Textbook 4.1, 4.3, and 4.4 Flashcards
According to Piaget, mental structures that organize information and regulate behavior:
Schemes
According to Piaget, taking in information that is compatible with what is already known:
Assimilation
According to Piaget, changing existing knowledge based on new knowledge:
Accommodation
According to Piaget, a process by which when disequilibrium occurs, children reorganize their schemes to return to a state of equilibrium:
Equilibration
According to Piaget, a narrowly focused type of thought characteristic of preoperational children:
Centration
Evaluating Piaget’s Theory (4):
- Underestimates cognitive competence in infants and young children, overestimates in adolescents.
- Vague concerning processes of change.
- Does not account for variability in children’s performance.
- Undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on cognitive development.
The difference between what children can do with assistance and what they can do alone:
Zone of Proximal Development
A teaching style in which teachers gauge the amount of assistance they offer to match the learner’s needs:
Scaffolding
A child’s comments that are not intended for others but are designed to help regulate the child’s behavior:
Private Speech
Unique sounds used to create words, making them the basic building blocks of language:
Phonemes
Speech that adults use with infants that is slow, has exaggerated changes in pitch and volume, and is thought to aid language acquisition:
Infant-Directed Speech
Early vowel-like sounds that babies produce:
Cooing
Speech-like sounds that consist of vowel-consonant combinations and are common at about 6 months:
Babbling
A child’s connections between words and referents that are made so quickly that they cannot consider all possible meanings of the word:
Fast Mapping
When children define words more narrowly than adults do:
Underextension
When children define words more broadly than adults do:
Overextension
A language-learning style of children whose vocabularies are dominated by names of objects, people, or actions:
Referential Style
A language-learning style of children whose vocabularies include many social phrases that are used like one word:
Expressive Style
Speech used by young children that contains only words necessary to convey a message:
Telegraphic Speech
Words or endings of words that make a sentence grammatical:
Grammatical Morphemes
Grammatical usage that results from applying rules to words that are exceptions to the rules:
Overregularizations
Skinner and other learning theorists claimed that all aspects of language are learned through imitation and reinforcement:
The Behaviorist Answer
Children are born with mechanisms that simplify the task of learning grammar. Their brains have circuits for inferring the grammar of their native language:
The Linguistic Answer
Children learn grammar through powerful cognitive skills that detect regularities in their environment, including patterns in the speech they hear:
The Cognitive Answer
Much language learning takes place in interactions between children and adults, with both parties eager to communicate well:
The Social-Interaction Answer
