Week Three

Question 1

development in early childhood

Answer 1

• Early childhood – preschool years (2-5)
• Changes in all domains of development rapid and clearly observable, in particular:
• Movement becomes instrumental.
• Gross motor skills precede fine motor skills.
  
  • Physical development: fine motor skills
  • Cognitive development: acquisition of language
  • Psychosocial development: increasing social interactions, importance of play

Question 2

drawing

Answer 2

• Drawings become more sophisticated through age.
• Drawing is underpinned by a number of elements.
  • Children later add more detail into drawings and add relationships.

Question 3

physical activities in childhood

Answer 3

-physical activities that require more strength, balance and coordination emerge.
-shift from moving for the joy of it to using movement as a means to an end.
- rapid development of fine motor skills.
SEE DIAGRAM

Question 4

Pre-operational stage

Answer 4

- Symbolic representations and capacity:
	• Language
	• Pretend play
		○ Can include imaginary companions
	• Can refer to the past and future
- egocentric view of the world, make believe play.

Question 5

object permanence

Answer 5

-Have object permanence
- However, a focus on perceptual salience – the most obvious features of an object or a situation – means that preschoolers can be fooled by appearance
• Perceptional salience
• The focus on the most perceptionally obvious property of the object.
- They may also have difficulty with tasks that require logic

Question 6

conservation

Answer 6

• Reliance on perceptions and lack of logical thought means that children have difficulty with conservation
  • the idea that certain properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in a superficial way
  • Piaget’s conservation tasks.
  • Children failing to understand that re-arranging objects etc. does not change the amount or number of the object.
  • These children tended to focus on one salient object and then found it hard to unfocused on that.
  ○ Also have a focus on the end product rather than the process.

Question 7

centration

Answer 7

• Focusing on one aspect of a problem or object

Question 8

irreversible thought

Answer 8

Cannot mentally undo an action

Question 9

static thought

Answer 9

Focusing on the end state rather than the changes that transform one state into another

Question 10

issues with experiments

Answer 10

• Limitations on the reliance of language ability.

* Relied on children being able to count.

Question 11

preoperational stage

Answer 11

• Children in this stage also have trouble with:
  • Difficulty with classification
  • Using criteria to sort objects on the basis of characteristics such as shape, color, function
  • Lack class inclusion, the ability to relate the whole class (furry animals) to its subclasses (dogs, cats)
  • Egocentrism
  • The inability to understand that others have different cognitive perspectives.
  • Understanding that others see and think differently to us.
  • Piaget’s mountain experiment.
  § Thought that Piaget over-complicated the tasks and thus confounded them.

Question 12

egocentrism and theory of mind

Answer 12

The ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one’s own.
• The understanding that others have different wants, beliefs and needs.
• Sally anne task.
§ Basic understanding emerges between 3 and 4 years old.

Question 13

development of language

Answer 13

• Language
  * Defined as a communication system in which a limited number of signals – sounds, letters, gestures – can be combined according to agreed-upon rules to produce an infinite number of messages

Question 14

phonemes

Answer 14

• basic units of sound that can change the meaning of a word

Example: substitute the phoneme /c/ for /m/ in the word “man” changes the meaning of the word

Question 15

morphemes

Answer 15

• the basic units of meaning that exist in a word
○ “View” is one morpheme
□ Add the morpheme “re” to get a two-morpheme word with a different meaning – “review”
□ Add “pre” to get another two-morpheme word with another different meaning – “preview”

Question 16

syntax

Answer 16

• the systematic rules for forming sentences

○ Fang Fred bit. or Fang bit Fred. or Fred bit Fang. Which violates the syntax of English?

Question 17

semantics

Answer 17

• understanding the different meanings of language

○ “Sherry was green with jealousy” does not mean that Sherry was green, literally

Question 18

pragmatics of language

Answer 18

• rules for using language in different contexts

Question 19

prosody

Answer 19

• how the sounds are produced
○ The “melody” of speech, including pitch, intonation, accentuation of syllables in a word or words in a sentence, and the duration or timing of speech
□ We might say, “Oh, yeah” in response to a friend who asks if we are ready to go, but “Oh, yeah?” to express doubtfulness or disbelief
□ Children have a preference for high-pitches and thus prefer to listen to pitch rather than content.

Question 20

language: newborns

Answer 20

Preference for speech over non-speech sounds

Question 21

language: infants

Answer 21

• Comprehension (reception) occurs before production or expression of language
• Receptive language precedes expressive. Thus, can understand but not say.
• First words are generally nouns.
○ 10-month-olds, on average, can comprehend about 50 words but do not produce any of them
○ After the first word, vocabulary comes fast.
○ During this rapid expansion, a new word can be acquired every 2 hours.

Question 22

over and under extension

Answer 22

○ All men become daddy, only Labradors are dogs.
• Overextension – the use of a word to refer to a too-broad range of objects or events
• Under extension – the use of a word in too-narrow fashion

Question 23

over-regulisation

Answer 23

○ Often the child that previously knew the word ‘went’ begins to say ‘I goes’. However, this is not a regression but rather shows that the child is beginning to understand the rules around language and has just been faced with an irregularity.
• The child has inferred the morphological rules of adding –s to pluralize nouns or –ed to signal past tense
In Overregularisation, the child ‘over applies’ the rules to cases in which the proper form is irregula

Question 24

holophrases

Answer 24

• Holophrases – first words that convey an entire sentence of meaning
1-year-olds can use Holophrases for naming, questioning, requesting, and demanding

Question 25

vocabulary

Answer 25

○ It is thought that the child starts school with a vocabulary of about 10,000 words and adds somewhere between 5 and 13 new words a day throughout the primary school years
○ Middle childhood and adolescence bring metalinguistic awareness – knowledge of language as a system

Question 26

nativist, neurocognitive approach

Answer 26

• Nature
  * Noam Chomsky
  * Language skills hard-wired at birth through innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
  * Logically plausible and widely favoured, but unproven hypothesis

Question 27

Learning and socio-cultural approaches

Answer 27

• Nurture
  * B.F. Skinner, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky
  * Language as a social tool and social construction created for social reasons
  * Empirically better supported approach

Question 28

play

Answer 28

• Saracho & Spodek (1998) define play as:
  • Intrinsically, not extrinsically motivated
  • Self motivation.
  • Process-, not product- oriented
  • Creative and non-literal
  • Having implicit rules
  • Spontaneous and self-initiated
  • Free from major emotional distress
• The years from age 2 to age 5 are called the play years
• Between infancy and age 5, play undergoes two changes:
  • It becomes more social
  • It becomes more imaginative

Question 29

• Mildred Parten (1932)

Answer 29

• from age 2 to age 5 play becomes increasingly social and socially skilled
  
  • Parten developed a classification system for the play of preschool children from the least to the most social

Question 30

Parten’s categories of play

Answer 30

• Unoccupied play – children stand idly, look around, or engage in apparently aimless activities such as pacing
• Solitary play – children play alone, typically with objects, and appear to be highly involved in what they are doing
• Onlooker play – children watch others play, take an active interest, perhaps talk with the players, but do not directly participate
• Allows children t learn implicit rules to the game.
• Important for peer relationships as it allows children to look and not barge into the game.
• Parallel play – children play next to one another, do much the same thing, but they interact little (for example, two girls might sit near each other in the sandpit but do not talk)
- Associative play – children interact by swapping materials, conversing, or following each other’s lead, but they are not united by the same goal (for example, the two girls may share sandpit toys and comment on each other’s sand structures)
- Cooperative play – children join forces to achieve a common goal; they act as a pair or group, dividing their labor and coordinating their activities in a meaningful way (for example, the two girls collaborate to make a sand castle)

Question 31

pretend play

Answer 31

• The first pretend play occurs around age 1
• Play in which one actor, object, or action symbolises or stands for another
• In the earliest pretend play, the infant performs actions that symbolise familiar activities such as eating, sleeping, and washing
• Between the ages of 2 and 5, pretend play increases in frequency and in sophistication
• Children combine their capacity for social play and their capacity for pretense to create social pretend play
• Play in which children cooperate with caregivers or playmates to enact dramas
• Social pretend play requires a good deal of social competence, including the theory-of-mind or people-reading skills
• Social pretend play is universal
• The quality and content of preschoolers’ play is influenced by their culture
□ Quality and depth and context of play varies depending on culture.

Question 32

theories of play

Answer 32

• Psychoanalytic
		• Opportunity to gain mastery over anxieties
		• Repetition compulsion
		• Catharsis
	• Social learning
		• Roles learned through direct, vicarious or self-reinforcement
			• Play occurs because we reinforce it. 
	• Ethological
		• Similar to animal behaviour
		• Physical activity play
			○ Rhythmic stereotypes
			○ Exercise play
			○ Rough-and-tumble play
	• Cognitive
		• Symbolic play extends possibilities
			○ Play is critical for social and cognitive development. 
		• Social and cognitive development

Question 33

executive functioning

Answer 33

• Barker et al.(2014)
• Young children sped a lot of time in structured activities. Children engage in rigid ‘development activities’
• Engaging in these activities can preclude executive functioning.
○ Kids getting ready for their day, know it is going to be snowy, will still walk out of the house without a jacket.
□ While I am warm in the house, I need to prepare for the end game.
□ El-directed executive function.
□ However, parents then tell the child to put on jacket, not allowing them to develop cognitive function.
□ Found tat being bored ad doing nothing etc. is better for development and executive functioning.