Unit 4 Flashcards
Schemes
According to Piaget, mental structures that organize information and regulate behavior.
Assimilation
According to Piaget, taking in information that is compatible with what one already knows.
Accommodation
According to Piaget, changing existing knowledge based on new knowledge.
Equilibration
According to Piaget, the process by which children reorganize their schemes to return to a state of equilibrium when disequilibrium occurs.
Sensorimotor Period
Infancy (0-2 years). First of Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, which lasts from birth to approximately 2 years.
Preoperational Period
Preschool and early elementary school years (2-7 years).
Concrete Operational Period
Middle and late elementary school years (7-11 years).
Formal Operational Period
Adolescence and adulthood (11 years and up).
Object Permanence
Understanding, acquired in infancy, that objects exist independently of oneself.
Egocentrism
Difficulty in seeing the world from another’s point of view; typical of children in the preoperational period.
What are the characteristic shortcomings in preschoolers’ symbolic skills?
- Egocentrism
- Centration
- Appearance as Reality
Animism
Phenomenon of crediting inanimate objects with life and lifelike properties such as feelings.
Centration
According to Piaget, narrowly focused type of thought characteristic of preoperational children.
Core Knowledge Hypothesis
Infants are born with rudimentary knowledge of the world, which is elaborated based on experiences.
Teleological Explanations
Children’s belief that living things, including their parts and their actions, exist for a purpose.
Essentialism
Children’s belief that all living things have an essence that can’t be seen but gives a living thing its identity.
Mental Hardware
Mental and neural structures that are built in and allow the mind to operate.
Mental Software
Mental “programs” that are the basis for performing particular tasks.
Attention
Processes that determine which information will be processed further by an individual.
Orienting Response
An individual views a strong or unfamiliar stimulus, and changes in heart rate and brain-wave activity occur.
Habituation
Act of becoming unresponsive to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly.
Classical Conditioning
A form of learning that involves pairing a neutral stimulus and a response originally produced by another stimulus.
Operant Conditioning
A form of learning that emphasizes the consequences of reward and punishment.
Autobiographical Memory
Memories of the significant events and experiences of one’s own life.
One-to-One Principle
Counting principle that states that there must be one and only one number name for each object counted.
Stable-Order Principle
Counting principle that states that number names must always be counted in the same order.
Cardinality Principle
Counting principle states that the last number name denotes the number of objects being counted.
Intersubjectivity
Mutual, shared understanding among participants in an activity.
Guided Participation
Children’s involvement in structured activities with others who are more skilled, typically producing cognitive growth.
Zone of Proximal Development
Difference between what children can do with assistance and what they can do alone.
Scaffolding
A style in which teachers gauge the amount of assistance they offer to match the learner’s needs.
Private Speech
A child’s comments that are not intended for others but are designed to help regulate the child’s own behavior.
Infant-Directed Speech
Speech that adults use with infants that is slow and has exaggerated changes in pitch and volume; it helps children master language.
Cooing
Early vowellike sounds that babies produce.
Babbling
Speechlike sounds that consist of vowel-consonant combinations; common at about 6 months.
Fast Mapping
A child’s connections between words and referents that are made so quickly that he or she cannot consider all possible meanings of the word.
Underextension
When children define words more narrowly than adults do.
Overextension
When children define words more broadly than adults do.
Phonological Memory
Ability to remember speech sounds briefly; an important skill in acquiring vocabulary.
Referential Style
Language-learning style of children whose vocabularies are dominated by names of objects, persons, or actions.
Expressive Style
Language-learning style of children whose vocabularies include many social phrases that are used like one word.
Telegraphic Speech
Speech used by young children that contains only the words necessary to convey a message.
Grammatical Morphemes
Words or endings of words that make a sentence grammatical.
Overregularizations
Grammatical usage that results from applying rules to words that are exceptions to the rule.
