Chapter 4 Handouts - Cognitive Development PDF

The Emergence of Thought and Language: Cognitive Development in Infancy and Early Childhood 1. The Onset of Thinking:  Piaget's Account 1. Basic Principles of Cognitive Development 1. According to Piaget, children understand the world with **schemes**, psychological str...

The Emergence of Thought and Language: Cognitive Development in Infancy and Early Childhood 1. The Onset of Thinking:  Piaget's Account 1. Basic Principles of Cognitive Development 1. According to Piaget, children understand the world with **schemes**, psychological structures that organize experiences into mental categories of related events, objects, and knowledge.  They change constantly to adapt to children's experiences. 2. **Assimilation** occurs when experiences are readily incorporated into existing schemes, whereas **Accommodation** occurs when schemes have to be modified. Assimilation and accommodation occur to reestablish **equilibrium**, through a process called **equilibration**, when the balance is upset (**disequilibrium**).   3. **Cognitive development** is divided into four stages:  sensorimotor period, preoperational period, concrete operational period, and formal operational period. 1. Sensorimotor Thinking (birth -- two years) 4. This stage is characterized by schemes developed through changes in perceptual and motor skills. 5. By eight to 12 months, one scheme is used in the service of another; by 12 to 18 months, infants experiment with schemes; and by 18 to 24 months, infants engage in symbolic processing. 6. **Object permanence** is the understanding that objects exist independently of one's self, actions, and thoughts toward them.  Infants develop a full understanding of object permanence around 18 months. 7. By 18 months, infants begin to talk and gestures, which is evidence of the capacity to use **symbols.** Now infants can begin to anticipate the consequences of mental, rather than just physical, actions. 1. Preoperational Thinking (two -- seven years) 8. Preoperational thinking is characterized by: 1. the use of mental symbols (i.e. language).  1. **Egocentrism**, the inability to see the world from another's point of view.  Preoperational children simply do not comprehend that others differ in their ideas, convictions, and emotions. 1. **Animism**, attributing life and lifelike properties to inanimate objects.   1. **Centration,** the inability to focus on more than one aspect of a task.   1. The inability to reverse mental operations and sometimes confuse **appearance as reality. ** Children who are preoperational thinkers believe an object's appearance tells what the object is really like. D. Evaluating Piaget's Theory  1. Several implications of Piaget's theory can be used to foster cognitive development: 1. The teacher's role is to create environments where children can discover for themselves how the world works. 1. Children profit from experience only when they can interpret this experience with their current cognitive structures. 1. Cognitive growth can best be facilitated when teachers encourage children to look at the consistency of their thinking and sort out those inconsistencies. 2. Criticisms of Piaget's Theory: 1.  Piaget's theory underestimates cognitive competence in infants and young children and overestimates cognitive competence in adolescents. 1. Piaget's theory is vague with respect to processes and mechanisms of change. 1. Piaget's stage model does not account for variability in children's performance. 1. Piaget's theory undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on cognitive development. D. Extending Piaget's Account: Children's Naïve Theories 3. Children's theories are usually called *naïve theories* because unlike real scientific theories, they are not created by specialists and are rarely evaluated by formal experimentation. 4. According to the **core knowledge hypothesis**, infants are born with knowledge of the world and this knowledge is elaborated on based on experience. 5. Young children develop naïve theories concerning physics, psychology, and biology: 1. **Naïve physics** is used to assess children's understanding of object permanence.  Infants rapidly create a reasonably accurate theory of some basic properties of objects, a theory that helps them expect that objects will act in predictable ways. 1. Children's **naïve theories of biology** have come to conclude many of the specific properties associated with living things: 1. Movement -- children understand that animals can move themselves, but inanimate objects can be moved only by other objects or by people. 2. Growth -- children understand that, from their first appearance, animals get bigger and physically more complex, but that inanimate objects do not change in this way. 3. Internal parts -- children know that the insides of animate objects contain different materials than the insides of inanimate objects. 4. Inheritance -- children realize that only living things have offspring that resemble their parents. 5. Illness -- preschoolers believe that permanent illnesses are more likely to be inherited from parents but that temporary illnesses are more likely to be transmitted through contact with other people. 6. Healing -- children understand that when injured, animate things heal by regrowth whereas inanimate things must be fixed by humans. 1. Children's theory of living things is rooted in **teleological explanations**, their belief that living things and parts of living things exist for a purpose. 1. Young children's theories of living things is rooted in **essentialism** -- their belief that living things have an essence that provide identity but can't be. II. Information Processing During Infancy and Early Childhood 1. General Principles of Information Processing 1. The view that mental development involves changes in mental hardware and software. **Mental hardware** refers to mental and neural structures that are built in and that allow the mind to operate, whereas **mental software** refers to mental programs that are the basis for performing particular tasks.  1. Attention 2. **Attention** is a process that determines which sensory information receives additional cognitive processing. 1. Compared to older children, preschoolers are less able to pay attention to task-relevant information.   1. Children's attention can be improved by making irrelevant stimuli less relevant in order to make relevant information stand out. 3. **Orienting response** occurs when individuals fix their eyes on a strong or unfamiliar stimulus and a change in heart rate and brainwave activity occurs. 1. Learning 4. **Classical conditioning** is a form of learning that involves pairing a neutral stimulus and a response that was originally produced by another stimulus. Through classical conditioning, infants learn that a stimulus is a signal for what will happen next. 5. **Operant conditioning** focuses on the relation between the consequences of behavior and the likelihood that the behavior will recur. 6. **Imitation** involves watching how others will behave and replicating the same behavior.  1. Memory 7. Carolyn Rovee-Coller's experiments reveal that three important features of memory exist in infants: an event from the past is remembered, over time, the event can no longer be recalled, and a cue can serve to drudge up a memory that seems to have been forgotten.  8. Memory improves in older infants and toddlers.  Preschool children can recall more of what they experience and remember it longer. 9. **Autobiographical memory** emerges in the preschool years.  Children's autobiographical memories are richer when parents talk about past events in detail and encourage their children to participate in these conversations. The difference in early memories can be traced to cultural differences in parent--child conversational styles. 1. Preschoolers as Eyewitnesses 10. Research on children's autobiographical memory has played a central role in cases of suspected child abuse. 11. When young children are questioned repeatedly, they often have trouble distinguishing what they experienced from what others may suggest they have experienced.  This can be minimized by following several guidelines when interviewing children: 1. interview children as soon as possible after the event,  1. encourage children to tell the truth, say \"I don\'t know\", and correct interviewers  1. ask children to describe the event in their own words, ask open-ended questions, and minimize the use of specific questions,  1. start the interview by discussing a neutral event, and  1. ask questions to consider alternative explanations.  1. Learning Number Skills 12. Infants are able to distinguish small quantities and can compare quantities. 1. Learning to Count 13. By three years of age, youngsters can count small sets of objects, and in so doing, adhere to the one-to-one, stable order, and cardinality principles. 14. Learning to count to larger numbers involves learning rules about unit and decade name.   II. Mind and Culture: Vygotsky's Theory 1. Vygotsky believed that development is an apprenticeship in which children advance when they collaborate with others who are more skilled. The social nature of cognitive development is captured in the concept of **intersubjectivity**, which refers to mutual, shared understanding among participants in an activity. Through **guided participation,** cognitive growth results from children's involvement in structured activities with others who are more skilled than they.   1. The Zone of Proximal Development 15. The difference between what children can do with assistance and what they can do alone defines the **zone of proximal development**, an idea that follows from his basic premise that cognition first develops in a social setting before children become more independent. 1. Scaffolding 16. Control of cognitive skills is most readily transferred from others to the child through **scaffolding**, a teaching style in which teachers let children take on more of a task as they master its different components. The defining characteristic of scaffolding is to give help but no more than is needed.   17. Mothers in different cultures accomplish scaffolding in different ways. 1. Private Speech 18. **Private speech** is one way that children help regulate their own behavior and it represents an intermediate step in the transfer of control of thinking from the others to the self. Children often talk to themselves, particularly when the task is difficult or after they have made a mistake.   II. Language 1. The Road to Speech 19. **Phonemes** are the basic units of sound from which words are constructed, including consonant sounds (i.e. *t* in *toe*) and vowel sounds (i.e. *e* in *get* and *bed*)*.*  20. Infants can hear phonemes soon after birth.   1. The Impact of Language Exposure 21. Not all languages use the same set of phonemes, so a distinction in one language may be ignored in another. 22. Infants can even hear phonemes that are not used in their native language, but this ability is lost by the first birthday. 1. Identifying Words 23. One of the biggest challenges for infants is identifying recurring patterns of sounds---words. 24. Infants use many powerful tools to identify words in speech. 1. Infants identify the beginning of words by paying more attention to stressed syllables than unstressed syllables. 1. Infants notice sounds that go together frequently. 1. Another way that infants identify words is through their emerging knowledge of how sounds are used and their function in their native language. 1. Parents and caregivers often help infants master language sounds by talking in a distinctive style. 25. **Infant-directed speech**, also known as *motherese,* refers to adults' speech to infants that is slower and has greater variation in pitch and loudness.   1. It attracts infants' attention more than adult-directed speech because its slower pace and accentuated changes provide infants with more salient language clues. 1. Infant-directed speech helps infants perceive fundamental sounds. 26. Steps to Speech 1. Language-based sounds don't appear immediately. 1. At two months, infants begin to produce vowel-like sounds known as **cooing**. 1. After cooing comes **babbling,** speech-like sound that has no meaning, which is a precursor to real speech. Infants' babbling is influenced by the characteristics of the speech, such as intonation that they hear. 1. First Words and Many More 27. After a brief period in which children appear to understand others' speech, but do not speak themselves, most infants will begin to speak.  28. The onset of first words is triggered by the realization that words are symbols.  Soon after, vocabulary expands rapidly. 29. Most children learn meanings of words much too rapidly for them to consider all plausible meanings systematically.  This is referred to as **fast mapping**. 30. Researchers have identified simple but effective rules that help children learn new words and match words with the correct referent. 31. When children hear unfamiliar words embedded in sentences containing words they already know, the other words and the overall sentence structure can be helpful clues to a word's meaning. 32. Children's increased cognitive skills help them learn new words. 33. Rules for learning new words are not perfect, and children often make mistakes.   1. An ***underextension*** denotes a child's meaning that is narrower than an adult's meaning. 1. ***Overextension*** denotes a child's meaning that is broader. 34. Children's vocabulary is stimulated by both heredity and experience.   1. **Phonological memory,** the ability to remember speech sounds briefly, is important in children's vocabulary growth. 1. The single most important factor in vocabulary growth is the child's language environment, with high-quality language environments producing the best learning. 35. Bilingualism 1. Bilingual children learn both languages simultaneously, slowly learning to distinguish them.  1. Bilingual children have smaller vocabularies in each language but larger overall, have a deeper understanding of the arbitrary nature of words as symbols, switch more quickly between tasks, and inhibit inappropriate responses better. 36. Word-Learning Styles 1. Some youngsters use a **referential style** that emphasizes words as names and that views language as an intellectual tool. 1. Other children use an **expressive style** that emphasizes phrases and views language as a social tool. 37. Encouraging Language Growth 1. Actively involving children in language-related activities is key to language growth: 1. The more parents speak to their children, the more rapidly words are learned. 2. Parents can help children learn words by reading with them. 3. Watching television can help word learning. 1. Speaking in Sentences: Grammatical Development 38. Soon after children speak, they create two-word sentences derived from their own experiences.   39. **Telegraphic** speech includes only words directly relevant to meaning and nothing more. 40. Moving from two-word to more complex sentences involves adding **grammatical morphemes:  ** 1. **Grammatical morphemes** are words or word endings such as --ing, --ed, or --s. 1. Mastery of grammatical morphemes involves learning rules as well as the exceptions to the rules. Simple relations are mastered prior to complex ones. 41. **Overregularizations** are rules that children apply to words that are exceptions to the rule. 42. How children acquire grammar: 1. The behaviorist answer is that children imitate the grammatical forms they hear. 1. The linguistic answer is that children are born with neural circuits in the brain that allow them to infer the grammar of language they hear. 1. The cognitive answer is that children learn grammar through powerful cognitive skills that help them rapidly detect speech patterns they hear in their environment. 1. According to the social interaction approach, language learning takes place in the context of interaction between children and adults.   1. Communicating with Others 43. Parents encourage turn-taking even before infants talk and later demonstrate both the speaker and listener rules for their children.  By age two children spontaneously take turns. By age three, children will prompt another to take their turn. 44. Improvement in communication skill is a major accomplishment in language during the first five years of life. By the time children are ready to enter kindergarten, they use language with great proficiency and are able to communicate with growing skill.