Exam 2 Flashcards
Chomsky (e.g., “language acquisition device”)
- (contrasted with BF Skinner) → Skinner’s approach is based off of the environment that the child is in
- Nativist Approach/model → language arises from the child
- Children are born with the device, as they grow they use innate capacity to learn language
Language characteristics (e.g., productive and regular, hierarchical)
- A communication system that demonstrates productivity(finite parts create infinite ideas,) regularity (system of rules), hierarchical (organized into parts like morphemes, sentences, etc)
- These things can be used to create an infinite combination of communications, and we learn it hierarchically
Morpheme and phoneme
Parts of the hierarchy of language, morpheme=unit of word, phoneme=sound
Nativist perspective of language
Chompsky - u born with it (innate)
Learning theory perspective
- BF Skinner
- language is a learned pattern of behaviors unique to a culture. Not innate
Early phonological development (e.g., number of speech sounds)
Learning to distinguish speech sounds (there are over 200 speech sounds)
Categorical perception and hearing “pauses” between words
- Ability of infants to hear strings of words and make distinction between end of one word and start of another.
- There is no actual longer pause between words, infants are just immersed in the language to recognize it
Young infants and perception of foreign languages
- We are born with ability to hear a broad range of phonemes, and environment selects out which we can hear
- young infants are actually better at hearing different phonemes from different cultures, brain has not yet pruned the connections we don’t need
Infant directed speech
Baby talk, “motherese”
Intersubjectivity (e.g., joint referencing)
- Idea that there is a triangle between the child, scientist, and object (in this case the bunny) but there is this development as a child sees a thing and becomes able to get someone’s attention and say look at this!!
- Between 9-12mo
“natural pedagogy” of parents/caregivers with infants (e.g., “ostentatious utterances”)
- naming, pointing, emphasizing objects and activities…”ostentacious utterances” including “look at…” and “are you…”
- Hart and Risley (1995) - higher SES=487 utterances per hour; low SES=187 utterances per hour; signif discrepancy in language input by CA=4
Overextensions and underextensions of words
When a child uses a word too specific for something else (not all flying things are birds, not all utensils are spoons )
Fast mapping
- Child has learned how to learn
- You know they are at that stage (3-4) because they keep asking you tons and tons of questions
- Around 18mo, infants appear to understand that objects have names, setting the stage for rapid vocab growth. They may grow their vocab from about 50 words at 18 mo to 10,000 by 6 years
Principles of children’s language learning:
1. whole object assumption
2. mutual exclusivity principle
3. taxonomic principle
- A dog is a dog, including the ears, the nose, the tail, etc.
- Notion that if this thing is an eraser, another thing that looks very different is probably not going to have that same name
- In fast mapping stage, they start to understand that pretty much everything has a name
Structure of syntax
Formation of utterances by combining words (AKA sentence structure)
Pragmatic language development
- accurate perception and understanding of speech
- production of intelligible speech
- appreciation of cultural norms
-inhibition of inappropriate speech or behavior
(AKA learning how to navigate life with language)
Deaf infants and the acquisition of language (hearing and deaf parents)
- deaf children with deaf+signing parents learn language at similar pace as hearing children with hearing parents
- deaf children with non-signing+hearing parents learn language at slower pace because parents are learning sign at the same time
Behaviorist perspective – positive reinforcement, punishment, prompting
- power of positive reinforcement, it’s good
- skill behavior, like prompting
- limitations of punishment, its bad
Impact of trauma on cognitive development
- PTSD causes children to have a tough time, they seem restless, fidgety, and have trouble paying attention, and could therefore be diagnosed with ADHD
- more in defense mode and react strongly to stimuli
HPA axis (amygdala – prefrontal lobe – adrenal gland) and PTSD
- The parts work in tandem, 3 point system, and they work to set the occasion to work with PTSD to compromise cognition
- Hippocampus > memory
- amygdala > emotion
- prefrontal > emotion regulation, planning, problem solving
Classical conditioning models of trauma
- PTSD is classical conditioning, someone in trauma context associates loud sound with fear response, and now even in safe space associates loud with fear
Memory processing models (e.g., contextual representations and sensory representation)
- contextual = consciously accessible
- sensory = involuntary and dis-integrated from broader memory
Emotional processing models
- fitting traumatic event into cognitive schema
- Difficult process. How do you fit such a negative thing into your schema…as a result you may push away that memory and can set the occasion for maladaptive functioning
Cognitive model of PTSD (e.g., “perceptual priming”, stroop test)
- If you were to show a picture of an alleyway, those who have had past of being accosted at some point vs those who have not had that experience will describe the scene much differently and have different physiological response
- In stroop test with words with neutral or emotionally charged list of words, kids with trauma are more stopped up reading the words related to trauma
“Development” vs “Expertise”
- Discrimination between maturation of individuals and raw acquisition of skills (learning how to do shit) → skills like riding bikes, making change, checking out books, would not be considered development.
- But these skills set the occasion for more development, and more development sets the occasion for more complex skill acquisition.
Young children and perceptual learning (e.g., face recognition)
- Face recognition → first few weeks, kids can recognize a human face…but it takes a while for children to make discriminations across faces.(4-5yrs)
- The people they see most often as kids they can tell apart more readily than those who don’t look like the people they know
Global and local processing, as relates to young children
Younger children (6-10 years) did poorer on tasks that required global processing, compared to older children (10-12 yrs)
; Porporino et al, 2004) global processing may develop more slowly and be more vulnerable to the condition in which the stimuli are presented.
Development of executive functioning skills (i.e., rate and functional ramifications)
- ability to function in a given environment depending on the context
- as you grow older, you are more able to executive function (frontal lobe shit)
- cleaning your room, stopping one task and starting another, etc.
Working memory (e.g., capacity for young children vs adults); implications for efficiency
- reasoning and problem solving
- Differences in working memory between younger children (worse) and older children (better)…affects ability to complete tasks
Development of long-term memory (e.g., primacy/recency effect)
- Encoding–establishment of info in memory
- Retrieval–recovery of stored info
- Rehearsal–as strategy for encoding, drives up across the childhood years, quantitatively and qualitatively
- primacy/recency effect–words at the beginning and end of a list are remembered more
Primacy–practices more, recency–still in STM. older children more adept at demonstrating primacy skills, suggesting that they are more prone to practicing rehearsal
Childhood amnesia and importance of “salient” events
first memories around age 3
Judgment – attribute substitution (and when is usage most likely?)
Exercise sound judgment. What are judgment traps that occur because of the way our nervous systems are organized
We don’t analyze a circumstance using data, we use general vibes (heuristics)
Availability heuristic
Conclusions based off of experiences immediately available to you
P words
I think I do more dishes
Representativeness heuristic
You look at someone and think that they are going to act a certain way based off of the way that they appear (but your judgment could turn out to be wrong)
Higher-order cognitive processes – definition and examples
- Reasoning, Decision making, Problem solving, thinking, Commonality: previously stored information is manipulated in novel ways
- the professor Birkenstock problem
“Collections” (Markman) – contrast with Piaget’s notion of “class” (hierarchical)
Related to higher-order processes, can’t expect young infants to organize info in the complex ways older adults do…but others say that children are actually really good at organizing collections of concepts housed together to help understand experiences
flowers vs blue flowers and yellow
Growth of knowledge and the “naïve theory approach” – not just expanding schema
holds that children construct commonsense understandings(theories) that have individual concepts embedded in them, and “new” knowledge is experienced in relation to existing knowledge
Decision-making – children and adolescents (e.g., complexity of goals, realism)
older children use more logical decision making
Decision-making – grocery shopping paradigm/bike purchasing paradigm
grocery shopping; youngins ran into store and went all over, older kids went in with a plan to get things
bike: older kids think about more logical reasons a bike would be good for them
Apprenticeships and Vygotsky’s zones of proximal development
Different ways of learning higher order cognitive practices → spending time with others as they show us stuff, how to do stuff
other cultures learn outside of school setting, older people teach skills
Reading – whole language vs phonics-based instruction
Prereading (0-6, McD’s logo)
Decoding (6-7; eg alphabet sounds)
Confirmation, fluency, ungluing from print* (7-8; “courage and skill”)
Reading for learning the New (9-13; textbooks)
“Whole-language” (recognizing words) vs. Phonemic Awareness (recognizing and putting together sounds)
Metacognition – metacognitive knowledge and regulation
What we know about how we think and how we exert influence over this
Metamemory tasks – differences between younger and older children (e.g., adding variables)
Metacognitive strategies (e.g., word mnemonics, reciprocal teaching)
Self-testing, spacing, interleaving
synaptic pruning
brain prunes unnused synapses as u get old
guest lecture
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