Developmental Psychology Flashcards
What do we gain by taking a developmental perspective?
- important knowledge of: emergence, manifestation and consistency of change across the life span
- better understanding of when, how and why change occurs
- helps us understand normative/non-normative development
What id developmental psychology?
- description, explanation and prediction of age-related changes in behaviour, thinking, emotions and social relationships
- identification of variables that influence development and how they work together to shape an individual’s life
- multi-disciplinary: based in psych but also draws on genetics, neuro, education, sociology and anthropology
How do we characterise development?
- continuity/ discontinuity in development
- stability/ instability in development
(at group level and at individual level) - quantitative/ qualitative
What factors explain development?
- nature-nurture debate
- multi-systems model of development
What are behaviour genetics?
study of how variation in behaviour can be explained by separating environmental and genetic influences
What are epigenetics?
the idea that experience can determine the turning on and off of genes
What are the levels of the multi-systems model of development?
- environment (physical, social, cultural)
- behaviour
- neural activity
- genetic activity
Is development a holistic process?
Yes
Change in one domain will affect change in the other domains
Describe the sensitive periods in development?
There are sensitive periods in development where the organisation of brain structure and function is particularly sensitive to environmental input
Four basic goals for understanding development
- describe
- explain
- predict
- influence
What are the experimental designs used to explore change?
- cross sectional designs
- longitudinal designs
- sequential (cohort) designs
What are cross-sectional designs?
Test different age groups simultaneously
- E.g: Fenson et al (1994): asked parents of toddlers to describe longest sentence used by their child, 1130 ps between 16 and 30 months
- Results: rapid growth of number of words in a sentence during this age period
Advantages of cross sectional designs
- quick and economical
- demonstrate age differences and indicate developmental trend
Disadvantages of cross sectional designs
- age trends may reflect extraneous differences between cohorts (rather than developmental change)
- no data on the development of individuals, therefore provide no info about determinants of change
What are longitudinal designs?
- measure individuals at different time points
- allows some measurement of individual change
- allows an exploration of the dynamic nature of change
Five goals of longitudinal designs
- consider change in individuals
- look at change and differences between individuals
- consider factors that drive change
- look at causes of change
- investigate cause of change
Advantages of longitudinal designs
- explores individual change over time
- explores patterns of continuity and discontinuity
- same cohort
Disadvantages of longitudinal designs
- costly and time consuming
- requires large data sets
- multiple (repeated) testing
- attrition
- equivalence of methods over time
- changing qs
- cohort effects
What is a cohort?
a group of people with a shared charactersitic
What is attrition?
loss of study participants over time
What are microgenetic measures?
- examine changes as they occur
- small samples but dense data collection
- provides valuable info about changes as they occur
What are sequential (cohort) designs?
combines across sectional and longitudinal designs to examine age related change across multiple cohorts
Advantages of sequential design
- discriminates true development from cohort effects
- indicates whether developmental changes experienced by one cohort are similar to those experienced by other cohorts
- often less costly and time consuming than longitudinal approach
Disadvantages of sequential design
- still more costly and time consuming than cross- sectional approach
- attrition and biases
What are the challenges for developmental research?
- developing measures that are reliable and valid
- representative samples
- reporting
- objective measurements (brain function)
Methodologies used in developmental psychology
- observational studies (video-recording- data rich but time consuming)
- eye movement methodology (attention-cognition: pupil size)
- imaging- fMRI- blood flow and neural activity (difficult to use with children)
- EEG and ERP
What is a genotype?
Genetic blueprint- genes you inherit from your parents
What is a phenotype?
Observable characteristics
- influenced by genes, environment and their interaction
What is a homozygous pair?
When the two sets of instructions are the same at any given locus
What is a heterozygous pair?
When the two sets of instructions are different at any given locus
What is the dominant-recessive pattern?
- dominant genes always express their characteristics
- both recessive genes must be present to express their characteristics
- however, genes vary in expressivity
Examples of dominant genes
- freckles
- Rh positive blood
- type A and B blood
- dark hair
- curly hair
Examples of recessive genes
- flat feet
- thin lips
- Rh negative blood
- type O blood
- red hair
What are polygenetic traits?
Traits that require the interaction of several genes
Examples of polygenetic traits?
- height
- body type
- eye colour
- skin colour
- personality
What are the 3 stages of prenatal development?
1) Germinal stage
2) Embryonic stage
3) Foetal stage
What is the germinal stage? (prenatal development)
- the zygote
- occurs from conception to implantation (around 2 weeks)
- blastocyst: division into 2 sections: section that will become baby and section that will form into various structures that support development
- structures: placenta, umbilical cord, yolk sac, aminion
What is the embryonic stage? (prenatal development)
- begins when implantation is complete
- forms foundations of all body organs
- all major organs and systems begin to develop
- organogenesis occurs
- heartbeat at 4 weeks
- rapid development
What is organogenesis?
Process of organs developing
What is the foetal stage? (prenatal development)
- 9- 38 weeks
- basic structures are refined and grow to final form
- week 12: sex can be determined
- viability possible by week 22/23
What is viability?
When a foetus can be born and survive unattached from the mother
Describe the prenatal development of the brain
- first month: neural tube forms
- 6th month: most of the brain’s neurons are in place and synaptogenesis begins (associated with new behavioural capacities)
- last trimester: cerebral cortex enlarges
What is the correlation between fetal behaviour and brain development?
the development of the brain is correlated with movement in the womb and different behaviours that the fetus can engage in
Describe the brain development of fetus
- different brajn regions mature at different times (regions associated with higher coginitve function develop later)
- hippocampus, amygdala and corpus callosum undergo rapid growth during first 3.5 years of life
- during these early years, the brain may be sensitive to experiences
What is the correlation between brain weight and age?
- there is an increase of the brain’s weight with age
- there is a slight decline in brain weight as people age
- male brain weighs more
Talk about foetal development- behavioural organisation I
- foetal movements (from week 8 onwards, felt by mother at 18-20 weeks)
- behaviour becomes progressively more organised with gestational age (by 34 weeks- distinct patterns of rest and activity)
- 20%-30% of time spent in quiet, motionless sleep-like state
- rest of time in ‘active sleep’
Talk about foetal development- beahvioural organisation II
- by 38 weeks, less time in ‘active-sleep’
- more inhibitory pathways
- activity and rest periods alternate cyclically
Foetal behaviour and learning
- foetal responses to sounds: changes in heart rate, head turns, movements
- foetal learning: distinguish between familiar and novel stimuli
What are prenatal risks?
- prenatal growth is strongly predetermined
- abnormalities in prenatal development result from: genetic causes, smoking, alchohol, drugs, environmental toxins, maternal disease, maternal diet, age, emotional state, poverty
Genetic disprders in prenatal development
- autosomal disorders: caused by dominant genes, single abnormal gene on one of the first 22 chromosomes
OR
caused by recessive genes, mutation on one of the first 22 chromosomes- both genes in a pair must be abnormal to cause the disease
Examples of genetic disorders caused by dominant genes
- huntington’s disease
- Sz
- migraine headaches
- extra fingers
Examples of genetic disorders caused by recessive genes
- phenylketonuria (PKU)
- sickle- cell disease
- tay-sachs disease
What are teratogenic effects?
Things that we know impact development
Examples of teratogenic effects
- smoking- affects birth weight
- alchohol consumption- leads to foetal alchohol syndrome (small size, small brain, physical abnormalities)
- drug abuse- leads to poor blood flow to placenta
Risks of low birth weight babies
- increased risks for impairment (perceptual, attentional, motor, intellectual, behavioural)
- can range from gross abnormalities to minor abnormalities
- prematurity
- respiratory difficulties
How do vunlerable children develop resilience?
- brain plasticity
- environmental characteristics: family good with caregiving skills, income and reslurces, community
What is sensation?
The acquisition of info through the sensory organs and the transmission of that infro to the brain
- seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling
What is perception?
Brain organises the info from the senses
- the attribution to sensations
Familiar voices and newborns
Newborns recognise their mother’s voice and by 1 month of age they can discriminate between syllables such as BA and PA
Visual ability of a newborn
- visual ability is the least developed of the senses
- newborns respond to light and track moving objects with their eyes
- visual acuity not same as in adults
What is visual acuity?
Sharpness of vision
Visual development of newborn
- initial poor control over the eyes (visual accommodation)- focus both eyes on same spot
- show preference for mother’s face
- demonstrate size and shape constancy
Describe the developmental progression of visual tracking
- from jerky to smooth tracking
- from scanning parts of an object to scanning across the whole object
Describe the perceptual skills of an infant
First 2 months
- first focus on where objects are in the world
- scan light/dark contrasts to search the edge of objects
- look at motion
2-3 months:
- shift to what an object is
- larger degree of detail noticeable
- pay attention to patterns
Ways of studying infant perception
Visual preference method
Habituation/ dishabituation
What is visual preference method as a way of understanding infant perception?
- researchers measure how long a baby looks a 2 pics
- presentation of two stimuli at the same time
- does infant look at one more than the other?
- preference implies discrimination
What is habituation as a way of studying infant perception?
- presenting the same pic over and over until baby stops looking (habituates)
- present second stimulus- does infant show renewed interest?
- habituation implies visual memory
- infants should look longer at novel stimulus
Shape perception in infants
Infants percieve shapes as wholes rather than angular parts
Object unity in infants
By 4 months, infants percieve object as a whole, newborns do not
Describe ages and object unity and trajectory continuity
- 6 months: percieve trajectory continuity
- 4 months: only when occluder is small/narrow or over a short time
- 2 months: percieve discontinous trajectory
Infants and subjective contours
By 3-4 months, infants can see subjective contours
Infants and pattern perception
- 2 day old infants discriminate between patterned and unpatterned shapes
- < 1 week old infants show preference for shape
- 2 month old infants prefer more complex pattern whereas 1 month old prefer less complex pattern- suggets that improved acuity results in greater interest in more complex patterns
Infants and face perception
- face perception is one of the most important stimuli in infant’s world
- attention to faces would be advantageous for survival and learning
What mechanism may account for face preference?
- faces display charactersitcis that are appealing: high contrast, ‘top-heavy’, move
- infanrs are born with an ‘innate face- detecting’ brain mechanism that directs their attention specifically toward face-like configurations
Describe the auditory perception in infants
Begins to develop before birth:
- foetal reactions to sound
- from 20 weeks gestation
- can discriminate between male and female voices
Newborns show preference for mother’s voice:
- lack of preference for father’s voice
- preference of mother’s voice as it sounds in uterus
Infant ages and auditory perception
Newborns:
- prefer to hear own language over foreign
- prefer to hear familiar story over new
1 month:
- distinguish “ba” and “pa” sounds
6 months:
- can discriminate two syllable words
- respond to syllable hidden inside a string
Up to 6 months:
- discriminate all sound contrasts that appear in any language
Describe other sense of infants
Less research on smell and taste:
- newborns respond differently to basic tastes (sweet, sour, bitter)
- 1 week olds distinguish body odour of their mothers from that of a stranger
Touch and motion:
- well developed
- most sophisticated of all senses at birth
- fine-tuning over the course of first year
What is intersensory integration?
How early can an infant integrate sensory information across more than one modality to percieve it as one event? (e.g matching mouth movements to sounds)
What is cross-modal (intermodal) transfer?
How early can an infant learn something via one sense and transfer that info to another sense? (e.g recognising a toy by toych although it was never felt before but only seen)
Examples of intersensory integration
- 4 month olds connect sound rhythms with movement
- 5 month olds connect sound and sight in motion (moving train matched with moving sound)
- 4-5 months show preference for a face mouthing vowel
What did John Bowlby contribute about attachment?
Specifically wanted to observe and understand the responses of children when they’re separated from their mothers
Describe Bowlby’s “44 thieves” study
- observed and compared 44 youths and 44 juvenile thieves
- delinquent thieves were more likely to of experienced separation from their mother in the first 5 years of their lives
Describe Harlow’s “rhesus monkeys” study
- one cloth mother (didn’t provide food)
- one wired mother (provided food)
- rhesus monkeys stayed with cloth mother and only went to wire mother for feeding
- demonstrated overwhelming importance of soft body contact for their development
What is attachment?
- a selective, enduring, affective tie of infant to their caregiver based on the infant’s need for protection, comfort and nurturance
Describe proximity-promoting behaviours
- infants are born with proximity-promoting behaviours e.g crying, calling, clinging
- with experience, infants develop behavioural strategies which reflect infants’ internalised ways of organising their attachments to gain proximity
What is healthy development dependent of?
- healthy development dependent on interplay between the attachment behavioural system and exploration system:
1) felt threat- attachment behaviours to achieve proximity and regulate stress
2) felt security- exploration behaviours (learn about world)
Describe the steps to attachment and development
1) Experiences of care with primary attachment figures
2) Internal working models of self, other and relationship
3) Relating to others/ psycho-social functioning
What is the development of attachment (Bowlby, 1969)?
Phase 1: non-focused orienting
Phase 2: focus on one or more figures
Phase 3: secure base behaviour
What is attachment like beyond infancy?
- goal- corrected partnership
- language, cognitive advances (e.g theory of mind) enable child to weigh both parents and his or her own goals
- attachment needs can increasingly be negotiated collaboratively between parent and child
Describe Ainsworth’s strange situation
- laboratory
- assesses 12-24 months
- observation of infant behaviours during a sequence of episodes in which parent and child are together, separated and reunited
What does an infant do in a well-functioning attachment relationship?
- when together: use mother as a base to explore form
- when separated: be stressed by absence of mother
- upon reunion: be effectively comforted by mother
What are the different attatchment styles?
- secure
- insecure-avoidant
- insecure-resistant
- disorganised
What is a disorganised attachment style?
- reflects a breakdown
- disruption in the co-ordination of regulation in behaviour
- behaviour displays fear, misdirected, jerky movements
How to measure attachment beyond the strange situation?
Representational measures of attachment:
- looking at internal models
- looking at cognitive representations of attachment
Attachment in adulthood
- in adolescence and adulthood, still attached to parents but mental proximity is more important than physical proximity
- quality of adult parental attachment is assessed using Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)
Stability on attachment
- estimates of stability of attachment overtime suggest modest associations
- estimates are moderate by risk status: stability is found to be weaker in ‘at risk’ samples than in ‘low-risk’ samples
What are the origins of variations in attachment study?
- variations in caregiver’s behaviours is dependant on the development of attachment
- secure: mother is responsive
- low levels of responsiveness is associated with insecure attachment: avoidant, ambivalent and disorganised
What predicts secure attachment?
- parental factors: prompt, consistent and appropriate responding (ability to read children’s cues)
- child factors: temperament (are they more easy-going or irritable), genetic differences
What is learning?
A fairly permanent change in behaviour due to past experience
What is habituation?
- response to a stimulus declines with repeated presentations of that stimulus
- foetuses show habituation to a vibroacoustic stimulus as early as 30 weeks gestational age
- therefore develops very early on
- highly adaptive- diminished attention to “old” stimuli allows infants to pay attention and learn about new stimuli
What is classical conditioning?
learning of an association between two stimulus (a conditioned stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus)
What are the components of classical conditioning?
- unconditioned stimulus (UCS): a stimulus that elicits reflexive response
- unconditioned response (UCR): the reflexive response
- conditioned stimulus (CS): a neutral stimulus which will later elicit desired response
- conditioned response (CR): the response to pairing CS and UCS
What are the two processes in classical conditioning?
- acquisition: acquisition of an association between the conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus stimulus- animals will acquire bell food association
- extinction: after animals acquire the association, if the bell is repeatedly, the bell food association will begin to disappear and animals will show reduces salivation response
Explain classical conditioning in infants
- association between mother and comfort/ security and warmth
- learning to feed- UCS= breast, UCR= sucking, CS= breast/ bottle, CR= sucking
- infants show extinction as young as 2-24 hours old
- classical conditioning in newborns is limited to biologically programmed reflexes
What is evaluative conditioning?
where repeatedly pairing a neutral stimulus can affect peoples ratings/ preferences for those neutral stimuli
- in older children, classical conditioning can affect preferences
What is fear conditioning?
where neutral stimulus is repeatedly presented with an aversive stimulus, which leads to fears/ phobias
- Little Albert (9 month): had no fear for wide range of objects
- researcher smashed a steel bar down (made horrible noise), Albert was scared
- noise paired with rat 7 times
- Little Albert formed fear of rat
What is instrumental conditioning?
- concerns relationships between one’s own behaviour and a reward punishment it produces
- also called operant conditioning
- e.g eating veg to recieve praise
What is reinforcement?
Changes in environment that follow a behaviour and increase the probablity that the behaviour will reoccur
- positive reinforcement: bringing good thinfs to the animal
- negavtive reinforcement: taking bad things away from animal (increase probablity that behaviour will reoccur)
What is a punishment?
Changes in envrionment that follow a behaviour and decrease the probablity that the behaviour will reoccur
- positive punishment: presenting aversive stimulus after a repsonse
- negative punishment: taking good things away from the animal
Studying instrumental conditioning in infants
- we can see evidence for instrumental conditioning very early on in infants
- Lipsitt et al. (1966) relationship between sucking reponse and sugar
What is observational learning?
Bandura (1965)
- observational learning and modelling: watching behaviour of others
- no reinforcement needed to learn mere exposure
- but whether behaviour is repeated depends on observed consequences
Describe Bandura’s Bobo Dolls
- nursery school children watched adult hits bobo doll
- adult was awarded, punished or experienced no consequence for beating up the bobo doll
- children’s actions were determined by model’s actions and the consequences
What is imitation?
- imitation is a form or observational behaviour
- evidence: if a newborn watched an adult slowly and repeatedly stick out their tongue, newborns would also stick out their tongue
What are the challenges with measuring infant memory?
- measuring infant memory is notoriously difficult (infants cannot give verbal responses until 1 years old and researchers must rely on innovative methods)
- early childhood is a time of rapif cognitive growth, but different systems grow at different paces
Describe visual and auditory recognition in infants
- foetuses recognise their mother’s voice one- two weeks before birth
- infants show a novelty preference- they prefer to look at new things
What are the two theories as to why memory improves during early childhood
- memory effiency: memory processes improve with age (i.e working memory capacity increases, learning becomes more efficient)
- memory strategies: children learn effective memory strategies (e.g elaboration, rehearsal, organisation as they get older)
Episodic memories in infants
- adults usually don’t rememeber evenfs from the first three years of life and few from the next two (infantile amnesia)
- young children have something similar to episodic memory but they forget those memories as they age
- exact cause is unknown
Memory in old children
As memory becomes adult like (14-15 years), working memory capacity increases and children integrate meaning into episodic memory
What is metacognition?
Understanding of our own minds
What is theory of mind?
Awareness that other people have different statds of awareness to you
What is metamemory?
Our knowledge and awareness of own memory processes
Development of metacognition
- from age 5: children know which material is easy/ difficult to learn
- by the first few years of school, this can be see through Judgements of Learning (JOLs)- measure of metacognition
Describe overconfidence in children
- children are overconfifent
- they overestimate how much they remember
- they don’t adjust their confidence based on experience
E..g childre consistently overestimated the number of pictures they would recall across multipme lists
Describe metacognitive control
- young children use their metacognitive knowledge to influence their learning
- by around 7-8, children will choose to restify items that gave lower JOLs more often that items which gave them higher JOLs
How can you study for long- term learning?
- retrieval practice
- spacing
- interleaving
What is retrieval practice?
A strategy in which bringing information to mind enhances and boosts learning. Deliberately recalling information forces us to pull our knowledge “out”
- retrieval practive improves learning
What is spacing?
- not cramming for long term learning but instead spacing studying out
- spacing improves memory and category induction
What is interleaving?
a process where students mix, or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study in order to improve their learning
Emotion production: what is the discrete/ basic emotion perspective?
- basic emotions: experienced/expressed by all humans and each comprises differentiable, distinct features e.g facial expressions physiological patterns, and subjective feelings
- e.g happines, anger, fear, surprise and disgust
- complex, dependent emotions: dependent on interactions between affective and cognitive processes, influenced by experience, learning and socialisation
- e.g guilt and shame
Emotion production: what is the dynamics theory?
- a system made up of components: facial expressions, instrumental behaviours, physiological responses, subjective experiences
- these components influence and change each other over time via self organisation
- result of self organistion is more slexible
- outcomes of self organisation are callrd attractor states
Are emotional expressjons universally understood?
- Ekman and Friesan
- South Fore people in New Guinea (unexposed to Western Media)
- had to identify correct emotional picture from a set of three (adults) or two (children) that matched a story
- faces were from Westeners
Descrive cogenitallt blind people and facial expressions
Congenitally blind people can produce spontaneous emotional facial expressions to seeing people, but have trouble producing voluntary emotional expressions
Facial expressions in unborn fetuses
- no in variant linkage between emotional expression and emotion
- fetuses produce a variety of facial expressions including smiles and pain during non-painful ultrasound
- findinfs for prenatal facial expressions with a dynamical systems view of emotional development
What is the development of smiling in infants?
- 0-2 months: smiling during sleep
- 2 months: social smile
- 2-6 months: interactive smiling
- 6-18 months: referential smiling
- across childhood: smiles in contexts of social sucess
Emotion recognition in infants
- 5 month olds
- four emotion contrasts: sadness/disgust, sadness/anger, anger/disgust or happiness/surprise
- examination of within valence contrasts
- used morphed faces
- found that infants were able to distinguish between sadness/ disgust and happiness/surprise, couldnt distinguish between anger/disgust
Emotion recognition across development
- recognition: recognising and naming of emotional expressions
- sad, happy, angry, just alright, scared
- children recognise emotions better with age
Summary of emotjon recognition in infants
- infants can discriminate between facial emotional expression
- various components of emotional recognition improve across childhood
- vocal boice recognition follow a slower developmental trajectory
Social referencing in infants
- 12 month old infants
3 conditions: - face plus voice: faced the cliff, smiled and vocalised
- face only: face the cliff, and only smiled and nodded
- voice only: did not face the cliffc continued watching TV screen and vocalised
Findings:
- voice had strong influence
- face only took babies longer to cross cliff
- face and voice took babies really quick to cross cliff
Describe the emotion comprehension between 3 and 11 years
- significant age effect for components
- improvement was much slower for some components than others
Phase 1: understanding of important public aspects of emotion
Phase 2: understanding of mentalistic nature of emotions
Phase 3 understanding of multiple perspectives and emption regulation
Summary of emotion understanding in infants
- infants use their caregivers emotional signal as a guide in ambivalent situation
- children’s emotional understanding becomes more and more complex with age
- sensitive interpretation of an infanrs desires predicts secure attachment and emotion understanding
- attachment seems to be related to development of empathy
What are examples of emotion regulation strategies?
- attention focus: shifting attention away from an upsettinf event
- reappraisal: changing the interpretation of a situation
- suppression: masking the expression of emotional expressions
Do adolescents use better emotion regulation strategies?
- ps: dutch children and adolescents betweeb 8 and 18 years okd
- adaptive strategies (e.g problem solving, distraction, acceptance)
- maladaptive strategies (e.g giving up, withdrawal, aggressiveness)
- transient maladaptive shift in emotion regulation strategies
Summary of emotion regulation
- the use of emotion regulation strategies changes with development
- generally, adolescents might use less helpful regualtion strategies
- evidence in support of emotion- specific use of regulation strategies
What is required from children when developing their language?
- comprehension
- production
What do children have to learn? What are the components of langauge?
- phonology: system of sounds
- semantics: meanings of words and combinations
- grammar: structure of language
- pragmatics: social rules for language
What are the different theories of language development?
- learning theorist
- nativist
- interactionist
What is the learning/ empiricist perspective in language development?
- language is learnt
- learn language from environment
- children are reinforced with grammatically correct speech
- adults shape child’s speech
- once words have been shaped, reinforcement is withheld until child begins to combine words
What is the nativist perspective in language development?
- humans are biologically programmed to acquire language
- children from all around the world show similar linguistic achievements at similar times
What is the interactionist approach in language development?
- suggests that language is the product of both learning and a biologically programmed activity
- suggests that children across the world develop language at a similar pace because they are members of the same species and share may experiences
Factors that affect langauge development
- damage to left hemisphere- leads to apahasia- broca’s area (affects speech production) and wernicke’s area (affects comprehension)
- sensitive period- missing this sensitive period suggets that there is little chance developing language
Describe the sensitive period as infants get older
- data suggets that people become less able to apply a language as they get older
- study on native english speakers and chinese immigrants
- founs that when immigrants started learning langauge before 7, their score on test was just as high as english speakers
Describe prelinguistic phase
- Infants start to process sounds in the womb
- 1-2 months: indanrs discriminate between different phonemes
Describe the preparation for speech production in infants
- parents say they can differentiate between different cries
- from about 1 month babies begin to coo (they make repeitive vowel sounds signalling pleasure)
What is proto-imperative and proto-declarative?
proto-imperative: requests for objects/actions
proto-declarative: comments on objects or actions
What is the development of speech production in infants?
- cooing and laughing (1 month)
- babbling and vocal play (4-6 months)
- canonical babbling (6-10 months)
What is canonical babbling?
- babbling repetitive vowel-consonant combinations
- gradually develop intonation
- shift to sounds that are heard most
How do infants initially learn the meanings of words?
- children construct ‘semantic system’ because words are related to one another
- learning is ‘constraint’: language learning constraints are correlates of more general constraints on attention and learning
What kinds of words are learned first?
Mainly general nominals (ball,dog)
How do infants go from words to sentences?
- first sentences: combining two words
- telegraphic speech: short and simple, grammatical markers missing
Describe the development of grammar in infants?
- very strong correlation between vocab size and complexity of a child’s sentences
- 2-3 years: telegraphic speech ceases, add inflections, begin to form qs
- overregularisation: 3-4 year olds appl basic rules to irregular words
- form complex sentences (3-4 years)
Describe correlation between social class and vocab development
- differences in children’s vocab size and the frequencies with which parents talk to their children dependent on social class
- clear association between social class and no. of words children know
- children from professional families learnt more words compared to working class
What is theory of mind?
Fundamental human ability to be able to predict and interpret other people’s behaviour and think about what other people’s mental states are
What is social cognition?
cognitive processes applied to social information
- thinking about and understanding other people, the self and relationships/ interactions
What are the general principles of social cognitive development?
- important differences behave in unpredictable ways
- people have intentjons, beliefs, desires and these can vary across time and situations
- relationships are mutual
Describe understanding minds
- The ability to attribute mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, presence)
- An understanding of how the mind words and how mental states affect behaviour
What factors contribute to the development of a theory of mind?
- social referencing: babies monitor parental emotional reactions in ambiguous situations
- joint attention
- mental state talk
- metacognition
- social factors
- role of environment
What is mind-mindedness?
Proclivity to comment appropriately on infants mental states- desires, knowledge, thoughts etc
