Podcast
Questions and Answers
Which method involves infants stopping their looking behavior to indicate they are no longer interested in a stimulus?
Which method involves infants stopping their looking behavior to indicate they are no longer interested in a stimulus?
What is the primary sensory capability of newborns that is most poorly developed at birth?
What is the primary sensory capability of newborns that is most poorly developed at birth?
What perceptual ability is characterized by infants turning their heads towards sounds?
What perceptual ability is characterized by infants turning their heads towards sounds?
What does the term 'perceptual narrowing' refer to in early development?
What does the term 'perceptual narrowing' refer to in early development?
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Which of the following refers to the innate abilities that infants may possess at birth?
Which of the following refers to the innate abilities that infants may possess at birth?
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Which aspect is critical for the development of visual perception in infants?
Which aspect is critical for the development of visual perception in infants?
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What method assesses changes in an infant's sucking patterns in response to different sounds?
What method assesses changes in an infant's sucking patterns in response to different sounds?
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At what point in development do infants become tuned to the stimuli necessary for their survival?
At what point in development do infants become tuned to the stimuli necessary for their survival?
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At what age do infants begin to show preference for binocular cues to depth perception?
At what age do infants begin to show preference for binocular cues to depth perception?
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What is perceptual narrowing in relation to face perception?
What is perceptual narrowing in relation to face perception?
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Which auditory preference is typically observed at birth?
Which auditory preference is typically observed at birth?
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How does auditory localization develop in infants from birth to 5 months?
How does auditory localization develop in infants from birth to 5 months?
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What type of cues to depth perception are present at birth and categorized as motion-based?
What type of cues to depth perception are present at birth and categorized as motion-based?
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Which developmental aspect becomes more selective over the first year as a function of experience?
Which developmental aspect becomes more selective over the first year as a function of experience?
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What is the significance of the high amplitude sucking paradigm in the context of auditory perception?
What is the significance of the high amplitude sucking paradigm in the context of auditory perception?
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What is a characteristic feature of infant-directed speech (IDS)?
What is a characteristic feature of infant-directed speech (IDS)?
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What does the mutual exclusivity constraint imply in word learning?
What does the mutual exclusivity constraint imply in word learning?
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What role do grammatical cues play in word learning?
What role do grammatical cues play in word learning?
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Which bias relates to the shape of objects in word learning?
Which bias relates to the shape of objects in word learning?
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How does social context assist in word learning?
How does social context assist in word learning?
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At what age do children typically start combining words into two-word combinations?
At what age do children typically start combining words into two-word combinations?
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What is indicated by the term 'naming explosion' in vocabulary development?
What is indicated by the term 'naming explosion' in vocabulary development?
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Which of the following is NOT a source of constraints in word learning?
Which of the following is NOT a source of constraints in word learning?
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What does the 'holophrastic' period refer to in language development?
What does the 'holophrastic' period refer to in language development?
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What is a characteristic of late learners of sign language compared to native sign language users?
What is a characteristic of late learners of sign language compared to native sign language users?
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Which aspect is NOT part of the interactionist perspective on language acquisition?
Which aspect is NOT part of the interactionist perspective on language acquisition?
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At what age do infants typically start producing their first gestures?
At what age do infants typically start producing their first gestures?
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What is one reason babbling may be important for language development?
What is one reason babbling may be important for language development?
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How do infants typically learn to segment speech into meaningful units?
How do infants typically learn to segment speech into meaningful units?
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Which type of input significantly increases a child’s speech sound development?
Which type of input significantly increases a child’s speech sound development?
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What is the significance of statistical learning in language acquisition?
What is the significance of statistical learning in language acquisition?
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Which statement best reflects Quine's problem in understanding language?
Which statement best reflects Quine's problem in understanding language?
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How do children typically demonstrate vocabulary growth in their second year?
How do children typically demonstrate vocabulary growth in their second year?
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What aspect of child-directed speech is most beneficial for language development?
What aspect of child-directed speech is most beneficial for language development?
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What developmental phenomenon limits the ability to remember experiences from before the age of 2 or 3?
What developmental phenomenon limits the ability to remember experiences from before the age of 2 or 3?
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Which style of caregiving is characterized by providing rich information and confirming children’s contributions?
Which style of caregiving is characterized by providing rich information and confirming children’s contributions?
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What can affect both encoding and retrieval in children’s memory development?
What can affect both encoding and retrieval in children’s memory development?
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Which of the following describes a false memory?
Which of the following describes a false memory?
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What type of directive encourages children to share unique personal stories during memory discussions?
What type of directive encourages children to share unique personal stories during memory discussions?
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What is one potential problem that arises with child eyewitness testimony?
What is one potential problem that arises with child eyewitness testimony?
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Which cultural approach emphasizes interrelatedness in memory discussions?
Which cultural approach emphasizes interrelatedness in memory discussions?
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How does a low elaborative caregiving style impact a child's memory?
How does a low elaborative caregiving style impact a child's memory?
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What is a common effect of cognitive pruning in memory development?
What is a common effect of cognitive pruning in memory development?
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Which protocol helps to improve accuracy in child eyewitness testimony?
Which protocol helps to improve accuracy in child eyewitness testimony?
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Which memory development concept focuses on individual entities and their associations?
Which memory development concept focuses on individual entities and their associations?
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What impact does social scaffolding have on children's memories?
What impact does social scaffolding have on children's memories?
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Which statement best describes 'omission' in the context of memory?
Which statement best describes 'omission' in the context of memory?
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What factor is vital for understanding concept and category development?
What factor is vital for understanding concept and category development?
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Study Notes
Perceptual Development
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Methods for studying infants:
- Physiological responses: Measuring physiological changes to assess infants' perception.
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Looking:
- Preferential looking: Infants look longer at stimuli they find more interesting. For example, they may look longer at familiar faces compared to random patterns.
- Head turn preference: Infants turn their heads towards sounds they prefer. It can be used to assess auditory perception and preferences.
- Habituation: Repeatedly presenting a stimulus until the infant's interest decreases. It helps understand how infants learn and form expectations.
- Violation of expectation: Infants react to unexpected events, indicating their understanding of physical laws and expectations.
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Sucking:
- High amplitude sucking: Infants suck harder on a pacifier when they hear a new or preferred sound, indicating their auditory discrimination abilities.
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Infants' perceptual abilities:
- Prenatal development: Some basic perceptual abilities develop even before birth.
- Postnatal tuning: Perceptual abilities become more refined with experience, focusing on the skills necessary for survival and development.
- Innate perceptual preferences: Newborns show preferences for faces, their mothers' voice, and certain sounds. Some preferences are biologically based, while others may be due to prenatal learning.
- Perceptual narrowing: Infants become better at discriminating stimuli relevant to their environment, while losing sensitivity to others.
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Newborn sensory capabilities:
- Vision: Newborns' vision is the least developed sense. They are sensitive to brightness, can discriminate basic patterns and colors, and track motion. Their visual acuity improves rapidly in the first six months.
- Hearing: Relatively well-developed at birth. Infants can turn towards sounds, discriminate loudness, direction, and frequency. They are highly responsive to speech and phonemic contrasts.
Development of Visual Perception
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Changes in body:
- Physical changes in the eye, like the development of visual pathways and the fovea, contribute to improved vision.
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Changes in brain:
- Brain development, including neural connections and specialization in visual areas, enables more complex visual processing.
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Changes in behavior:
- Infants' visual scanning patterns change as they develop, focusing more on faces and objects of interest.
- Movement is crucial for visual development, as it helps infants explore their environment and learn about depth and spatial relationships.
- Different types of visual cues: Monocular cues (using one eye), binocular cues (using both eyes), and motion-based cues contribute to depth perception.
Depth Perception
- Monocular cues: Infants use motion-based cues early for depth perception, followed by pictorial cues later.
- Binocular cues: Develop around 4 months of age.
Tuning of Visual Perception
- Experience and focus: Visual perception becomes more selective throughout the first year, prioritizing relevant stimuli.
- Face perception: Experience with faces of different species, races, and ages influences infants' face recognition abilities.
- Perceptual narrowing: Infants lose the ability to discriminate certain stimuli, such as monkey faces, as they focus on human faces.
Auditory Perception Development
- Relatively well-developed at birth: Infants can discriminate sounds, recognize their mothers' voices, and prefer certain sounds, like their native language.
- Auditory learning in fetuses: Newborns show preferences for their mothers' voices, familiar stories, and native language, indicating prenatal learning.
- Auditory localization: Infants can identify where a sound is coming from at birth, but this ability exhibits a u-shaped developmental trajectory due to brain development, head movement control, and head size changes.
Categorical Perception
- Speech segmentation: Infants learn to categorize sounds and distinguish between speech sounds.
- High amplitude sucking paradigm: Infants dishabituate to a new sound, suggesting they can distinguish between different phonemes.
- Social context: Infant-directed speech (IDS) helps infants learn language. IDS has a higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, and wider range of pitch than adult-directed speech.
The Interactionist Perspective
- Nature and nurture: Both biological factors and experience interact to influence language development.
- Linguistic universals: Common experiences across cultures contribute to shared aspects of language.
- Social context: Language is learned within a social environment through interactions, including caregiver-child interactions, and feedback on errors.
- Scaffolding: Caregivers provide support and guidance to help children learn language.
- Child-directed speech: Caregivers use specific language patterns to facilitate language development in children.
Sequence of Language Acquisition
- Newborn: Infants show preferences for speech, can discriminate phonemes, and communicate through crying.
- 1-4 months: Infants become sensitive to the prosodic features of speech, like rhythm and intonation.
- 4-6 months: Infants begin babbling.
- 9-12 months: Infants produce reduplicated babbling, a form of babbling with repeated sounds, and start using first gestures.
- 12-18 months: Infants begin uttering single words.
- 18-24 months: Vocabulary growth accelerates, often referred to as a "vocab spurt."
- Around 2 years: Infants start combining two words into simple phrases.
- Preschool years (2.5-5 years): Children produce more complex utterances, demonstrate humor and metaphor, and continue to grow their vocabulary and communication skills.
How Nature and Nurture Combine in Language Development:
- Perceiving and Producing Sounds: Infants are biologically prepared to learn language, and they develop their vocalization skills through practice and feedback.
- Identifying Larger Units: Infants learn to break down speech into meaningful units and associate sounds with meaning.
- Linking Sound and Meaning: Infants develop the ability to associate words with their referents.
- Putting Units Together: Infants learn to combine words into sentences and express complex ideas.
Babbling
- Combining consonants and vowels (CV): Infants engage in vocal motor practice, which may be essential for language development.
Active Child, Responsive Environment
- Interactional influences: Infants' vocalizations influence the caregiver's responses, creating a reciprocal loop that fosters language development. More advanced vocalizations by infants lead to more advanced responses from caregivers.
- Contingent interaction: When caregivers respond to infants' vocalizations in a contingent way, it encourages infants' vocal development.
- Social interaction shapes babble: The type and quality of caregiver responses influence infants' babbling patterns, suggesting that social interaction plays a significant role in language learning.
Segmenting Speech
- Recognizing units: Learning to identify the boundaries between words in speech relies on cues like pauses, prosody, and statistical regularities.
Statistical Learning
- Identifying patterns: Infants can learn to segment speech by detecting statistical regularities in language. They can identify patterns in the sequence of sounds and syllables, which helps them learn new words.
Meaning
- Quine's problem: The challenge of figuring out the meaning of words in a language.
- Biases or constraints: Infants use innate biases or constraints to help them learn word meanings.
- Grammatical cues: Infants use the structure of sentences to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words.
- Statistical cues: Frequency of word-object pairings helps infants establish word meanings.
- Social context: Interaction and environment play a crucial role in word learning.
Constraints on Learning
- Biases about word meaning: Infants have built-in biases that help them narrow down possibilities when identifying word meanings.
- Mutual exclusivity constraint: Infants assume that a new word refers to a new object or concept. For example, if they already know the word "spoon" and someone shows them a new object and says "gug," they might assume the new word applies to that object.
- Whole object constraint: Infants tend to assume that a new word refers to the entire object rather than its specific part. For example, they might assume the word "dog" refers to the whole animal, not just its tail.
- Shape bias: Infants often rely on shape as a key feature for categorizing objects, which is related to the whole-object constraint.
Where Constraints Come From
- Biological factors: Some constraints may be biologically innate, but not necessarily specific to language.
- Learning from experience: Specific aspects of constraints might be learned through interactions with the environment.
Statistical Cues
- Cross-situational word learning: Repeated exposure to the same word in different contexts helps infants learn the meaning of the word.
Grammatical Cues
- Syntactic bootstrapping: Infants use the grammatical structure of sentences to help them understand the meaning of new words.
Social Context
- Scaffolding word learning: Caregivers guide children's word learning through various strategies like pointing, vocal emphasis, using routines, and following the child's attention.
- Joint attention: Shared focus between the caregiver and infant on an object fosters word learning.
Explicit Teaching
- Direct instruction: Caregivers can explicitly teach children the meaning of new words.
Word Learning
- Inductive problem: Figuring out word meanings involves inferring the correct meaning from limited information.
- Multiple answers: There can be multiple interpretations for a single word, and infants need strategies to narrow down possibilities.
Words Do Not Equal Language
- Holophrastic period: During early language development, a single word can represent a complex meaning.
- Vocabulary growth: Early vocabulary growth is slow but accelerates around 18-24 months, known as the "naming explosion" or "vocabulary spurt."
- Over- and under- extensions: Infants often make errors in applying words to objects or situations.
Combining Ideas
- Infants move from using single words to combining words and gestures to form more complex meanings.
- Two-word combinations: Start around 2 years of age and include simple sentences primarily using nouns and verbs.
Memory Development
- Implicit memory: Implicit memory pertains to unconscious or procedural memory, such as remembering how to ride a bike. It is typically present from birth and develops gradually throughout childhood.
- Explicit memory: Explicit memory involves conscious recollection of events and facts. It develops later in childhood, around 2-3 years of age.
- Infantile amnesia: Inability to remember events that occurred before the age of 2 or 3.
Accounts of memory development
- Neurological accounts: Development of the brain, particularly the hippocampus, plays a key role in memory development.
- Information processing accounts: Changes in information processing strategies, metacognitive abilities, and content knowledge contribute to memory development.
- Sociocultural accounts: Language, learned strategies, and memory discussions within a social context play a role in memory formation and recall.
Social Scaffolding of Memory
- Parental guidance: Caregivers help shape a child's memories through their interactions and conversations about past events.
Caregiver Style
- High elaborative: Caregivers provide rich details and conversational elaboration during memory discussions.
- Low elaborative: Caregivers provide less detailed information and less conversational expansion during memory discussions.
- Elaborative style matters: Children of high elaborative caregivers have better memory recall than children of low elaborative caregivers, particularly for past experiences.
What Caregivers Emphasize in Memory Discussions
- Cultural variations exist in emphasis placed on individual experiences (autonomous self-goals) vs interrelated or social contexts.
Eyewitness Testimony
- Challenges of child eyewitness testimony: Difficult to obtain accurate memories, especially about negative or uncommon events.
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Types of memory errors:
- False memories: Fabricated or distorted memories that are not entirely true.
- Omission: Key details are left out of a memory.
- Commission: Misattributing details to the wrong event or distorting an existing memory.
- How to study suggestibility: Researchers use staged events, varying pre-event discussions and questioning to assess the impact of suggestions on memory in children.
- NICHD protocol for interviewing children: Emphasizes neutral and open-ended questions, avoiding misleading language and information.
- The impact of language: Words used in questions can influence children's memories.
Development of Concepts
- Concepts and categories: Concepts are mental representations that categorize similar objects, events, ideas, or people. Categories are groups of entities that are grouped together.
- Importance of categorization: It allows for efficient processing of information and helps us understand and navigate the world around us.
- Theories of concept structure: Different theories exist about how concepts are organized in our minds.
- Mathematical concepts: Developing understanding of math concepts is crucial for learning and problem-solving.
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Description
This quiz explores the methods used to study perceptual development in infants, focusing on their physiological responses, looking behaviors, and sucking patterns. Key techniques such as preferential looking, habituation, and violation of expectation are examined to understand how infants perceive and learn about their environment.
