
something instead of what they see
○ 8 -10 years
- Start to recognise depth and represent
object/person as it appears in front of them
What are the benefits of intelligence testing?
- Uniform way of comparing cognitive performance
- Excellent predictors of academic achievement
- Identifies strengths and weaknesses and can create individualised learning plans
- Remains fairly consistent with age - relatively stable over the years –> testing same cognitive abilities each time
- Teachers, parents, psychologists are able to devise individual curriculum matching a person’s development and expectations
What are the limitations of intelligence testing?
- A single score is often inadequate in explaining multidimensional aspects of intelligence
- Does not capture the complexity and immediacy of real-life situations
□ Sometimes the items are timed for no clear reason - if the timing was more necessary and relevant to the task (ie escaping a room), people could perform within the time limit - Influences such as physical/emotional stability, limited experiences, unfamiliarity with language
What are some reasons for intelligence testing?
○ As part of comprehensive psycho-educational evaluation to aid in the
- Identification of intellectual disability (ID)
- Identification of specific learning disabilities (SLD)
- Identification of intellectual giftedness
○ Determine placement in specialised programs/funding
○ Neuropsychological evaluation
○ Clinical intervention
○ Research
What abilities are tested using the WISC?
- Verbal comprehension
- Visual spatial
- Fluid reasoning
- Working memory
- Processing speed
How is the WISC distributed?
○ Normally distributed - most scores falling near the mean
- 68% of scores fall within 1 standard deviation of mean - 95% fall within 2 standard deviations - Score of 100 given to a child who scores exactly the mean for their age at that time
What are the advantages of the WISC scoring system?
- IQ scores at different ages are easy to compare despite increase in knowledge accompanying child development
- Easy to read the score and understand strengths and weaknesses cognitively
What does intelligence testing do?
- Predicts future performance
- Predicts ability to learn a new skill
- Measure a person’s potential
- Makes achievement possible
What does achievement testing do?
- Assesses overall learning accomplishments
- Skills children learn through direct intervention
- Assess current performance
- Areas such as reading, writing, maths
What indicates underachieving?
- Difference between results of intelligence and achievement
- Greater difference between results: need to investigate what is going for the child
What is the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT-III)?
○ Comprehensive and locally standardised achievement test that
- Provides norm referenced information about a student in the four main areas of achievement - Covers ages 4:0 through 50:11 (4 years, zero months - 50 years, 11 months) - Follows normal distribution - Provides diagnostic information and recommended interventions
What are the abilities tested by the WIAT?
- Sentence composition
- Early reading skills
- Phonological awareness
- Maths problem solving
What is a specific learning disorder (SLD)?
• Affects a person’s ability to ‘receive, store, process, retrieve or communicate information
• Brain-based disorder linked to neurological differences in brain structure
• Can manifest in one or more areas of academic achievement
○ Can be specific to reading, or could be reading
and writing deficit
• Greatly benefit the use of appropriate adaptations, accommodations, and compensatory strategies
○ Early identification is important
What is the outstanding feature of an SLD?
-Child’s underachievement is unexpected
How are SLDs classified?
• Difficulties learning academic skills - indicated by presence of at least one of following symptoms that have persisted for at least 6 months, despite provision of interventions targeting those difficulties:
○ Inaccurate/slow and effortful word reading
○ Understanding meaning of what is read
○ Spelling
○ Written expression
○ Mastering number sense etc
○ Mathematical reasoning
• Affected academic skills are substantially below those expected for their age - cause significant interference with academic or occupational performance
• Learning difficulty began during schooling age
• Not better accounted for by intellectual disabilities, other neurological disorders, lack of proficiency in language or academic instruction, or inadequate educational instruction
What was the historical approach to SLDs?
• Used to compare children based on IQ tests alone
• If children were achieving less than within 1 standard deviation of mean IQ score - received diagnosis
○ Ability-achievement discrepancy
• Previous methods of identification have failed to adequately distinguish between groups
• Advances in cognitive theory and assessment methods assisting with understanding cognitive differences between groups
What is the Ability-Achievement Discrepancy (AAD)?
• Comparison of child’s achievement to their full scale IQ using standard assessment
○ Based on assumption that IQ is near-perfect achievement predictor
○ Potential to over/under-diagnose student based on arbitrary cut-offs
• Discrepancy between ability and achievement may be statistically significant but not clinically relevant
• Discrepancies not normally evident until 3rd or 4th grade
• Doesn’t consider adequacy of educational instruction
• No longer as frequently used
What is the ‘Patterns of Strengths and Weaknesses’ (PSW)?
• Different way of assessing SLDs • Three common components: ○ Cognitive strength ○ Cognitive weakness ○ Academic weakness
What are the main types of SLDs with impairments in reading?
- Word Recognition (WR) (/decoding) difficulties: dyslexia
- Listening comprehension (LC) difficulties:
- Both WR and LC difficulties (less common)
What is dyslexia?
○ Understand text when it is read aloud but have difficulties reading the words
○ Occurs in 5-8% of school age population
○ Neurobiological disorder that causes a marked impairment in development of basic reading and spelling skills
○ Persistent pattern of learning difficulties:
- Word-level reading skills
- Difficulties decoding (pronouncing printed words)
- Difficulties encoding (spelling words)
○ 13 and 14 year olds with reading disorders can correctly identify no more words than typical 7 and 8 year olds
○ Poor phonological recoding skills of children with learning disorders leaves them to have special difficulty with pseudowords that can only be pronounced using phonological recoding
- Sounding out the word they haven’t seen before -
can’t rely on visual memory
What does it mean to have learning comprehension (LC) difficulties?
○ Can read words accurately but cannot comprehend what they read
What areas of the brain are involved in reading and what purpose do they serve?
○ Broca’s - semantic processing
- Meaning of words
○ Parietotemporal - phonological processing
- Sounds of words
○ Occipitotemporal - rapid automatic and fluid identification of words
- Integration of sound and print of word: visual
familiarity
How does the brain display dyslexia?
Broca’s, Parietotemporal, and Occipitotemporal areas are under-activated in children with dyslexia when performing reading tasks
What are the types of reading-related tasks in fmri?
○ Letter identification ○ Single letter rhyming ○ Nonword rhyming ○ Real word identification ○ Vocabulary ○ Sentence verification
What does systematic phonic intervention incorporate (to help reading SLD)
○ Letter-sound associations
○ Pre-planned sequence of letter-sound associations
○ Associations are practiced in text and in isolation
What did the study on systematic phonics intervention on Dutch children with dyslexia show?
○ Under half were no longer in lowest 10% for spelling
○ 26% were no longer in lowest 10% for pseudo-word decoding
○ For word reading 30% were no longer in lowest 10%
What did the study on metabolic changes in the brains of learners with SLD do?
○ Aimed to improve word decoding accuracy and reading comprehension
○ Fluency based method (how fast and accurate they read the words)
○ Assumption: there is a reciprocal relationship between reading speed, accuracy and comprehension – slow readin = poor reading
○ For children with reading disorders - more brain activity in right hemisphere of brain than with typical readers - brain is compensating for their reading difficulties
○ Following intervention - children with reading disorders’ brain activity became more localised - more similar to typical readers and using right hemisphere less
- Clear metabolic activity shift from right to left after
one month of intervention
-Performance in tasks also improved
What does the Dyslexie font do?
- Letters are made to look as different as possible to help with letter distinguishing
- Changing angling, heights and forms of letters
- Kids with dyslexia read better
Is there one way of describing giftedness?
No:
○ Social construct rather human intervention
○ Will differ depending on cultural values
What is the tripartite model of giftedness?
○ Giftedness denoted by high intelligence
○ Denoted by outstanding accomplishments
○ High potential to excel
How is ‘giftedness denoted by high intelligence’ identified?
- Identified through
□ General intelligence (g)
□ Multiple intelligencies, or
□ Neuroanatomical
- Recommended program:
□ Highly accelerated and/or
□ Academically advancedHow is ‘giftedness denoted by outstanding accomplishments’ identified?
- Identified through □ Performance in classroom or □ Performance on academic tasks - Recommended program □ Highly enriched and/or □ Academically challenging
How is ‘giftedness denoted by high potential to excel’ identified?
- Identified through □ Teachers, coaches, others - Recommended program □ Motivating and/or □ Compensatory interventions
What are the benefits of identifying giftedness?
○ Provides information to support admission to special schools of gifted programs
○ Understand the unique strengths and weaknesses (asynchronies) for an exceptionally bright child
○ Assessing growth in areas such as creativity or critical thinking with implications for curriculum modification
○ Discerning factors potentially contributing to underachievement or low motivation
○ Determining appropriate grade placement
What are the emotional strengths of gifted children?
- Positive self-concept
- High self-esteem
- Motivation and task commitment
- Resiliency
What are some emotional vulnerabilities of gifted children?
- Difficulties connecting with same age peers
- Asynchronous development
- Label can be stigmatising
- Perfectionism
What are the main themes involved in language development?
- Nature and nurture (aka language specificity)
- Environment/individual differences
What is evidence for language specificity?
-Brain modularity:
○ Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area - two main
areas that have something to do with language
○ Broca’s area:
- Appears to have something to do with
grammatical processing
- Adjacent to the part of the motor control
area for jaws, lips, and tongue
- Damage to broca’s area produces a certain
type of aphasia (language difficulty)
resulting in stilted, ungrammatical but
contentful speech
○ Wernicke’s area
- Appears to have something to do with
meaning and word access
- Adjacent to primary auditory area that
receives linguistic input
- Damage to Wernicke’s are produces
certain kind of aphasia resulting in fluent
speech that is completely lacking in sense
- A lot of speech with not much content
What is an argument against language specificity?
○ Many non-linguistic things appear localised in the brain (eg expert piano players)
○ Many aspects of language (such as word concept and meaning) appear to be spread throughout the entire cerebral cortex
How do ‘wild children’ (children raised by animals) demonstrate the role of environment on language development?
○ Commonalities across ‘wild children’
- Strange gait (often on all fours) - Odd senses (smell/hearing focus) - Poor social skills (eye contact, disinterest, little empathy) - Dislike of clothing - Vocabulary usually better than grammar, but sometimes no language at all
Why is it hard to draw conclusions about the role of environment on language development based on wild children?
- Seriously deprived in many ways not just linguistically
- Very traumatised
- How much do linguistic difficulties arise due to poor social development?
□ Language is used to interact with other people, so if you’re not interacting with other people why do you need it - We know very little about their initial state
- Highly variable environments
How do deaf children demonstrate the role of environment on language development?
○ Performance on grammatical tasks in ASL depends highly on the age it was learned
○ Suggests there is a critical period that makes it harder to get to native ‘speaker’ level (meaning people who have learned it from birth)
○ Similar study in BSL (British sign language) found similar dependence on age- those who acquired it later did worse, even compared to second-language learners
How do second language learners demonstrate the role of environment on language development?
○ Does the age at which you acquire the second language effect how good you get to be at it?
- Performance on grammatical tasks in one’s second language depends highly on the age it was learned
- If you arrived sometime before 15 you end up doing pretty well
- After 15 - the later you started learning the worse you would be
○ Is there a sensitive period for language, distinct from sensitive periods for achieving mastery in other domains?
- Clear evidence that there is one - hard to tell qualitively unlike other forms of expert learning
What are phonemes?
○ Units of sound (consonants or vowels) in a language: the shortest segment of speech that distinguishes two words
What are vowels?
- Sounds where air is not blocked
- Depends on shape of the mouth and tongue positioning
- Depends on where in the mouth the vowel is pronounced
What are consonants?
- Sounds where air is blocked
- Depends on voicing - when the vocal chords begin to vibrate
□ Voiced = z, v, g, b, d
□ Voiceless= s, f, k, p, t - Depends on place of articulation - where in the mouth the obstruction is
- Depends on manner of articulation - how the blockage occurs
How are phonemes learned?
○ Based on categorical perception:
- Our perceptual system imposes a discrete category even though the underlying physical stimulus is continuous - If you gradually move from g to k, there is a distinct moment when you stop perceiving it as g and start hearing k - it is not a gradual/continuous perception - Consonants are perceived categorically, vowels are not
What did the habituation test say about phonemic learning?
□ Infants get bored if presented with the same stimulus for long enough
- Can measure their boredom based on their sucking on things or their eye gaze
□ We know when they perceive two things as the same if they are habituated to the first thing and stay bored when presented with the second
□ Habituate infants by repeating the same phoneme until they get bored - present them with a new phoneme and see if they recognise it as different (control: present them with another new phoneme that differs by the same voice onset time (VOT) but does not cross phonemic boundary)
□ Should perceive the control as the same phoneme and remain bored, but perceive the cross-boundary phoneme as different and get excited
- This is what they found
- Infants appear to have categorical perception from 3 months or less
- Perceive all consonants in all languages even though adults cannot
- Implies it is innate knowledge
- Does not suggest it is language-specific
◊ Did same test on animals and came out with same results as babies
When do infants lose the ability to hear all phonemic contrasts?
By about 12 months they can only hear those that are in their native language
- Probably makes speech perception much faster and
more efficient
What does an infant’s loss of the ability to hear all phonemic contrasts suggest about learning phonemes?
We learn them through statistical learning
What is statistical learning?
Sensitivity to statistics of the environment - which things occur and which things they occur with
What are the two kinds of statistical learning?
□ Individual
- How often and in what distribution does a thing occur
□ Co-occurrence
- How often and in what distribution do two different things occur together
What did the test on babies’ phoneme-contrast detection in a foreign language show in terms of statistical learning?
□ Train babies on the distribution of a new language and see if they learn the new contrast
□ 8 month-old English-learning babies trained on Hindi contrast that doesn’t exist in english
□ Control group heard a series of tones
□ Unimodal group - distribution favoured one category
□ Bimodal group - distribution favoured two categories
□ Habituate them to sound A - do they dishabituate to sound B?
□ Found
- Infants only dishabituated in bimodal condition - suggests they used that condition to learn the Hindi phoneme contrast
What did the test about the association between good phoneme learning and good vocabulary learning show?
□ Took babies at 6 months and train them on new phoneme contrast not in their native language
□ Some learned it and some didn’t - can tell by dishabituation behaviour
□ Take same babies and get a sense of their vocabulary and 13 months and 16 months
□ Found that how well they did on the task at 6 months (how long it took them to hear the contrast) predicts their vocabulary at 16 and 13 months
□ Suggests that it’s useful to learn the phonemes of your native language
Can adults learn new phonemes?
○ Yes - much more difficult and performance is more fragile
○ Adults with lots of musical training tend to do better
What is the issue with word segmentation?
-spaces can’t be heard
• Since you speak a language fluently your brain puts the spaces in between words
• How do people know where the spaces go?
What are some possible solutions to the word segmentation problem?
- Maybe with phonotactic constraints
□ Limitations on which sequences on sounds are
permissible in language
□ Learning them might help distinguish what might
the start and end of a word based on what sounds
are allowed where - Prosodic constraints
□ Which stress patterns are common in that
language
Infants are aware of these by 9 months
What are some issues with the ‘constraints’ solutions to word segmentation?
□ These constraints only get you so far: can’t segment all words based on those
□ For both, you need to know something about what words are before you can use the constraints - chicken or egg situation
What the ‘variant of statistical learning - intuition’ solution to the word segmentation problem?
□ Words are chunks of language that always have same sequence of phonemes
□ If you learn which phonemes go together and which don’t you’ll be able to use that to pick out which are words
□ Capture this intuition with notion of transition probability
- For each unit, it’s the probability of each other unit following
□ If what people are sensitive to are these transition probabilities, then maybe they are learning which things are words by using statistical learning - which things occur with which other things?
What did the study on whether children use transition probabilities show?
□ Habituated infants to a stream of speech and defined the words solely by transition probabilities (not real words, merely sounds whereby the transition periods of the syllables was made to seem as though they were words)
- Mechanised speech - no tonal or phonotactic
information
□ Then changed it up to make transition probabilities different (ie changed the probability that one syllable would be followed by the another)
□ If infants noticed the change, they only could have noticed it if they were tracking the transition probabilities in the first place
□ Defined the ‘words’ so that the transition probability between the syllables within a ‘word’ was 1, and that of the syllables between a ‘word’ was 0.33
□ For some infants they played a partial word (so only part of the syllables that went together, not the whole word) and others got non-words (so where the transition probability of the second syllable following the first was 1/3 not 1)
□ Children perked up in both instances but more so for the non-words
□ So responded differently for partial words and non-words
□ Only reason for this would be if they had been tracking transition probabilities
What did the test of making adults listen to a made-up language on repeat show us about transition probability?
- Took 4 adults and taught them a made-up language with 1000 word types and repeated them in different combinations 60 000 times (10 hours of speech, listened to while exercising)
- Tested them on the segmentation of the words both immediately and after 1-2 months
- All participants in both tests did really well compared to the control (people who did the test without having listened to it)
- 3 years later, 3 came back and were given the same test
- Remembered the high frequency words even after 3 years
- Perhaps transition probability could explain word segmentation for a whole language
Is tracking transition probabilities a language-specific skill?
No:
○ Also found with visual sequences, action sequences, and spatial organisation
What are some issues with word learning?
• Saussure: the arbitrariness of sign
○ The form of a word tells you little about its meaning
○ To learn a word’s meaning you basically have to memorise it
• The problem of reference (Quine)
○ The meaning of any word is logically unconstrained
○ Could be infinite meanings of one word
What are the patterns of kids learning words?
○ First words usually come in between 8 and 14 months - varies tremendously
○ First words are piecemeal but at some point (usually 12-24 months) there is a vocabulary spurt characterised by very rapid learning
○ Vocabulary growth varies with SES and environment
- Due in part to umber of words they hear
- Also possibly the amount of conversational turn-
taking
-Production follows comprehension - children will understand more than they say
How do kids learn words?
Children rely on a number of useful biases and principles:
- Shape bias
- Mutual exclusivity
- Size principle
- Social reasoning
What is the shape bias?
□ Sensitive to features with meaning in the word
□ One of main features in shape
□ Children prefer to categorise (most) nouns by shape
□ Emerges over the course of the second year
□ May be learned based on statistical associations between words and features of categories they pick out
□ Eg the shape bias matches the pattern of how words (particuarly solids)are used in the input
□ This is statistical learning of which things occur with each other
□ Evidence for learning
- Test:
◊ Taught children new words that were very clearly organised by shape (associated with shapes) - wanted to see if that helped them have the shape bias emerge earlier
◊ Took infants in before they had shape bias and taught them the new words with the shapes over 9 sessions
◊ Found that the shape bias did emerge in the ones that were taught, but the ones that were taught that also had improved vocabulary
◊ Suggests not only that the shape bias was caused by statistical learning, but that the shape bias itself helped them learn words outside of the lab
What is the Mutual Exclusivity strategy of word learning?
□ Children generally assume items don’t have more than one label
□ If you see two items and one of them you don’t know, one you do - probably will say the word you don’t know will match the item you don’t know
□ Problem:
- Must be a soft bias - many items do have multiple labels (eg dog, pet, animal)
- How, when and why is it overridden
What is the size principle strategy of word learning?
□ Bunch of things in the world but you don’t know the words for them
□ Multiple examples are evidence for the smallest category hat covers them
□ If you have one example for something you people will mostly extend it to the basic level
□ The more examples you have, the smaller the category becomes - more specific
□ Three levels of categories:
- Subordinate
- Basic
- Superordinate
What is the social reasoning strategy of word learning?
□ Language is a social thing
□ Infants only learn labels if the speaker is looking at the object
□ If they are looking away, infant will not associate the word with the object
□ Children do not learn labels if the speaker has previously mislabeled other items
-Pay attention to how knowledgable the speaker is
What is data?
• Data is information that has been transformed into a manner that can be manipulated, analysed, and used to infer relationships
What are the two different types of data?
Categorical
Continuous
What are the types of categorical data?
- Binary
□ Two categories that are usually in opposition to
each other
□ Exclusive to each other
□ Yes or no/ present or absent/ 0 or 1 - Nominal
□ Name
□ Label we give for each category indicates something similar for everyone in that category
□ Category labels don’t indicate any kind of relationship to each other
□ 3 or more - Ordinal
□ 3 or more
□ Order
□ Names of each category have a particular meaning
which shows a relationship to each other - All collect frequency data
- Can’t get a mean score
- Chi-squared looks at patterns of frequencies - what patterns can we expect
What are the types of continuous data?
- Interval
□ Number represent particular order
□ Distance between each number is the same
□ Temperature
□ Does not treat 0 as anything special - no particular
meaning - Ratio
□ Same as interval but zero is significant
□ 0=absolute
□ Eg time, length, weight
What are two classes of words?
• Open-class words: ○ Carry the content ○ Easy to add new members ○ Produced earlier ○ Easier for 2nd language learners • Closed-class words: ○ Carry much of the grammar ○ Hard to add new members ○ Produced later ○ Harder for 2nd language learners
Why are verbs so significant in sentences?
- Determine what arguments are
- In charge of the sentence - verb tells you what the other arguments in the sentence should be
- Determine whether arguments are optional or not
Do we learn that verbs take different arguments through mimicry?
Probably not:
□ Study on preschoolers
- Made up a verb ‘moop’ and gave examples of
using it ‘he mooped the ball to her’, ‘he is
mooping Ralph the ball’ - saying it with
particular arguments
- Asked about something they had never seen
before - ‘can you say he is mooping the ball to
her?’ - kids said yes
◊ Generalising to a context they haven’t
seen before
□ People are willing to say verbs in argument structures they have never heard before - generalising beyond the input not just copying
Do we learn that verbs take different arguments by generalising arbitrarily?
No
□ Taught people another verb pilk: ‘she is pilking the data to the screen’
□ Can you say ‘she is pilking the screen the data’?
□ Most said no
□ Used patterns of their language to make an informed decision about the verb rules
What is the Logical Problem of Language Acquisition?
There are so many exceptions to the rules - how do we learn the exceptions?
What are some possible solutions to the Logical Problem of Language Acquisition?
- Maybe children are told when they get things wrong (ie they get negative evidence)
◊ Probably doesn’t play much role - children
appear not to receive much, or if they do they
don’t notice it
◊ Parents tend to only correct the truth of the
child’s utterance, not the grammatical
correctness
◊ Often the child doesn’t understand the
correction - Maybe they are sensitive to more subtle kinds of negative evidence - rephrasings that statistically occur more often
◊ This does occur, but it’s arguable whether it is
enough to entirely solve the problem - Maybe they use implicit negative evidence about which argument structures don’t appear
◊ Does also happen - predicts that
overgeneralisation errors should be more
common for infrequent verbs
◊ Children taught a new language with two
kinds of arguments - some with ‘ka’ and some
without
- Later asked which verbs were
grammatical - the more a verb occurred
with ‘ka’ the more they were likely to say
‘ka’ was grammatical
What are morphemes?
- Morphemes are the smallest units that convey meaning (sometimes ‘s’ to indicate plurality, ‘ing’ implies it’s continuous etc)
- Includes tense, which overlaps with mood (whether it is certain to happen), and aspect (whether it is ongoing)
What are the two verb tenses?
□ Regular (+ed)
- Psychologically real - can adapt new words
and +ed to make it past tense
□ Irregular (mostly occur in clusters based on similarity of the stem)
- Also psychologically real - people are more
confused about new verbs that sound like
irregulars
- Therefore not just purely memorising them
□ Irregular verbs are the most frequent - suggests evolutionary story
- If a verb is infrequent, it’s unlikely to be well-memorised - people are more likely to +ed to the end
How is morphology learned?
- Theory that it follows a U-shaped curve
□ Start learning through memorisation, so get some
things right
□ Then realise there is a pattern so add ‘ed’ to
everything - past tense rules are overgeneralised
□ Then mistakes are corrected - Lots of debate around the reasons for this curve
- Revolves around whether there are two opposing mechanisms (rules vs memorisation) or whether it all emerges from statistical learning
How do we use verbs to construct/tract a parse/phrase?
-One possibility: learning the rules of a language = learning words that immediately follow other words (bigrams/n-grams)
-People probably don’t just use n-grams to
capture grammatical rules
-There are long-distance dependencies between
words in sentences, suggesting some deep/hidden
structure related to the verb linking them
- It’s impossible to track long-distance
dependencies if all you notice is word-to-word
probabilities - you’d need very long word chains -
goes beyond realisitic confines of human memory
-More agreed-upon possibility:phrase structure - phrases nested in with one another in our underlying mental representation
○ The underlying depiction of a sentence’s
phrase structure is called its parse tree
○ Syntactic ambiguity arises from sentences
with the same words but different meanings -
because they have different parse trees
- Shows parse trees are psychologically
real
○ Syntactic ambiguity (poorly resolved) can lead
to unintentional humour
How do we process sentences?
○ People do our best to figure the phase structure out as we’re hearing the sentence
○ Sometimes this results in us getting misled into choosing the wrong parse tree - having to go back and reanalyse it from the beginning
- Called garden path sentences
□ Implies that sentences with larger long-
distance dependencies tend to be more
difficult
○ Developmentally - even children are remarkably good at figuring out language as it comes - a skill distinct from, but correlated with, knowledge of vocabulary
What is infancy?
- First few years of life, from birth to aroud 1 year of age
* Piaget’s sensorimotor stage
What was Plato’s perspective of infancy?
- Emphasised self control
- Children are born with innate knowledge
What was Aristotle’s perspective of infancy?
- Knowledge comes from experience
- Infant’s mind is a blackboard with nothing written on it
What does an infant bring in to the world that equips them to start making sense of the world around them?
Motor milestones
Reflexes
Sensory abilities
What are an infant’s motor milestones?
2 months: can lift head (av range= 0-3months)
6 months: sit independently (av range=5-9 months)
8 months: crawling on hands and knees(av range=6-11)
9 months: Pulls to stand (av range = 6-12 months)
12 months: walking (av range= 9-17 months)
- Cultural differences in motor milestones - reflecting contexts of development - Motor milestones not met by latter end of average range may require further investigation - Investigation is important especially if multiple developmental delays have been noted
What are an infant’s reflexes?
- From birth have the gripping reflex
- Inborn automatic responses to different forms of stimulation - biologically based (suggests importance for survival)
- Gives quick indication of baby’s neurological status
- Some reflexes can be refined over time to become complex patterns of behaviours, others may drop out
- Common infant reflexes
□ Crawling
□ Grasping
□ Rooting (head turns with mouth open when
touched on the cheek)
□ Moro (outstretched arms and arched back when
startled or loss of support)
□ Stepping
□ Babinski (fanning out of toes when foot stroked)
What are an infant’s sight abilities?
- Sight
□ Poor acuity (things are not clear), but prominent
features pop out
□ Can see objects from a distance of 14cm
□ Colour perception by 1 month
□ Newborn visual ability for social stimuli:
- Look longer at regular face-like patterns than
scrambled face pattern
- Look longer at biological motion than other
kinds of motion
- Can differentiate familiar faces from unfamiliar
faces, and smiling from unsmiling
□ Preferential looking techniques enable us to infer
what infants can see
□ Gaze preferences have implications for what
babies observe and learn
□ Babies later diagnosed with ASD do not show
preference for faces over other displays - perhaps
miss out on social and language cues conveyed by
faces
□ Third trimester fetus looks towards three dots
configured like a face not towards three dots in
inverted configuration
What are an infant’s touch abilities?
□ Sensitive to temperature change
□ Evidence of sensitivity to pain - physiological indicators
- Not possible to assess cognitive components of
pain
□ Research has shown positive benefits of massage for preterm infants, infants of depressed mums, infants suffered abuse, HIV infants, infants exposed to drugs
- Benefits include weight gain and later cognitive
and motor development
□ Research with humans and other mammals suggest that touch may be a necessity for mammalian development, both at physiological and social level
What are an infant’s hearing abilities?
□ Newborns can discriminate mum’s voice from unfamiliar female voice, and discriminate familiar from unfamiliar novel story read by mum
□ Preparedness for language - infant can discriminate sounds of speech in own language from other languages at 6 months
What are an infant’s tasting abilities?
□ Differences in mouth chemistry make sensory experience different for infants:
- Taste chemistry changes throughout childhood
reaching adult form by early adolescence
What are an infant’s smelling abilities?
□ Breastfed newborns discriminate and prefer scent of own mum than lactating stranger
□ Bottle fed infants prefer scent of lactating females
□ Breastfeeding seems to trigger odour learning and the development of preferences
- Historically infants were thought to ‘feel nothing’ - recent research shows newborns are aware of stimuli in their environment and have ways of coping with an entirely new sensory environment from birth
- Infant’s sensory abilities may scaffold the development of some cognitive and social competencies
What are the active visual perception stages of infants?
○ 1 month olds
- Able to scan over a face
- Focus on eyes and mouth
○ 3 months old
- Still focusing on same areas but more focused, more elaborated and they spend more time on the areas
- Indicates this are is what they are interested in
○ Early facial perception skills are developed over time - not static
What is the quality of infants’ hearing abilities?
○ Newborns:
§ Can hear soft sounds as well as adults
§ Fairly good at determining location of sound
