Early Development Flashcards
Key Developmental Theories and Basic Description (3)
- Nativism (nature)
It focuses on core, hard-wired, innate knowledge about objects, actions, numbers, and space.
- Empiricism (nurture)
Views humans as statistical learning machines, processing huge amounts of information from the external environment. By 3 months, we have made over seven million eye movements and viewed human faces for approximately four hundred hours.
- Constructivism
A third theory of development is constructivism, which suggests that humans are biased toward learning through social interactions and predisposed to seeking out information and exploring and understanding the world through hypothesis testing.
Three Core Foundational Concepts of Constructivism (3)
- Circular (bi-directional) causality
- Interactivity and brain networks
- Self-organising & activity-dependent processes
Describe Holistic Person-Context Interaction Theory (4)
Development takes place through an individual’s inner interactions between the genetic, brain, cognitive and behavioural components and their outer (person-context) interactions with the physical (niche construction) and social world (parent-child interaction).
Although there are constraints that determine, for example, which range of functions can be supported by a given cortical region, there is increasing evidence from…
- Infant perinatal focal damage
- Changes in development
- Atypical development
… that suggests there is not always a 1:1 mapping between brain structure and function.
Piaget’s Four Stages of Development Theory (4)
Sensori-Motor Stage
Preoperational Stage
Concrete Operational Stage
Formal Operational Stage
Define Assimilation and Accommodation
Assimilation is the process of incorporating new information or experiences into existing knowledge structures or schemas.
Accommodation is the process of modifying and updating existing knowledge structures or schemas based on new information or experiences.
Key Features of Piaget’s Theory (7)
- Proposes a sequence of four stages of cognitive development.
- Each stage imposes certain limitations on cognition.
- To progress to the next stage, those limitations must be overcome through cognitive restructuring.
- Assimilation and accommodation are the processes proposed to drive developmental change in this model. Note that accommodation occurs only when and if assimilation fails.
- Stagers occur in an invariant sequence (in order), and are hierarchical, deriving from knowledge structures of the previous stage of development.
- At each stage, radical cognitive restructuring (a complete overhaul of thought processes) occurs. This change is qualitative in nature.
- Development is domain-general and demonstrates concurrence, meaning that the same systems and skills can be applied to knowledge acquisition at different developmental stages.
Features of Sensori-Motor Stage (4)
0-2 years
Understanding the world through physical action upon it.
This understanding is limited by egocentricity.
It ends when they develop an understanding of object permeance.
Features of the Preoperational Stage (2)
2-6 years
Mentally represents aspects of the world but with limitations.
Features of the Concrete Operational Stage (2)
7-11 years
Uses ‘operations’ or mental actions to solve problems.
Features of the Formal Operational Stage (2)
age 12+
Can deal with the hypothetical and abstract.
Criticism of Piaget’s Four Stages of Development (4)
- Infants are capable of much more than the pre-operational stage contends.
- It overestimates children’s abilities during the formal operational stage.
- It neglects significant changes in the adolescent period.
- It doesn’t account for individual differences between children and populations (Piaget studied his own children).
Define Object permanence
describes the ability to mentally represent an object, even when it is not visible. Understanding that objects exist permanently, independent of our experience, makes this possible.
Define Egocentricity
is the belief that something exists because of the observer’s actions upon it.
Outline The A, not B Task (4)
The task demands executive integration of multiple cognitive tasks, including;
- Inhibiting a prepotent response.
- Holding a memory of the new location in mind (requiring attentional capacity).
The task assesses representational capacity (and accompanying attentional resources).
Representational capacity
is the ability to imagine the object existing in a specific location without directly observing it in that location.
Define perceptual expectation
a mental representation of an object in a specific location based on direct observation of the object in that location (seeing is believing).
Criticisms of the A, not B Task (8)
- The task is highly replicable but context-dependent.
- The age of success depends on the number of repetitions and the delay period.
- Depending on specific parameters, infants can pass or fail these tasks at different ages.
- Evidence suggests that the error is more due to an inability to inhibit the prepotent response (incorrect but instinctual responses, as in the Go, No-Go Task).
- Different findings when responses are measured using looking or reaching behaviours.
- Early mental processes like simple perceptual expectation may not support the developmental trajectories we see in the A-not-B task and other representational activities such as drawing, pretend play, and delayed imitation.
- For example, 12-month-old infants do not show the A not-B error unless a delay is imposed between object placement and initiation of the retrieval response. Compared to 18-month-olds, 12-month-old infants perform worse in the invisible displacement task (the object is placed in a container, and the container is hidden).
- Representational capacity does emerge gradually during infancy (in line with the sensorimotor period). However, it may not result from their developing understanding of interactions between the self and the external environment.
Define Phonology
is the sound system of the language.
Semantics
or lexical items are the meanings of words.
Morphology
refers to the internal structure of words.
Two types of morphology with definition (2)
- Inflectional: the addition of amorphemeat the end of a word to change what the word means in a sentence or
- Derivational: a type ofword formationthat creates new lexemes by changing syntactic categories or adding substantial new meaning (or both) to a free or bound base.
Define Syntax
the way that words are combined to make sentences and grammar.
List the stages of language development (6)
Pre-linguistic
Babbling
Holophrastic
Two-word
Telegraphic
Multi-word
Features of the Babbling stage (4)
6-12 months
Progression from reduplicated/canonical babbling (repeating the same syllable over and over), to variegated babbling (combine different consonant and vowel combinations) and finally proto-words (‘Made up’ words used to represent a word they cannot pronounce).
The emergence of meaning presents from approximately 9 months.
First words may bear little
relation to the adult equivalent or have a different scope.
Features of the holophrastic stage (3)
12-18 months
One word can convey a whole phrase of meaning.
Phonology is often simplified for ease of articulation (‘fis’ phenomenon).
Features of the two-word stage (3)
18-24 months
Explosion of vocabulary and start of grammar.
Usually content words e.g. “dolly gone”.
Features of the telegraphic stage (3)
2-3 years
Sentences make sense but are not grammatically complete as some
grammatical words still omitted.
From this point, continued development of inflectional morphology, auxiliary verbs and length of utterances.
Define Phonemes
perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another. For example, p, b, d, and t are phonemes in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat.
