User:Atcovi/Spring2024/Child Psychology/Ch. 6

6.1 - Infancy: Cognitive Development #1

This section focuses on the development of children's ways of perceiving and mentally representing the world.

Schemes - Children's concepts of the world.
Assimilation - Absorb new events into existing schemes.
Accommodation - Modify existing schemes when assimilation does nt make sense.

Piaget believed children's cognitive processes develop in stages.

Sensorimotor Stage

Object Permanence

Object permanence is the realization that an object/person is still in existance even if its out of the peripheral vision. This ties into an infant's working memory and reasoning ability. If a child does not percieve a toy hidden under a blanket to be in existence, than it is not mentally represented. About 0-10 months, they will develop some form of object permanence.

A-not-B error: Infant tried to get the toy from screen A [as it was successful in the past] vs. getting the toy from screen B [to which he saw it placed there].

6.2 - Infancy: Cognitive Development #2

Information-processing approach: Focuses on how children mainpulate/process info coming in from the environment/already stored in the mind.

What Is the Capacity of the Memory of Infants?

Cognitive capabilities depend on memory. This improves between 2-6 months of age and again by 12 months.
Coller did some ankle/mobile moving experiment where 2 month olds remembered to do the experiment (after 1 day has passed) after 3 days whilst 3 months old remembered after a week.
Reminders, or priming, improved infant memory.

Imitation: Infant See, Infant Do

Deferred imitation occurs as early as 6 months of age.
An early imitation that is "reflex" and inborn, strengthens survival and formation of caregiver-infant bonds. Made possible by mirror neurons.
What gives? Maybe this early imitation is occuring because of mirror neurons, not cognitive imitation. Scientists say this reflexive imitation drops out when reflexes drop out.
Mirror neurons are also connected with emotions. Also connected with gender differences in empathy/instinctive human capacity to acquire language.

6.3 - Social Influences on Early Cognitive Development

Vygotsky emphasized learning through a more skilled partner, first starting out in the household. Zone of proximal development is where the teacher comes in to sweep the child to a learning victory. Scaffolding is essential to independent learning.

"According to Vygotsky, children’s cognitive development involves their internalizing skilled approaches from joint problem solving with more skilled partners."

6.4 - Individual Differences in Cognitive Functioning Among Infants

Cognitive development is different for all infants. We test infants' intelligence through the...

Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID) - The 178 mental scale items assess verbal communication, perceptual skills, learning and memory, and problem-solving skills. The 111 motor scale items assess gross motor skills (standing, walking, and climbing) and fine motor skills (able to move fingers). An extra behavior rating scale is based on an examiner's observation of the child during the test, assessing attention span, goal directedness, persistence, and aspects of social and emotional development.

Testing Infants: Why and with What? We test infants to see any early signs of sensory or neurological problems.

How Well Do Infant Scales Predict Later Intellectual Performance? Bayley got language and motor skills right (in terms of ability to predict those skills later in life). Can also predict cognitive development.

CanNOT predict academic performance or IQ scores among schoolchildren well.

Conclusion: Can identify gross lags in development/sensorimotor skills, but moderate predictions of intelligence only a year later and it gets worse as time goes on.

What Is Visual Recognition Memory? How Is It Used to Enhance Predictability of Infant Intelligence?

Visual recognition memory is the ability to discriminate previously seen objects from novel objects. Based on habituation. IQ scores and visual recognition memory correlate positively. VR memory and intelligence are both stable traits.

Though, prediction of intellectual capacities of infants in years to come are not very accurate.

6.5 - Infancy: Language Development

What Are Prelinguistic Vocalizations?

A 3 month old infant cooing

Prelinguistic words are words used before the development of language in infants. This includes cooing and babbling. Prelinguistic vocalizations do NOT represent objects/events. BOTH are innate and can be modified through experience.

In the first month, infants cry. Cries are NOT a primitive form of language.
In the second, infants coo (express positive emotions). Coos are better (articulate) than cries because they use their tongues. They come in forms of 'oohs' and 'ahs'.
About 8 months in and between 6-9 months, cooing stops and babbling increases. This is their first steps to human speech. They come in ba, ga, and the good-old dada.
10-12 months, infants exhibit echolalia (automatic repetition of sounds/words) [ah-bah-bah-bah-bah].
Towards the end of the 1st year, infants exhibit adult-like intonation (use of pitches of varying levels to help communicate meaning). It sounds as if the infant is trying to speak the parents' language.

How Does the Child Develop Vocabulary?

Vocabulary development = child's learning of the meanings of words.

Receptive vocabulary > expressive vocabulary. They pretty much know more words than can use. A good predictor of vocabulary at 24 months is their ability to segment speech sounds into meaningful units/words.

When Is The First Word? About 8-18 months. About 65% of children's first words are categorized in 'general nominals' and 'specific nominals'.

General nominals are nouns that include the names of classes, objects or people (doggy, cat, boy, girl, she, he). Use pronouns as well.
Specific nominals are proper nouns (Daddy, Rover).

At around 18-22 months of age, vocabulary acquisition is improved by the miles.

Referential and Expressive Styles in Language Development

Children who prefer a referential approach (refer to objects) in their language development use language to label objects in their environment. These include nominals, such as doggy, cat, pussy cat, boy.

On the other hand, children who prefer expressive language style (express your thanks!) use language for social interactions. These include words, such as stop, more, thank you, and all gone.

Overextension

Overextension is the use of words in situations in which their meanings become extended/inappropriate. This usually extends to words that are similar in function or form (mooi --> moon cookies cakes [all round]).

Once the child's language development expands, they can still use the overextended word and the correct word. For example...

Bow-Wow → Dog
Bow-Wow → Dog Horses Cats Cows [familiar animal]

Moo → Cow
Bow-Wow → Horses Cats
Doggy/Bow-Wow → Dogs Cat

How Do Infants Create Sentences? On Telegraphing Ideas

Telegraphic Speech

Roger Brown called brief expressions that have the meaning of sentences: telegraphic speech. These include 'Home Tuesday' = "I'm going to be home on Tuesday".

The mean length of utterance (MLU) is the average number of morephemes, or the smallest unit of meaning in a language, that communicators use in their sentences (walked → TWO morphemes, walk and -ed). Morphemes include suffixes and prefixes. MLU increases greatly once verbal speech begins.

Holophrases

Holophrases are single words that express deep meanings. An example is yelling Mama! for "Come Here, Mama" or "You're My Mom".

Two-Word Sentences

An example is: "That ball good" --> the is and a are implied. These show an understanding of syntax, or word placement ("My shoe", "Mommy go [she's leaving] vs. "Go mommy" [go away Mom!]).

6.6 - Theories of Language Development: Can You Make a Houseplant Talk?

Learning Theorists Perspective

Nature vs. nurture in how children learn language with some changes.

Models - Those who we imitate. Children learn language through observation and imitation.
Babbling - Babbling is innate but modified by language environment. Deaf infants' babbling is never similar to the sounds of the parents' language.
Reinforcement comes through in increasing the frequency of babbling (adult smiling --> positive feedback). From a behavioral perception, we see this through reinforcement and extinction. They acquire their early vocab through shaping [by the parents in terms of syntax and correct pronounciation]. Likely to shape on grammatical inaccuracies than inaccurate info. Though, let yo kids make pronunciation mistakes!

Can the learning theory explain the studdent burst of language development? No, but it surely can explain why two-word sentences appear at the same in all development of languages.

How Can Adults Enhance Language Development in Children?

[lists several ways how young children can enhance language growth when adults do the following things]

How Does Psycholinguistic Theory Explain Language Development?

Nativist View: Innate/Inborn factors cause children to attend to and acquire language in certain ways.
Psycholinguistic theory: Language acquisition involves an interaction between environmental influences (reinforcement, ex) and an inborn tendency to acquire language (nature nurture). Innate tendency is the language acquisition device (LAD). Proof is the deaf children miracle and the unified development of language development in children. Evidence from Chomsky comes from universal grammatical rules (deep structure) and babbling.
Surface structure of the language (superficial grammatical construction) is the cure to the infant's "prewired" desire to learnin grammar.
Sensitive periods for language development is from 18-24 months of age until puberty (for capability of learning a language through plasticity). Adapability is hella good for kids cuz of plasticity, but not for adults.
Infant-directed speech is where speech is slower, sentences are brief, simple in syntax, key words are spoken louder, and facial expressions are a must.

Read Simon's ASL incident.

What Is the Emergentist Theory of Language Development?

The emergentist theory of language development is the view that the child's complex abilities to understand/produce language emerge from simpler processes that are biological, cognitive, and social in nature. This is basically heavily emphasizing nature.

The 'ingredients' for emergence of language comes from genetics, neurons, CNS, W/B area, ability to learn by association, attention, social interaction, and cognitive desire (there's more but there's a gist). Some processes that 'glue' all these together include...

Formation of neural networks
Parent-infant interaction
Linkage of auditory with articulatory and conceptual systems
Infant's strats for learning the names of things and meanings of words.

^only happen in humans.