Unit 5 Flashcards
cognitive changes: dramatic and consistent
- Dramatic changes over the first 2 years
- Highly consistent across environments
Piaget scheme
- Categories of related events, objects, & knowledge used to make sense of the world
ex-learning that a structure that moves, is furry, and walks on four legs is a “dog”. This may lead to an 18-month-old thinking all furry animals are dogs, such as cats and cows.
Piaget adaptation
*Children adapt to their environment through:
*Assimilation: new experiences fit into existing schemes
*Accommodation: modifying or creating new schemes to fit new experiences
ex-Imagine a very small child is seeing a dog for the first time. If the child already knows what a cat is, they might assume the dog is a cat: It fits into their existing schema for cats, since both are small, furry, and have four legs, but they learn that it is not a cat but a dog.
Piaget assimilation
new experiences fit into existing schemes
ex-when a young child learns the word dog for the family pet, he eventually begins to identify every similar-looking canine as a dog
Piaget accommodation
modifying or creating new schemes to fit new experiences
ex-recognizing that a horse is different than a zebra means the child has accommodated, and now the child has both a zebra schema and a horse schema
piaget sensorimotor stage
– Infants use info from their senses & motor actions to learn about
the world
– Infants start out being reflexive & become more
integrated/coordinated, intentional, & abstract
ex- wiggling their fingers, kicking their legs, or sucking their thumbs
substages of piaget sensorimotor stage
- age 0-1 months= reflexes: use of built-in schemes or reflexes such as sucking or looking
- age 1-4= primary circular reaction: further accommodation of basic schemes, as the baby practises them endlessly– grasping, listening, looking, sucking
- age 4-8= secondary circular reactions: baby becomes much more aware of events outside his own body and makes them happen again in a kind of trail-and-error learning
- 8-12= coordination of secondary schemes: clear, intentional means-end behaviour
- 12-18= tertiary circular reaction: “experimentation” begins, in which the infant tries out new ways of playing with or manipulating an object
- 18-24= beginning of mental representation: development of use of symbols to represent object or events
Piaget object permanence
- Understanding that objects continue to exist when not perceived
– 2 months – rudimentary expectations shown by
longer looking when an object disappears
– 6 – 8 months – looking for a partially hidden object
– 8 – 12 months – reaching for or searching for a toy that is hidden
piaget imitation
– 2 months – can imitate actions they can see themselves make
– 8 – 12 months – can imitate other people’s facial expressions
– 1 year – imitation of any action that wasn’t in the child’s repertoire begins
– 18 months – deferred imitation (a child’s imitation of some action at a later time) begins
the challenges to Piaget view: cognitive, object permanence, imitation,
- Piaget underestimated the cognitive capacity of infants
- Wrongly equated lack of physical ability with lack of cognitive understanding
- Object permanence occurs much earlier, and is more complex, than he predicted
Object Permanence
– 4-month-olds show clear signs of object
permanence (Baillargeon et al., Rosander & von Hofsten)
– Most 5 month-olds look to the other side of a screen when a moving object disappears behind it = some kind of representation of the hidden object
Imitation
– Piaget’s proposed sequence of imitation skill has been supported
* Imitation of a hand movement starts at 1 – 2 months
* Imitation of 2-part actions starts around 15-18 months
– Imitation of facial gestures and deferred imitation
occur earlier than Piaget proposed
– Infants learn through modeling
– More skills than Piaget thought may
be inborn
Spelke violation of expectancy prodecure
- Familiarize or habituate infant to a particular
scene - Show a new scene that may violate the
infant’s expectations = dishabituation
Object concept
- Understanding of the nature of objects & how they behave
– 3-month-olds’ knowledge more sophisticated than previously thought
– Controversy
– Ability or strategies for learning may be innate (Core Knowledge Perspective)
– Do infants understand the concepts or are they responding to novelty
– E.g. support
object individuation
Object Individuation
* Identifies & differentiates object from others based on mental representation
– 4 month olds individuate based on spatio-temporal information (e.g. location & motion)
– 10 month olds individuate based on an object’s property information (e.g. size, shape, colour)
– 9 to 12 month olds individuate based on the kind of object (e.g. ball, cup, truck)
* Understanding of objects seems to develop gradually over the first 3 years
classical conditioning: modeling
Babies who felt smothered by the left breast learned to refuse the left breast
operant conditioning: modeling
– Mother’s voice or heartbeat, sweet liquids increased sucking response & head turning
observational learning
– Learn from watching others (Provasi et al., 2001)
– Prefer to watch others play with same objects as infants played with
schematic learning
The organization of experiences into expectancies, or “known” combinations
* Categories
– By 7 months infants actively use categories
– Habituate to animal pictures, dishabituate to new animal
– Respond to superordinate categories before basic
* Babies respond differently to animals and furniture but not to dogs and birds
* Do not realize that basic is subcategory of superordinate
* Hierarchical categories appear by 2 years
but are not well developed until about age 5
memory learning
Infants remember some auditory stimuli while they are asleep
* 3-month-olds can remember specific objects & their own
actions as long as a week (Rovee-Collier)
* Compared to Piaget’s ideas
* Infants are more cognitively sophisticated
* But, they do make systematic gains in memory
* Early memory is strongly tied to context (e.g. different cloth around crib)
measuring intelligence in infancy: bayley scale, habituation, predictive value
Difficult to measure
* Identify children who require special interventions
* Bayley Scales
* Measure primarily sensory & motor skills, & cognitive &
language development
* Can help ID infants & toddlers with developmental delays
* Not predictive of later IQ or school performance
* Recent versions more predictive of IQ scores in preschool
* Habituation may be a better measure (Fagan’s Test)
* Used with those with problems such as cerebral palsy
* Moderately predictive of IQ & academic
achievement at 21
theoretical perspectives: behaviourism
E.g. Skinner: emphasizes the role of reinforcement and punishment in shaping behavior
* Infants learn language through reinforcement
theoretical perspectives: nativism
- E.g. Chomsky: children’s brains contain a Language Acquisition Device which holds the grammatical universals; Pinker
- Infants have an innate knowledge of grammar (LAD)
- This constrains and assist in language development
theoretical perspectives: interactionism
- E.g. Bloom, Tomasello, Vygotsky: children developed thought and language by actively interacting with adults
- Infants are biologically prepared to attend to language
- Subprocess of cognitive and social development
the IDS (infant-direct speech) influences on language development
- Simplified, higher-pitched speech used with infants
– Newborns prefer IDS
– Helps identify sounds
– May help with word learning
influence on language development: early experinces
Early experiences influence language
* Critical
* Being read to often
* Being spoken to = richer vocabularies & more complex sentences
* Poverty
* Substantial gap in vocabulary by age 4
* Gap widens over the school years
* Cultural differences
* Emphasis on type of communication, non-standard forms of language, and biased assessments may show delays
(e.g. for Indigenous children)
early milestones on language development
One month
* Cooing vowel sounds, usually to signal pleasure
6 months
* Babbling with vowel & consonant sounds
* Babbling is related to the beginning of
language production
* Intonational patterns are used
* Initially all sounds, but gradually only
those heard
10 months
* Gesture-sound combinations
9 or 10 months
* Receptive language consists of about 20-30 words
* Word stresses can help identify words
* First syllable stress common in English
* E.g. market vs. garage
12 months
* Expressive language
– Ability to produce words
– 12 months — babies begin to say first words
– Words are learned slowly in context with specific
situations & many cues
receptive language
- Receptive language consists of about 20-30 words
- Word stresses can help identify words
- First syllable stress common in English
- E.g. market vs. garage
expressive language
– Ability to produce words
– 12 months — babies begin to say first words
– Words are learned slowly in context with specific
situations & many cues
holophrases
– Combining a single word with gestures to make a complete thought (“Daddy” – point at shoe = “Daddy shoe”)
– Used between 12 and 18 months
naming explosion
– Between 16 & 24 months
– 50 words to 320 words in vocabulary
– Vocabulary grows in spurts
– In English, most words are names for things
or people (nouns)
telegraphic speech
- Threshold of 100 to 200 words in vocab = sentences
- 18 – 24 months
- Sentences
- Short, generally 2 or 3 words, & simple
- Brown coined the term “telegraphic speech”
- Follow rules
- Listener usually needs to know the
context to understand
individual differences in language development
- Differences in Rate
– Wide range of normal variation
– Most who talk late eventually catch up
– Those who do not
– Have receptive language problems
– May have other cognitive problems
– Should receive professional diagnosis & treatment
– Related factors
– Higher in boys & those with fewer
language-based social interactions
expressive style: individual difference in language developemnt
– Expressive style
* Early vocabulary linked to social relationships rather
than objects
referential style: individual differences in language development
– Referential style
* Early vocabulary made up of names of things or people
* Often advanced in understanding adult
language
language development across cultures
- All languages (typically)
- Cooing, babbling, first words, holophrases, & telegraphic speech at similar ages
- Different across languages
- Specific word order in early sentences
- Particular inflections are learned in highly varying order
