Developmental Psych - PSYC21021 Lecture Notes PDF

**LECTURE 1:** **Language basics (1)** - Language is generative. - Language is comprised of small units that are combined (phonology) - Language conveys meaning (semantics) Language Basics (2) Languages have rules about how words go together (syntax) - A bites the dog man. - The...

**LECTURE 1:** **Language basics (1)** - Language is generative. - Language is comprised of small units that are combined (phonology) - Language conveys meaning (semantics) Language Basics (2) Languages have rules about how words go together (syntax) - A bites the dog man. - The dog bites a man. - The man bites a dog. - Subject-verb-object in English Language is social. **[Infant designs ]** **Preference studies** - With no training, what do infants want to listen (or look) to. **Habituation/familiarisation studies** - First, we train infants and then measure what they prefer. **Change detection studies** - We train infants to respond to a change (can infants tell the difference between two things). **What sounds are in my language?** Prosody - The pattern of stress and intonation in a language. - Languages have different prosodic patterns Phonemes - The perceptually distinct units of sound in a language that distinguish one word from another (e.g., p, b, d, t) - Pat, bat, bad, pad - Languages differ in the sounds that they use as phonemes. **Early Phonological Development: Prosody (2)** The foetal auditory system is fully functioning during the last trimester. Newborns: - prefer their own mother's voice (De Caspar & Fifer, 1980). - discriminate languages with different prosody (German/Spanish) but not languages of similar prosody (English/Dutch) (Nazzi et al., 1998) - prefer their native language compared to a foreign language (Moon et al., 1993). - cry with an "accent" (Mampe et al., 2009). **Early Phonological Development: Phonemes (1)** - Phonemes are the sounds that distinguish words (e.g., pat/bat, sip/zip). - Other languages have phoneme contrasts that are not in English. - Across the world's, there are about 600 consonants and 200 vowels. But any language uses about 40. - Children's babble -- initially wide range of sounds. In first year move towards producing only sounds of target language (Levitt and Wang, 1991). **Early Phonological Development: Phonemes (3)** - At 1-2months, infants can discriminate between all sounds, even foreign ones. Adults only discriminate those in their language (Eimas et al, 1979; Miyawaki et al., 1975). - Between 7-11 months, systematic decline in ability to distinguish sounds from nontarget language and increase for target language. (Kuhl et al, 2006) **Early Phonological Development: Phonemes (2)** **Finding the words** - Infants can segment words from their language at \~ 7.5 months, but not 6 months (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). **Statistics (1)** - Infants are surprisingly sophisticated statisticians. - Track the co-occurrence of syllables. - Syllables that co-occur often are likely part of the same word. - H-A-P is always followed by P-P-Y - P-R-E is always followed by T-T-Y - B\--A is always followed by B-Y - D-O is always followed by G-G-Y **Statistics (2)** Experiment with 8-month-olds using highly controlled made-up language (Saffran et al., 1996). - A few minutes of listening to words in a randomised order. - Infants listen longer to part words, suggesting they found the words in the stream. **Finding the words: Prosody (1)** **Infant-directed speech (IDS) (Christia, 2013).** - Higher pitched - Slower speaking rate. - Important words are generally at the end and are exaggerated more. - The boundaries between phrases are enhanced, making it easier to segment speech. - Infants prefer to listen to IDS and interact with people who use IDS. - More attentive around IDS **Finding the words: Prosody (2)** - Infants segment speech better with IDS than adult-directed speech (ADS) (Theissen, Hill & Saffran, 2005). **Finding the words: Frequency (1)** - Highly frequent salient words (e.g., Mummy, child's name) - Highly frequent linguistic words (e.g., the, he/she) - These words act as an "anchor". - If you can identify a word in the speech stream you can identify one boundary of the adjacent words **Finding the words: Frequency (2)** - Highly familiar words (own name, "Mommy") help 6-month-olds segment words (Bortfeld et al., 2005) - Baby Maggie recognized words next to the name \"Maggie\" and baby Hanna recognized words next to the name \"Hanna\" - Recall that 6-month-olds fail in the Jusczyk & Aslin (1995) study. **Finding the words: Frequency (3)** - Some linguistic categories of words (e.g., articles the, a, his, hers, conjunctions and, or) are highly frequent. - Infants can use "the" to segment nouns at 8 months (Shi & Lepage, 2008) - At test, infants listened longer to an isolated word that was taught with a real function word. **How are words organised?** - The dog chased the squirrel in the park. - The squirrel chased the dog in the park. - Chased in squirrel the park in dog the. - Order matters! **Finding the patterns: Frequency (1)** Many highly frequent words are function words. Grammatical function How would you describe this stream to someone else? - Su is beginning - Su is in the middle - Su is at the end **Finding the patterns: Frequency (2)** In English, function words tend to go to before (articles, pronouns, prepositions): - An apple - The dog - You ran - They swam - On the table - Under the chair But not in all languages In order to learn syntax, infants need to learn the word order. **Finding the patterns: Frequency (3)** - In Japanese, the order is switched - Articles are after the noun, postposition rather than prepositions. - Infants are sensitive to this by 8 months (Gervain et al., 2008) - Italian is a frequent-first language; Japanese is a frequent-final language. **Finding the patterns: Frequency (4)** - Italian 8-month-olds listen longer to frequent-first - Japanese 8-month-olds listen longer to frequent-final - By 8 months, infants have started to learn some of the ordering rules for their language. **Finding the patterns: Rule-learning (1)** Syntax requires learning the abstract rules of a language. But can infants learn abstract rules? - The red car (grammatically correct) - \*The car red (grammatically incorrect) - The boy is jumping (grammatically correct) - \*The boy is jump (grammatically incorrect) - The girl eating cake is happy (grammatically correct) - The girls eating cake are happy (grammatically correct) - \*The girls eating cake is happy (grammatically incorrect) - \*The girl eating cake are happy(grammatically incorrect) Finding the patterns: Rule-learning (2) Syntax requires learning the abstract rules of a language. But can infants learn abstract rules? - 6-month-olds could learn an abstract rule with linguistic stimuli (Marcus et al., 1999) - Those familiarized to ABA pattern listened longer to ABB - Those familiarized to ABB pattern listened longer to ABA **Conclusions and Issues** Infants make rapid strides in language acquisition over the first year. Identifying sounds, statistics, patterns, word boundaries Early preferences and skills for starting to crack language complexities. Infants tune the specifics of their language (sounds, order) well before they begin to speak. LECTURE 2: - Two main stages of early social skills (primary and secondary intersubjectivity). - Two key modes of communication are important for language and acquisition (turn-taking and joint attention). Early socialisation (1): - Pre-linguistic communication is more than just crying. - Primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979): First months: attention to faces, eye contact, produce vocalisations, imitate sounds and gesture. - Secondary intersubjectivity : Older infants: more sophisticated, pointing, turntaking, shared attention. **Early socialization: Primary intersubjectivity:** - First months: attention to faces, eye contact, produce vocalisations, imitate sounds and facial gestures, one-at-a-time interactions. - Caregiver and infant share experiences in face-to-face interactions. But these interactions are dyadic (baby and caregiver, baby and object). - No assumption of the perspective of others. - These interactions are not intentional. **Motivation -- dyadic mimicry:** - Infants imitate (Kuhl, & Meltzoff, 1996; Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). - Newborns mimic facial expressions. - 3-4-month-olds imitate sounds. - Limited form of imitation. - No understanding of others' intentions. - But shows that infants motivated to engage with others. **Preference for Faces** - From birth, infants prefer to look at things that are "facelike" Goren et al.. (1975). **Early Socialisation: Attention to faces and eye gaze** - Newborns prefer to look at direct (compared to averted) gaze (Farroni et al., 2002). - Senju and Csibra (2008) = 6mo infants only follow the gaze to the object if preceded by mutual eye gaze. Same results found for IDS (but not ADS). The communicative signal (eye gaze/IDS) encourages infants attend to the same object. **Early Socialisation: Secondary Intersubjectivity** - Older infants (from around 9 months): more sophisticated, pointing, turn-taking, joint attention. - Caregiver and infant share experiences and these interactions start to become triadic (the infant and caregiver interacting together with a toy; social referencing). - The interactions become intentional, and infants start to assume that others have their own perspective. **Secondary Intersubjectivity (2)** - Coordinate emotional response with another person. - Still Face Experiment (Adamson & Frick, 2003). - Parent \"freezes\" and stops responding - The interaction breaks down - Attempts to repair the interaction (social engagement cues) **Secondary Intersubjectivity (3)** Coordinate emotional response with another person. Still Face Experiment (Adamson & Frick, 2003). - Parent \"freezes\" and stops responding - The interaction breaks down - Attempts to repair the interaction (social engagement cues) Social referencing and the Visual Cliff example (Sorce et al., 1985). - Visual cliff (depth perception) - Infants will look to the parent for an emotional cue of how to respond - Shared attention to the situation, transfer of information **The visual cliff:** - Social referencing and the Visual Cliff example (Sorce et al., 1985). - Visual cliff (depth perception) - Infants will look to the parent for an emotional cue of how to respond - Shared attention to the situation, transfer of information. Secondary Intersubjectivity (5) Beginnings of intentional communication by the infant signified by: - Use of eye contact/pointing to direct another's attention. - Consistent use of vocalisation to indicate specific goal. - Evidence of child waiting for response. - Persistence if not understood. Two key modes of communication important for language acquisition = turn-taking and joint attention. **Modes of communication** Turn-taking. Joint Attention. - Sharing a focus of attention. - Following attention. - Directing attention **Turn-taking (1):** - Young infants (from around 3 months) alternate vocalisations with their caregivers (Stern et al. 1975). - By 12 months, very few overlaps between 'speakers' (Schaffer et al, 1977). - Proto-conversations (Bruner, 1975) - similarities between turn-taking in early vocalisations and later conversation. **Do infants really have sophisticated turn-taking skills?** - Interruptions suggest not until 3rd year can children control turn-taking in language (Rutter & Durkin, 1987). - In the early stages the caregiver ensures a smooth interaction between speakers. - Difficult to establish exactly when mutually intentional. **Joint Attention (1)** - Initial interactions incorporate either: The child and adult or the child and an object. **Joint Attention (2)** - Joint attention = triadic interaction involving child, adult, and object/event. - Shared awareness of the shared attention. **Joint Attention (3)** Joint attention = triadic interaction involving child, adult and object/event. - Sharing Attention. - Following Attention. - Directing Attention. **Joint Attention: Sharing Attention (1)** Social referencing (Sorce et al., 1985). - Visual Cliff. By 9 months, children look to adult in unfamiliar or threatening situations to gauge emotional response. **Joint attention: Sharing attention (2)** Topic Comment - At 9 months, child and adult interact over an object. Child switches gaze between adult and object (Carpenter et al, 1997). - Caregivers talks about object of joint attention.(West & Iverson, 2017) **Joint attention: Sharing attention (4)** Topic Comment - Joint attention skills predict later language skills (e.g., Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). - Children better learn the names for objects better when they are attending to the object when it is named (Pereira, Smith & Yu, 2014). **Joint attention: Sharing attention (5)** Routines (Bruner, 1983) - Much of early language is learnt in routines - Caregivers structure routines around child. - Routines create a shared context. The child knows what comes next. - Highly repetitive routines provide a scaffold for language learning. - Routines differ in the types of words used (Tamis-LeMonda et a., 2018). **Joint attention: Sharing attention (6)** - BUT\... - During 1st year, mothers constantly monitor the child's line of regard. When a child's attention shifts from the desired object of attention, mothers attempt to regain the child's attention (Collis & Schaffer, 1975). - The mother is initially solely responsible for establishing a shared topic and providing relevant language. - Mother's sensitivity to a child's focus of attention is related to the child's vocabulary development - children are more likely to learn the referent for an object they attend to than for one their attention is directed to (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). - Twins often show language delay -- linked to amount of time spent in joint attention episodes with mother (Tomasello et al, 1986), highlighting the mother's role. **Joint attention: The following points** - 9 months: can follows point in front of another person. - 12 months: begin to check back with the pointer. - 14 months: follows point across the line of sight. **Joint attention: Following attention - Gaze Following (1)** - Gaze following allows us to track where someone else is looking and join them, engaging in joint attention. - By 9 months, infants will turn to follow an adult\'s gaze and share an object of attention with another (Scaife & Bruner, 1975). **Joint attention: Following attention Gaze Following (3)** - Infants aren't tracking the GAZE specifically until around 18 months (Corkum & Moore, 1995; Moore & Corkum, 1998). **Joint attention: Following attention Gaze Following (4)** - 12-month-olds will follow a head turn....even if the person is blindfolded! - 14-month-olds will only follow when the eyes are visible (Brooks and Meltzoff, 2002) **Joint attention: Following attention Gaze Following (5)** - But, 12-month olds will gaze follow if the partner has their eyes open, but not if the eyes are closed! (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002). **Joint attention: Following attention Gaze Following (6)** - Infants follow gaze behind barriers (Moll & Tomasello, 2004). **Joint attention: Following attention Gaze Following (7)** - It can be tricky to determine to motives for infant gaze following. - Conflicting evidence about when children are following because they think the looker sees something interesting. - 18 months, but some evidence in infants as young as 12 months. **Understanding communicative intentions (1)** - Can children understand that adult intends to communicate information to them? - Behne et al. (2005) look at whether 14-, 18-, and 24- month-olds will follow a helper\'s point. Do they understand that there is a shared goal of finding the toy? **Understanding communicative intentions (2)** - Infants follow both point and gaze direction to retrieve object of interest (Behne et al., 2005). **Understanding communicative intentions (3)** - Infants do not follow non-communicative points and gaze direction (Behne et al., 2005). **Joint attention: Directing attention (1)** Pointing - Imperative --to get adult to do something. - Declarative -- to direct adult's attention to something. - 9 months, child points to object then checks mother's line of regard, by 18 months child checks mother's line of regard before pointing to an object. **Joint attention: Directing attention, Criticisms** - **Imperative pointing:** infant learns that if she points, she gets what she wants (Camaioni, 1993). - **Declarative pointing:** infant learns that she gets more attention by pointing at things (e.g. Moore & D'Entremont, 2001). - BUT 12month-olds indicate when an adult finds 'wrong' object (e.g., Liszkowski, et al., 2006) and respond negatively when attention is directed to the infant and not the object (e.g., Boundy et al., 2019) **Conclusions** Two main stages of social development - Primary Intersubjectivity - Secondary Intersubjectivity Key communication skills - Turn Taking - Joint Attention Development of social skills and understanding of communicative intent **LECTURE 3:** **Word Learning is HARD:** - It can't just be "point and name" - Point and name is not common (and not universal) - When pointing and naming, usually only nouns **Word Learning is HARD (2)** A picture of a woman petting a dog. The word &\#34;gavagai&\#34; is shown along with possible meanings of the word (e.g., dog, ear, sitting, brown, paw, stroke, bark, fast) **Word Learning is HARD (3)** - Getting meaning right - Under-extension  **Word Learning is HARD (4)** - Getting meaning right: - Over-extension The word dog; with arrows pointing to a picture of a dog, a picture of a lion, and a picture of a horse. **Early Word Knowledge: Comprehension (1)** - Comprehension precedes production - 2-year-olds comprehend 2-3x as many words as they produce (Goldin-Meadow et al., 1976) - Infants appear to start to comprehend nouns as early as 6 months (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012) - Infants start to comprehend verbs (e.g., eat, hug) later \~ 10 months (Bergelson & Swingley, 2013) **Early Word Knowledge: Comprehension (2)** - Between 18- and 24-months, infants get much faster on the looking-while-listening task (Fernald et al., 1998). - By 18 months, they don't even need the full word (Fernald, Swingley, & Pinto, 2001) **Early Word Knowledge: Production (1)** - Around 12 months, first words, by 24-30mths around 500 words - (however, lots of variability) - First words from a range of categories - Nouns (objects -- dog, cat & proper names - Mummy) - Verbs (action words -- jump, get) - Social routines (bye, hello, please) - Adjectives (descriptions -- cold, dirty) - Lack of things like articles (a, the) **Early Word Knowledge: Production (2)** **[Early Noun Bias]** - Cross-linguistically, predominance of nouns in early vocabularies (e.g., 40% of English-speaking children's first 50 words -- Nelson, 1973) - More nouns even in \"verb-friendly\" languages - Natural partitions hypothesis (Gentner, 1982) - Early nouns denote concrete objects easily individuated from surroundings. - Actions, states etc. tend to apply TO entities labelled by nouns, less clearly defined in space & time. **Early Word Knowledge: Production (3)** - Early Noun Bias - Socially mediated word learning (Tomasello, 2003) - Not all early words are nouns (hello, bye) - Not all early nouns are discrete objects (breakfast) - Learning occurs in situations where easiest to read adult's intentions, irrespective of word class. - Happens often with nouns **Early Word Knowledge: Production (4)** - Words used in a variety of situations (Tomasello, 1992) - Names for people and objects -- e.g. Daddy, spoon - Names for actions -- e.g. open to request that a door be opened, a jar be opened etc.  - Names for properties - gone, more, dirty **Early Word Knowledge: Production Errors (1)** - **Under-extension:** word used only in specific context or specific exemplar - Words used in specific contexts where adults would use in a wide range of contexts. - *bye* only when putting the telephone receiver down (Bates et al, 1979) - *there* only when putting an object in a location (Barrett, 1982) - Refer to the word *flower* only to mean a rose and NOT other flowers (Fernandez & Cairns, 2011) **Early Word Knowledge: Production Errors (3)** - **Overextension:** a word used beyond its true meaning. - Overextension errors are frequent. E.g. calling a ball an apple. - Generally, make errors until the age of 2.5 years. - Category error (the concept of ball is incorrectly in the same category as apple). - Vocabulary limitations (lack the word "ball"). **Innate constraints on early word learning (1)** **Gavagai --** how do children know what a word refers to? 1. **Object constraint =** words refer to objects, explains early noun bias. 2. **Whole object constraint =** words refer to whole objects rather than their parts. Gavagai = whole animal, not tail, ears, legs. 3. **Principle of contrast =** no two words have exactly the same meaning, explains how the child overcomes overextension. 4. **Mutual exclusivity =** no object has more than one name. Helps children override the 'whole-object constraint' and learn the names for parts of objects. **Problems with constraints theories:** **Do constraints explain word learning or just describe it?** - Non-noun words? **Are constraints innate or learned via experience?** - Little research on infants. **Are constraints specific to language?** - My uncle gave me this (show object). - Give me the one my dog likes to play with (from array). - 3-year-olds select the new object, social inferencing on intention unrelated to the meaning of words. **Structural cues to word meaning (1)** Syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis. 3- to 5-year-olds shown a picture of someone kneading a substance in a bowl. - Do you know what it means to sib? - Do you know what a sib is? - Have you seen any sib? Task -- pick sibbing, a sib, or a sib from a selection of pictures depicting several actions, substances, and containers. - Sibbing = picture of kneading. - A sib = picture of a bowl - Sib = picture of substance. **Structural cues to word meaning (2)** Nouns refer to objects/categories and adjectives refer to properties. Nouns and adjectives differ in how they are used in sentences. - "Can you hand me the X?" = noun - "Can you hand me the X one?" = adjective - "Can you hand me the red X?" = noun - "Can you hand me the X pen?" = adjective **Structural cues to word meaning (3)** - Gelman & Markman (1985) - 4-year-olds pick a different object of the same kind when asked to **find the fep one**, but a different object when asked to **find the fep.** **Structural cues to word meaning (4)** Waxman and Booth (2001) looked at how 14-month-olds extend novel nouns and adjectives. With **nouns,** children extend the noun to the category but not the property. - Children see objects (e.g., a purple elephant, purple dog, purple bear, purple lion). - Children are told \"Look! These are blickets! This one is a blicket and this one is a blicket.\" - When shown a purple horse and a purple plate and asked to give a blicket, they give the horse - When shown a purple horse and a blue horse and asked to give a blicket, they give randomly **Structural cues to word meaning (5)**  **Structural cues to word meaning (6)** - Waxman and Booth (2001) looked at how 14-month-olds extend novel nouns and adjectives. - With **adjectives**, children do not extend to the category OR the property. - Children see objects (e.g., purple elephant, purple dog, purple bear, purple lion). - Children are told \"Look! These are blickish! This one is blickish and this one is blickish.\" - When shown a purple horse and a purple plate and asked to give the blickish one, they give randomly - When shown a purple horse and a blue horse and asked to give the blickish one, they give randomly - Children DON'T extend it to the category, but also don't extend it to the property.  They seem to understand that it is not a noun, but don't quite get what it actually does **Structural cues to word meaning (7)** Visual Depiction of the Adjective condition of the Waxman and Booth (2001) paper. **Structural cues to word meaning (8)** - Structural cues to nouns seemed to be learned early, but structural cues to other words appear later. - Adjectives - 18-month-olds show the same pattern (Booth & Waxman, 2009) - 21-month-olds are getting better but not great (Waxman and Markow, 1998). **Structural cues to word meaning: Verbs** - This can be used to narrow down verb meanings.  Two-year-olds use structural cues to narrow down verb meanings (Naigles, 1990) - A man is running with a dog right behind him: - The dog is **meeking** the man. - The man is **meeking** the dog. - The man is **meeking**. - What does **meeking** mean? **Structural Cues to Word Meaning: Issues** - Children sensitive to some aspects of sentence structure, but not clear exactly what and when. - The chicken and the egg...Some knowledge of words and word categories is needed to understand their structure. - Do experimental studies reveal something about long term learning of word meaning, or immediate problem-solving task? - Structural information can't solve all the problems - The man's tamming over the bridge - Tamming = walking, strolling, going **The social-pragmatic approach** - Proposed by Tomasello (2003) - Children learn words and word meaning from pragmatic cues in the environment which remove ambiguities around word meaning. - Word learning is constrained in two main ways: 1. The social world is structured: - Routines,  games, patterned social interactions 2\. Social-cognitive skills the infant has: - joint attention, intention reading. **The social-pragmatic approach: Scaffolding and routines** - Children learn language in familiar social contexts in repeated daily routines. - Young children learn almost all their early language in cultural routines, e.g., feeding, games, book reading (Ratner & Bruner, 1978) - Cross-culturally, children are engaged in a wide range of social routines and learn most of their early words in familiar contexts (Lieven, 1994). **The social-pragmatic approach: Social-cognitive skills** - Social revolution at approximately 9 months. - During joint attention, adults use language and children attempt to interpret the communicative intent. - Word learning occurs when children attempt to interpret the communicative intentions as expressed in the utterance.  - The shared common ground reduces the possible referents (Baldwin, 1993). **The social-pragmatic approach: Social-cognitive skills (2)** - Children use things like eye-gaze and joint attention to identify referents from adults. - 18- to 20-month-olds learn names for objects better when the speaker and infant are jointly attending to the object (Baldwin et al., 1996) - Gaze-following behaviour at 10 months predicts language skills at 18 months (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005) **The social-pragmatic approach: Intention Reading (1)** - Children use speaker's intentions to infer meaning (Baldwin, 1991, though see Jaswal & Hansen, 2006) - Child already knows the name of the familiar object on the table & she knows the adult knows this too.  - So she can assume (using intention-reading) that the adult intends the novel object when the adults asks her to "show me the modi." - 2-year-olds understand that a novel referent refers to object adult looking for rather than objects they have rejected (Tomasello & Barton, 1994). **The social-pragmatic approach: Intention Reading (2)** - Acquisition of verbs -- children able to interpret adult's anticipation of what will happen and learn verbs which relate to forthcoming action (Tomasello & Kruger, 1992) - Children can differentiate between intended and accidental actions when learning new verbs (Tomasello & Barton, 1994). **The social-pragmatic approach: Issues** - What kinds of inferential skills does the child bring to the task of language acquisition? - Can this process of learning account for the acquisition of complex syntax? **Word Learning Summary** - Language learning is not isolated - Cognitive, social, environmental factors - Children show key patterns in how they use language - Comprehension precedes production - Early noun bias - Children have access to a variety of sources of information when learning word meanings. - Different theories to try to explain how children learn word meanings. **Critical Evaluations** - Unclear when different information is used at different stages of development. - Would we expect the same strategies across languages and cultures? - How do children learn less salient words (e.g., the) or words that are more abstract (e.g., happiness, justice)? **LECTURE 4: EARLY MULTI-WORD SPEECH: CONTRUSTIVIST APPROACHES.** **What is syntax?** - The ways in which a language allows words to be combined: - Enables understanding between speakers, e.g. 'Who did what to whom' - Allows productivity -- with a finite set of words we can produce an infinite number of possible sentences. **What needs explaining?** - Language is: Species-specific: Little evidence other primates can acquire syntax even with intensive training. Species-universal: virtually all children have acquired the majority of the grammar of their language by 5yrs. **What are early word combinations like?** - Mainly content words - Refers to here-and-now, easily understood in context. - Creative More sing, All gone sticky, other one spoon - Observes adult word order truck gone vs. gone truck **Lexical (word-based) rules?** - Rules item-specific - based on individual words or schemas (sets of words). - Limited variety of utterances until children are able to generalise between schemas. **Syntactic (grammatical) rules?** - Rules abstract -- based on grammatical categories. - Rules not restricted, therefore allow all utterances possible in the adult language **Interim summary** - Children's early multiword utterances are not random, nor simply imitations of what they have heard - Children learn language, but other species do not demonstrate the same impressive abilities. - So how are children able to put words together into sentences, what kind of knowledge do they need to be able to do this, and where does it come from? **Part B: Constructivist approaches: theory & initial evidence** **What is the Constructivist approach?** - Grammar is used for communication - Infants are motivated to learn to communicate - Grammar can be learned using general cognitive learning mechanisms - Communicative intention-reading - Drawing analogies - Distributional learning **The role of routines** - Routines allow children to predict what happens next and therefore what the language they are hearing might refer to. - Repetitive chunks of language can then be learned in context where the relation between linguistic form and meaning is more transparent. **What kind of evidence would support the approach?** - Children begin with lexically-based linguistic representations - High frequency items are learned early - Only gradual generalisation across exemplars to create more abstract syntactic categories and rules **Evidence for lexically-based (word-based) learning** **The verb island hypothesis** - Knowledge of grammar tied to individual verbs until 2½- 3yrs. - Child initially unable to generalise between verbs with similar meanings or used in similar sentence types. **Experimental evidence** - With familiar verbs (e.g. chasing), 2-yr-olds able to describe actions correctly to explain who is chasing, and whom is being chased. - But with unfamiliar (novel) verbs (e.g. weefing), before 3yrs children struggle to explain who is doing what to whom. **Evidence: Limited (lexical) constructions** - Argue children's early utterances based around individual lexical items (words) but not exclusively verbs - I + X Can I + X - Where's X gone? X + go - More + X Don't + X - 'X' represents a set of possible words used in the slot - Any high frequency word / group of words can form the basis for organisation of the child's linguistic system. - The constructions children learn reflect the frequency of particular patterns in the input. **Interim Summary** - Good evidence that children's early utterances are more restricted than those of adults. - How do children start to 'join up' the different parts of their developing linguistic knowledge? **Part C: Building an adult-like grammar** **How do children link up their lexically-based constructions to form a more adult-like grammar?** **1. Structure combining** **How do children's utterances build on what they have previously said?** - Dense diary study of a single child for 6 weeks at 2;0 - Recorded for 5 hours/week, and written diary of all new utterances kept by mother. - All utterances on last hour-long recording noted -- 'Target'. - All previous recordings searched for closest match -- 'Source'. **Method** **Identify:** - What changes required to change closest matching utterance - the 'source' - into the 'target' utterance (operations) **Results** 295 multiword utterances 186 repetitions (63%) - 158 repetitions of something child said previously - 28 immediate repetitions of mother 109 novel utterances (37%, of these ¾ single operation change) - 68 substitutions + 12 add on + 1 drop - 22 utterances required 2 operations, e.g. add on + substitutionWhere's Daddy's work? Where's my Daddy's cup of tea - 6 utterances required 3 or more operations (substitute, drop, add) I can't put it back on I don't put it (\_\_\_) on there **Conclusions** - Many of the child's apparently complex utterances are based around repetitions or small changes to what she has said before. - Most changes involve simple substitutions within a lexically-based frame, or the addition or subtractionof a single word. - Suggests child is operating with an extensive inventory of specific utterances, and fairly limited mechanisms for altering these utterances to match the demands of the discourse context. **2. Semantic analogy** - Children need to learn a number of verbs before they can recognise similarities between them and begin to build more general schemas. Commonalities reinforced, differences forgotten. **Evidence: repeating sequences** - 2 & 3-yr-olds asked to repeat 4-word sequences - \[FRAME\] \[SLOT\] - Back in the 'box/case/town' (higher similarity) - It's time for 'lunch/soup/drums' (lower similarity) - Manipulated 3-word frame by similarity of meaning of items in 4th 'slot' - Children made fewer errors when items that normally occur in the slot are more similar -- suggests overlap in meaning helps build flexible constructions **3. Distributional learning** - The ability to learn the co-occurrence characteristics of the input, i.e. which words occur together or in similar contexts. **Experimental evidence for distributional learning** - 2-yr-olds exposed to multiple transitive sentences of form X is Verb-ing Y with familiar verbs - Noun Phrase only condition -- all Xs and Ys are lexical nouns The cat is chasing the mouse The bear is hugging the fox - Mixed condition -- Xs and Ys are combination of lexical nouns and pronouns The cat is chasing the mouse / He is chasing himThe bear is hugging the fox / He is hugging him. **Experimental evidence for distributional learning** - Children taught novel verb (This is called dacking) to describe a new action between two participants. - Asked What's happening here? to elicit description - In which condition are children more likely to show generalisation of the X is V-ing Y lexical frame? i.e. to say 'The dog/he is dacking the lion/him' - 'This is called dacking, What's happening here?' - Pronouns helped children extract a more abstract representation of the SubjectVerb-Object sentence structure for use with novel (unfamiliar) verbs. **Interim Summary** - Studies of children's language production suggest early language not organised around same categories and rules as used by adult speakers. - Evidence for gradual generalisations based on similarities in form and meaning of sentences. **Overall Summary** - Children begin to combine words together at 18-24 months - Constructivist theorists argue that children access meaning and learn to combine words by interpreting the intentions of their interlocutors -- from hearing language used in predictable contexts - Children build up grammar by starting with more limited scope rules (e.g. lexical rules) than those used by adults and using general cognitive mechanisms to generalise **Critical Evaluation** - Production studies are difficult for children -- significant memory load in remembering and recalling novel words, planning entire sentences. - Do production studies underestimate how abstract children's knowledge of sentence structure really is? - Exactly how sentence structures become gradually more abstract over development is not clearly specified. **LECTURE 5:** Early Multi-Word Speech: Nativist Approaches Part A: Background In contrast to Constructivist Approaches, Nativist (or generativist) approaches assume that children approach the task of learning language with innate machinery that is specific to language, sometimes described as a Language Acquisition Device or Universal Grammar (UG). **[Nativists]** - argue that children\'s utterances are creative because they have access to innate grammatical rules. - children observe adult word order because they have an abstract rule - generalisations (e.g. adding inflections to words, wug -\> wugs) provide evidence of abstract (innate) rules **[Constructivists]** - argue that ν children\'s utterances are creative because creativity is based on the use of lexical frames learned from the language children hear, with new items inserted into variable \'X\' slots, e.g. I want X. - children observe adult word order because they pick up highly frequency lexical frames from their input (which, of course, follow the adult word order) - generalisations demonstrate that children learn these patterns gradually from distributional analysis of the language they hear **1. Nativist assumptions** ♣ Assume that grammar is a symbolic computational system which processes the relationships between abstract variables (e.g. Chomsky, 1995; Marcus, 1998). ♣ Assume that grammatical categories and rules are given apriori in the child's brain from birth (UG). ♣ Predict that the acquisition of a particular aspect of grammar should have an all-or-nothing quality. 'As soon as an item is assimilated into a class, that item automatically inherits the privileges of that category.' (Marcus,1998: 250) **General predictions** - Radford (1990: 61): '\...Once a child is able to parse an utterance such as \"close the door!\", he will be able to infer from the fact that the verb \"close\" in English precedes its complement \"the door\", that all verbs in English precede their complements...' - Prediction 1: children should learn these innately specified aspects of grammar very early on - Prediction 2: children should show consistent treatment of members of a particular grammatical category. **2. The nature of UG: Principles and Parameters** - All the possible rules for languages are innate. - Grammar is universal (UG) -- the rules of grammar apply in all languages. - Where the rules of grammar differ across languages, they do so in highly constrained ways which are encoded by parameters. - Children need to work out which parameter settings apply for the language they are learning. **Examples of parameter settings** Word order -- Verb-Object (English) or Object Verb (Japanese) - I eat sashimi - "watashi-wa sashimi-o tabe-tai-desu" = I sashimi eat-want Subject use -- In some languages subjects are obligatory (English), in others subjects are optional (Italian). - It is raining Sta piovendo = is raining **3. Theoretical advantages of UG** - Avoids problem of explaining how children acquire complex grammatical rules - Allows a unified theory of acquisition across languages whilst explaining how languages differ. **Empirical Evidence for Principles & Parameters** - Children's early utterances (usually) observe adult word order -- taken as evidence the relevant parameter is set. - Children are productive from early on (allgone sticky) --taken as evidence they are applying rules of grammar. - Some evidence that children understand the role of word order (Subject-Verb-Object transitive construction) from age 2 years or earlier from preferential looking studies... **Preferential looking & pointing studies** - Children aged 1;9 can identify the correct picture to match Subject-Verb-Object sentences from a choice of 2 causal actions - Taken as evidence for setting the word order parameter - BUT - disagreement from constructivists as to what these results mean -- comprehension vs. production **4. Theoretical problems for UG** - Parameters not specified. - How many parameters are there? - Which aspects of language are coded by parameters, and which are not? - Unclear how children avoid setting parameters incorrectly. E.g., Want a drink?, Got to go now - Bilingualism -- how do children set two (or more) versions of same parameters? **Empirical evidence against P&P** - Children display limited knowledge of SVO word order in production and act-out studies (e.g. Akhtar et al, 1997; Akhtar, 1999; Matthews et al, 2005; Chan et al, 2010). - Naturalistic data studies provide evidence of partial, lexically specific knowledge within a grammatical category -- verbs, auxiliaries, determiners (e.g. Pine et al, 1998; Lieven et al, 1997; Wilson, 2003) - Many studies show a very close relation between what children hear, how often, and what and when they learn(e.g. Ambridge et al., 2015) **Interim summary** - Nativist approaches provide an account of children's early multiword utterances that emphasises their similarity to adult language - Continuity accounts (that posit grammatical rules from the outset) explain development in terms of limitations on performance rather than limited knowledge - Next: maturation accounts to explain why children's language develops, while maintaining innate knowledge **Part C: Maturational Models** - children's language develops (changes over time), so many researchers argue that this provides evidence that they do not start out with a full innate UG (contra continuity accounts). - One solution to this problem is to build in a part of UG that matures over time according to a biologically-determined timescale (e.g. Radford, 1990). **Radford's (1990) maturational model** - At the Lexical Stage of development (around 20 months), children\'s utterances consist of mainly content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, with other parts of the corresponding adult utterance omitted. - At the Functional Stage (around 24 months) the child\'s innate grammar \'matures\' and the parts governing the use of more complex grammatical components switch on; for instance auxiliary verbs (e.g. to mark modality, certainty, futurity - can, will, might), determiners (to distinguish definite and indefinite referents - a/the), and inflections (to mark tense and agreement - watch/watched, I watch/He watch-es) **Distinct stages of development?** **Lexical utterances** - Kathryn no like celery - Hair wet - Pig say oink - Mummy doing? - Hands dirty **Functional utterances** - I'm pulling this - I don't need that - Will you help me? - She likes ice-cream - I watched the ducks **Theoretical Advantages & Evidence** - Explains why early utterances are not fully grammatical. - Allows for development over time so more likely to fit the empirical data. - Some have claimed a similar trajectory of learning for typically developing children with normal hearing, deaf, blind (e.g. Gleitman, 1981), despite their experiences of the world being different. **Theoretical & Empirical Problems** - Difficult to identify precise points in development when maturing aspects of the grammatical system come 'on-line'. - From earliest stages, children show some use of most grammatical functions, although inconsistent, and vary across languages - At around 24 months, children's use of many 'functional' words related to lexical frames - Can I X?, Don't X etc. (Lieven et al, 1997) **Interim Summary** - UG approaches claim innate abstract grammar but explain changes in children's language over development in terms of biological maturation of parts of the grammatical system. - Do changes in language over development reflect a process of gradual learning from the input combined with the ability to be productive in limited ways? (constructivist account) - How can we distinguish these two approaches? **Part D: The linking problem** **1. What is the linking problem?** How do children link up their innate knowledge of grammatical categories to the words they are hearing? - Caregivers don't label particular words as nouns, verbs etc. - But Universal Grammar -- what children are hypothesised to have innately - is defined in these terms **2. A proposed solution -- semantic bootstrapping** Assumes: - Grammatical (syntactic) categories and rules innate - Children use semantics (meaning) to map words in the input onto these innate syntactic categories by using innate Linking Rules to map semantics onto syntax **Linking rules between meaning and syntax** - The child 'links' individual words to innate grammatical categories (e.g. noun, verb, adjective, preposition,...) **Word meaning** **Child assumes that the word is a...** ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------------- Attribute Adjective Person, thing Noun Action, change of state Verb Spatial relation, path, direction Preposition **Linking rules cont.** - The child can also link semantic roles: - Agent -- the person carrying out the action - Patient -- the person or thing affected by the action to syntactic roles - Agent = Subject of sentence - Patient = Object of sentence **How does linking work?** **IMAGINE YOU HEAR:** "wug tamo pim" - 'Wug' means 'dinosaur' - 'Pim' means 'puppet' - The agent in this picture/event is the puppet ('Pim') - So, the puppet is the Subject - So, the Subject comes after the Object in this language -- Object-Verb-Subject word order **The problem -- it's not always easy to work out grammatical categories from meaning...** - Not all verbs are actions (Believe, want, need) - Not all nouns are concrete objects (Idea, dream, justice) - Not all subjects are agents (She wants a drink) **Solution:** - Use a form of distributional analysis to determine word order for the language from prototypical sentences. Then apply knowledge of word order to work out grammatical categories of more abstract terms. **[Using a prototypical sentence to work out word order and grammatical categories for non-prototypical examples]** **Prototypical transitive sentence** - The cat \[Agent=Noun=Subject\] - chased \[Action=Verb\] - the mouse \[Patient=Noun=Object\] **3. Advantages of semantic bootstrapping** - Explains how children break into innate system. - Explains why early utterances follow adult word order. - Explains how children learn verbs which are not actions, nouns which are not objects etc. **4. Problems for semantic bootstrapping** - Many of children's early lexically-specific utterances are not semantically prototypical, and therefore are unlikely to be based on innate knowledge of semantic linking rules - I want a drink, I don't like it (Lieven et al, 1997) - In passive sentences, the noun phrase (NP) which is usually the object of an active transitive becomes the subject **[ACTIVE:]** The cat (agent:Subj) chased the mouse (patient:Obj) **[PASSIVE:]** The mouse (patient:Subj) was chased by the cat (agent:Obj) The problem of passives - If the child hears passive utterances (e.g. the postman was bitten by the dog) early on, she may use semantic bootstrapping to conclude that her language is object verb-subject problems parsing other utterances - Some nativists propose that the passive 'Parameter' doesn't mature until later (5yrs) so passives are learned late (e.g. Borer & Wexler, 1987) - Children do hear and use passive sentences from fairly early on, (e.g. in Tomasello's verb island study), especially in some other languages (e.g. Demuth, 1989). **Interim summary** - Nativist approaches claim an innate abstract UG. - But how do children map words onto grammatical categories? - Semantic Bootstrapping proposed as a solution based on children's perceptual understanding of the world around them and innate linking rules - But the approach faces problems in terms of fit to the empirical evidence from children's early utterances **Overall Summary** - Nativist account introduced to explain how children learn how to put words together into sentences. - Assumes children operate with innate knowledge specific to grammar. To account for differences between languages, grammar encoded in Principles and Parameters. - Continuity accounts assume children start out with full grammatical knowledge - Maturational accounts assume parts of the grammatical system \'switch on\' at different stages in development based on a predetermined biological timetable. - Key challenge - how do children link up the language they hear with their innate grammar; the Linking Problem. **Critical Evaluation** - Children show improved performance on comprehension tasks compared to production -- does this demonstrate that they have innate abstract knowledge? - How can we differentiate between maturation of innate grammar and development due to gradual learning? - And for those of you interested in neuroscience, how might innate grammar be represented in the brain? **Lecture 7: Self-awareness & affiliation** 5 levels of self-awareness in early life: - Level 0: Confusion - Level 1: differentiation - Level 2: Situation - Level 3: Identification - Level 4: permanence - Level 5: self-conscious or "meta" self-awareness Level 0: confusion × Oblivious to mirrors or the reflections on the mirrors × Placing a mirror next to a canary à sing courtship songs, seek companionship × Why level "0"? Level 1: Differentiation - × Early self-world differentiation: seen vs. felt - × At birth babies differentiate their body as a "different entity" from others. - × 10-minute old babies: tongue protrusion (Meltzoff & Moore, 1995): - × 10-minute old babies: tongue protrusion (Meltzoff & Moore, 1995) - × Recent studies did not replicate this (Oostenbroek et al., 2016) - × No imitation of other acts - × Babies randomly produced actions, independent of what the adult is modeling. - × 24-hour-old babies differentiate when some touches their cheek vs. when they touch their own cheek (Rochat & Hespos, 1996). Level 2: Situation The "situated self" × How their bodies are situated in relation to other objects in the world. × By 6 weeks, imitation becomes more fine-tuned (Meltzoff & Moore, 1992). × By 2 months, they engage in protoconversations (Trevarthen, 1979). × By 2-4 months of age infants are aware that they can control objects. Level 3: Identification × Birth of "me" in the second-year of life: 18 months × Classic study by Lewis & Brooks-Gunn (1979). × Employed the 'mirror test' (previously used with non-human primates) on infants aged 9-24 months. × Infants had a red mark on their face. × Infants were placed in front of mirror and observed for 90 seconds. Level 3: Identification × 9- to 12-month-olds: did not touch nose. × 15- to 18-month-olds: a minority touched nose. × 21- to 24-month-olds: 70% - 73% touched nose. Level 4: Permanence × Birth of me extending over time after 18 months. × Me-but-not-me dilemma: "Me" as another. × Before age 4: They refer to their image in the mirror or on TV in the 3rd-person. × 3 year-old viewing herself on a TV with a sticker on her forehead: ''It's Jennifer... It's a sticker... But why is she wearing my shirt?'' (Povinelli, 2001, pp. 81). × After age 4: They refer to their image (photo from a different time, different clothes) as "me" and grasp the temporal dimension of self. Level 5: Meta-awareness × Others in mind: Evaluative and the metacognitive self-awareness at age 4-5. × Hold multiple representations and perspectives on objects and people. × Showing "embarrassment" for their image à self-conscious how others might see them. × Corresponds to the developmental period of false belief understanding (theory of mind). Is it universal? Cross-cultural studies: × 18- to 20-month-olds from Greece, Costa Rica, Germany, Cameroon: × Cameroonian children passed the test less than 4%; whereas the rest more than 50% (Keller et al., 2004; 2005). × Only 2 out of 82 18-month-old to 6-year-old Kenyan children responded toward the mark, most of them freezing while staring at their specular image (Broesch et al., 2011). × Why? × Parenting styles ("maternal contingent responsiveness") × Less exposure to mirrors × General lack of expressivity × Confused about what is expected from them. Summary × Most children can recognise themselves in a mirror by around 18 months. × Self-recognition and meta-representation are related to other developmental milestones (e.g. language, pretense). × An understanding that one thing (i.e. a mirror image) can represent something else (i.e. the child). × Different people might represent the same thing differently. Why imitate? × An important form of social learning. × A paradox: × Children imitate selectively × Children imitate faithfully à over-imitation Selective Imitation × 14-month-old children imitate selectively: understanding others' goals and intentions × copy intentional acts and not accidental acts or failed attempts (Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998; Meltzoff, 1995) × copy the rational acts (Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002) Overimitation × Children also copy slavishly à over-imitation: learn about objects whose causal properties are not immediately obvious × 3-5-year-olds & chimpanzees observed an adult using an unfamiliar puzzle box with opaque walls (so how it worked was not clear). × CHIMPANZEES imitated only the necessary actions, not the unnecessary actions × CHILDREN imitated all actions, including the unnecessary actions Imitate to Affiliate × Social side of imitation: People's dependence on others & need for belonging to a group creates motivations and pressures to imitate. × Learning goals: usually selective × Social goals: usually faithful and conveys social information such as "I am like you", or, at a group level, "I am one of you". × Empathetic responses ("I feel your pain"); competition ("I can do that too"), relative status ("I admire you"); Machiavellian ends to increase one's influence over others × Learning and social goals (Norms): copy the actions of ingroup members (e.g., native speakers) more faithfully than those of the outgroup members. × Social pressures: children might feel pressure to imitate (e.g., making a wrong choice simply because they want to stick with the group (Haun & Tomasello, 2011) How do children respond to the threat of social exclusion? × Being excluded from the group is painful for adults. (Uskul & Over, 2014; Williams et al., 2001) × Adults sometimes respond to exclusion with affiliative behaviors. × How sensitive are young children to ostracism? × Third-party observation × Do children respond with affiliative behaviors? × Imitation Response to ostracism × Children who watched the ostracism videos imitated more (and more faithfully) than children who watched the control videos. × Children are sensitive to social exclusion and modify their social behavior in response to ostracism. × Ostracism elicits affiliative behavior. × They try to affiliate with others through imitation Ostacism and affiliation: Further evidence: Do children draw more affiliative pictures after observing ostracism? Participants: 5-year-olds Response to ostracism × Children in the ostracism condition drew themselves and their friend standing significantly closer together. × Adults rated the drawings in the ostracism condition as more affiliative than the drawings in the control condition. × Drawings in the ostracism condition were more complex. Reputation management To avoid exclusion and ostracism àreputation management As adults, our behavior is modulated by our perception of what others think of us. × We adjust our behavior so that others see us in a positive light. × We are more generous in the presence of others (Ernest-Jones, Nettle &, Bateson, 2011; Haley & Fessler, 2005; see Kelsey, Grossmann, & Vaish, 2018 for 3-year-olds). Audience presence When observed: Children stole less and helped more. When unobserved: Children stole more and helped less. Summary × Children imitate to affiliate × The imitation is selective, when the goal is to learn × The imitation is faithful, when the goal is to convey the messages such as "I want to be like you", "I am one of you" × Children are sensitive to ostracism × Even if it is not them who is being ostracized × Even if it is an inanimate object who is being ostracized. × Witnessing ostracism elicits more affiliative behavior (e.g., more faithful imitation). × Children manage their reputation. × They act in norm-conforming ways more often when they are observed as compared when they are unobserved. Commitment to the group × Children prefer members of their own group to members of other groups (Dunham et al., 2011). × 5- to 8-year-olds predict that their team preferences would not change even if their team lost all their games (James, 2001). × 5-year-olds are loyal to their groups, e.g., keep the secrets of their groups, even when receiving bribes (Misch et al., 2016). Reputation management × The strategic management of reputation requires not only that we care whether people are watching but also who is watching (Banerjee, 2002; Goffman, 1959). × Do children care more about their reputation with potentially important social partners? × Children were more generous when they were observed by an ingroup member than when they were observed by an outgroup member (Engelmann, Over, Hermann, & Tomasello, 2013). General Summary × "I" vs. "The world" × Basic self-awareness around 18-24 months of age. × More sophisticated self-awareness around age 4-5 àmeta-representation (how others see them) × "I" and "We": Seeing the self in the social context × Children imitate to affiliate ("I am one of you") × Children avoid ostracism × Children manage their reputation × "We" vs. "They": Seeing oneself as part of a group × Children are loyal to their groups × They act more generously when observed especially by in-group members **Lecture 8: The importance of play.** **The importance of play** - "Play is essential to development \... so important \... that it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child" - Entire preschool curricula are designed around pretend play because of the "unequivocal evidence for \[its\] critical importance" to children's development. **core features of play:** - Flexibility: in different forms and lengths - Positive affect: about having fun - Non-literality: paradoxical literacy - Intrinsic motivation: voluntary. **Types of play:** **Piaget (1932)** × Functional play: when a child repeats motor actions on objects × Construction play: when a child build things × Pretend or symbolic play: when a child substitutes an imagined world for reality. × Games with rules **Functional play:** **Functions about objects:** - Playing to resolve uncertainty - Playing to explore the unexpected - Influence of adult pedagogy (playing to discover the unseen). **Playing to resolve uncertainty:** - Children like to play with new things (novelty preference). But what is something they've already played with that has left them uncertain about how it works -- will they be more motivated to keep playing if they figure it out? **Playing to explore the unexpected:** × Toddlers' play can look very unpredictable × But even toddlers have expectations about the world! × When the world surprises them, do even very young toddlers know what to do to figure out why? **Playing to discover & pedagogy** × Children are naturally curious to discover new things. × But they also pay attention to others who might indicate whether there is something interesting to be discovered. **Pedagogical signals and exploration** × Butler & Markman (2012, 2014): 3- and 4-year-olds × Children learn that this "blicket" is a magnet in 3 conditions: × Accidental condition: E says "Ooops!" × Intentional condition: \-- × Pedagogical condition: "Look watch this" × Children were given 10 inert blickets and some paperclips and were asked to play. × Exploration: Number of attempts Both 4- and 3-yearolds continued to test the magnetic feature of the blicket in the pedagogical condition, but immediately stopped in the accidental condition. In pedagogical condition, something was shared for their benefit. **Playing to discover the unseen: "Pedagogy as a double-edged sword"** Demonstration provides evidence about what causal relationships exist......but also about what relationships do not exist. When the experimenter demonstrated a function within the toy "pedagogically", children did not explore the toy as much. When the experimenter introduced a function within the toy "accidentally", children explored the toy further and discovered more things in the new toy. **Pretend (symbolic) play** × "as if" stance (Garvey, 1990) × Pretense is complex × The pretender intentionally projects an alternative on the present situation (Lillard , 1993). à COUNTERFACTUAL × A group of children collectively "pretend", acting like different people. × Meta-representative and linguistic skills × It is hard to distinguish pretend play from other types of play, e.g., physical play. Plays are infused in one another! × Emerges around the age of 12-15 months and peaks around 3-5 years. **Decontextualization and imagination** × A key aspect of early pretend play is the use of realistic objects. × Over time children become more skilled at decontextualization - using non-realistic objects in pretend play. × By age 3, children display more imaginative behavior - less reliance on props. **Development of pretend play** × 18-month-olds begin to perform individually "pretend" acts such as pretending to eat, drink etc. à individual × By age 2-3, children start engaging in joint pretense with play partners (Harris & Kavanaugh, 1993) à cooperative × when a partner pretends to pour tea into two cups and then to drink from one cup, children say that the one cup is "empty" now and the other still "full of tea". × By age 3, children could coordinate fictional scenarios with others! **Three views** All focus on the relationship between pretense and ToM (mental state attribution) × Rich Account × Lean Account × We-intentionality account **Rich account** Alan Leslie (1987) × Being able to keep reality apart from fiction is a complex ability. × Children are not ego-centric in this ability. By 18-24 months, children also "respond" to others pretend-acts. × They fill-up their empty teacups or wipe off when their pretend tea is spilled. × Children have adult-like meta-representations **Lean account** × Angeline Lillard (1993; 1998): children are behaving-as-if, without really understanding the difference between fiction and reality. × Stories about a character, Moe, from another planet. Moe hopped like a rabbit (the as-if behavior) × Study 1: Moe's behavior lacked the cognitive prerequisite---he did not know about rabbits because they don't exist on his planet (Lillard, 1993). × Study 2: Moe's behavior lacked the intentional prerequisite--- he did not want to hop like a rabbit at all (Lillard, 1998). × Was Moe pretending to be a rabbit or not? × 4- to 5-year-olds said "yes" **Methodological issues** × Confusing: × Verbally demanding, counter-factual thinking. × What does it mean "to hop like a rabbit without wanting to"? × Action-based methodology to investigate the intentional prerequisite with 2- and 3-year-olds (Rakoczy et al., 2004): × Pretending to pour water from a container into a cup. × Condition 1: playful, making water noises × Condition 2: surprise & frustration as if trying to really pour × When it was child's turn to play with the container: × Condition 1: they pretended to pour water. × Condition 2: they tried to pour water and said "I can't do it either" **"We-intentionality"** × Joint pretending is acting in accordance with our "weintentionality" or "shared-intentionality". × We "both" need to pretend X is Y. × Pretend identities: × Green blocks: soap × A puppet joins them and acts × Appropriately: pretends to wash her hands with "soap" × Inappropriately: pretends to eat the "soap" × 2- and 3-year-olds protested the puppet when it performed the inappropriate act. × Around age 2, they understand pretending as a specific form of intentional, non-serious activity. **How crucial is pretend play?** × Lillard et al., (2013) reviewed the work done on pretend play and its relation to development in the past 40 years. × Inconsistent results and methodological issues: × Most studies are correlational. × Nonrandom assignment of children × Experimenter are unmasked -- not blind × Areas of development × Non social aptitudes: Creativity, Intelligence, Problem solving, Reasoning, Conservation × Social aptitudes: Theory of Mind × Symbolic Understanding: Language Development × Self-regulation: Executive function, Emotion Regulation **Non social aptitudes: Intelligence** × IQ tests × Correlational studies: More intelligent children engaged in pretend play more often × Direction of effects is uncertain. × Training studies: Other adult interventions, music interventions raised IQ scores just as much. **Nonsocial aptitudes: Reasoning** × Logical syllogisms: × Dogs live in trees. Rex is a dog. Does Rex live in a tree? × Correct answer: yes but one needs to inhibit their reallife knowledge. × Pretend play might help children to reason about false premises, since they are definitional to pretend play: × One acts as if something false were true. **Social aptitudes: Theory of mind** × False belief understanding requires the same architecture as pretending X is Y. × Through role play children put themselves in someone else's shoes. × Multi-party pretense à pay attention to the roles of others and coordinate roles. × Do children who engage in pretend play perform better in false-belief tasks? × Direction of correlations is unclear × Linguistic abilities may mediate this correlation. **Symbolic Understanding: Language Development** Pretend play, like language, is symbolic. × Children who are more advanced in their play at 1;0 display better language skills at 2;0 (Lilliard et al., 2013). × Some evidence to indicate that play-based interventions affect later language development (Christakis et al., 2007). **Summary: Lillard et al. (2013)** × Play is very important and it is correlated with many important aptitudes in various areas of development (social, non-social, etc.). × Correlational studies × Training studies: × Pretend play has similar effects as other interventions such as music, adult training **Cross-cultural differences?** × Big cultural differences in the attitudes towards "play". × Mayan culture (Gaskins & Goncu, 1992): × Children do not have time to play. Early on they are engaged in chores. × Children do not spend much time with sameage peers, mostly with family members who are older children and adults × Adults do not value play. × Pretend play seems to show same developmental trajectory across cultures (Lillard, 2017). **Summary** × Play provides a very important context to learn and practice various socio-cognitive skills. × Children explore and investigate various "hypotheses" in their functional play (object functions, exploring the unexpected) × Double-edged sword of pedagogy × Pretend play: × Children become skillful pretenders around age 2&3. × It is a very sophisticated socio-cognitive act. × Fiction vs. reality × Requires an understanding of "we-intentionality" **Week 9: Morality** What are social norms? Norms are a form of "social reality" prescribing people act in certain ways in certain contexts (Searle, 1995). - One must or must not do X in context to Y. - As opposed to idiosyncratic behaviors or preferences. Kinds of social norms: Domain Theory: 2 general categories (Killen, 1991; Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 1998) ⋅ Moral norms: concerning the welfare of others evolved from two natural tendencies: 1) People have natural tendency to help one another (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006, 2009). 2) People avoid to harm one another (Nichols, 2004). ⋅ One must help others ⋅ One should not hurt others ⋅ One should not steal ⋅ Conventional norms: do not directly concern the welfare of others and have the following 3 properties (Rakoczy & Schmidt, 2013): ⋅ Rule: In this nursery, blue toys must go into blue boxes. Conventional norms are: 1) Idiosyncratic: what is wrong with putting yellow toys in blue box? 2) Agent-neutral: it is not a rule for one child but all children who go to that school should respect this rule. 3) Context-specific: this rule is only valid in this nursery. A child who does not attend this nursery is not expected to follow this rule. Classic view ⋅ Children are "egocentric", "selfish", "amoral" (Piaget, Kohlberg, Damon) Domain Theory: In Piagetian tradition ⋅ By age 4, children are able to distinguish different "domains" of social norms (Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 1998). ⋅ Interview method: hypothetical scenarios in which people commit norm violations: moral (hitting someone) vs. conventional (eating while standing): ⋅ Is it ok for this child to...? ⋅ If the teacher says it is ok, is it ok for this child to...? ⋅ This child goes to a different school, is it ok for this child to...? Moral norms Conventional norms Unchangeable Changeable Serious Less serious Punishable Less punishable Context-independent Context-dependent Authority-independent Authority-dependent Evidence not consistent with standard view The standard view ⋅ Children begin as amoral agents, eventually bound by rules ⋅ Only gradually begin to reason morally Evidence against Piaget/Kohlberg ⋅ Infants/young children show important precursors to morality: early prosociality ⋅ Even young children show sophisticated understanding of social norms. Two-step model: Tomasello & Vaish (2012): Two key steps in the ONTOGENY of human morality ⋅ Step 1: Second-person morality before age 3 (Preference) "I don't like to see you suffer" "I like to help you" ⋅ Helping, sympathy ⋅ Collaboration and sharing ⋅ Step 2: Preschoolers' norm-based morality (Agent-neutral) "People should not harm others" "People should help each other" ⋅ Enforcement of social norms ⋅ (Guilt and shame) Step One: Second-person morality ⋅ Infancy: 0-12-months: ⋅ Empathy ⋅ Social preferences ⋅ Ages 1-3: More "active" prosociality ⋅ Helping, sympathy ⋅ Collaboration and sharing Empathy: Newborn distress was significantly greater for other babies' cries than for their own recorded crying Social Preferences: "Good" over "Bad" ⋅ Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom (2007): 6- and 10-month old infants prefer "good guys" ("helpers") to "bad guys" ("hinderers"): ⋅ "Helpers" to "Hinderers" ⋅ "Helpers" to "Neutral" objects ⋅ "Neutral" objects to " Hinderers" ⋅ Helpers -- Neutral objects -- Hinderers Methodological differences - Indirect measures are used with younger children (infants): touching one object over another, preferential looking. - Ages 1-3: Active behavioral paradigms (directly dealing with "moral behavior or sentiments") (Helping, sympathy, Collaboration and sharing). Active helping at age 1-2 - Children read the intentions/goals of individuals and determine whether that individual needs help or not. - Children help others to achieve their goals. ("He wants to open the door but his hands are not free"). - When adults are in the exact same situation but make it clear that he is not interested in opening the cabinet, children do not help. (Control conditions) **Motivation for helping: Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation?** - **[Intrinsic motivation:]** One does things because it feels nice and right - **[Extrinsic motivation:]** One does things because of external rewards (e.g., praise, money) Intrinsic or extrinsic motivation? Pupil dilation: indicating distress Adult needs help: - ⋅ "Help" condition: ⋅ The child helps the adult ⋅ children's distress is reduced (reduced pupil dilation) - "No-Help" condition: ⋅ No one helps the adult ⋅ children's distress remained - "Other-help" condition ⋅ Some else helps the adult. Children's distress is reduced (reduced pupil dilation) ⋅ What if the child causes the harm himself and someone else helps the "victim" before the child? ⋅ When they caused the harm, they want to help themselves! Selective helping Will 3-year-olds help one of the following people or a neutral person? ⋅ Harmful person: destroys someone's picture ⋅ Helpful person: helps someone ⋅ Neutral person: does not help or harm anyone ⋅ Intended but failed to harm ⋅ Accidental harm Helping comes naturally ⋅ Early emergence ⋅ Ineffectiveness of encouragement & rewards ⋅ Cross-culturally similar in infants ⋅ Rootedness in sympathetic emotions ⋅ Cognitively flexible "Naturally" ⋅ As opposed to "culturally" (Tomasello, 1999) ⋅ Does not mean independent of social experience, but only not taught or imitated ⋅ And only at early ages; once kids are helping, socialization can then "shape" it Collaboration ⋅ What about children worked together with a peer and earned something together. ⋅ One child gets lucky (e.g., get more rewards than the partner) ⋅ Will children notice the "unfairness"? Will they make things "fair" by sharing? ⋅ Towards Step 2 -- sense of fairness and deservingness emerging ⋅ Seeing my partner as "equal" ⋅ If we put same effort, we should get the same rewards. Collaborating and sharing ⋅ 2- to 3-year-olds ⋅ Unequal distribution of resources: 1 vs. 3 marbles ⋅ Collaboration → Children shared the marbles equally ⋅ Parallel Work → Children did not share the marbles Summary ⋅ Early prosocial morality based on second-personal interactions and relationships \[0-3 years of age\]. ⋅ Helping and concern about other individuals emerges early and comes naturally. ⋅ Children are motivated to collaborate and consider their partners as equal. ⋅ "Natural" morality becomes increasingly flexible. ⋅ Morality begins in dyadic interactions without group norms. ⋅ Second-personal! Two-step model ⋅ Step 2: Preschoolers' norm-based morality (Agent-neutral) "People should not harm others" "People should help each other" ⋅ Enforcement of social norms ⋅ (Guilt and shame) How can full-fledged morality be investigated? ⋅ How do young children make moral judgments? ⋅ Evaluation of an action as right or wrong ⋅ Do children have normative expectations? ⋅ Do they enforce norms on others? ⋅ Do young children appreciate generality of norms? ⋅ Do they enforce norms as an unaffected observer? ⋅ Impersonal perspective ("We/one should do X") Limitations of moral judgment studies ⋅ Interview method relies on verbal ability, hypothetical thinking, counterfactual reasoning. ⋅ Cannot observe young children. ⋅ Is moral judgment enough? ⋅ I might know what is wrong or bad but may not act on this knowledge? ⋅ Moral judgment in action: ⋅ Do children enforce norms on others? ⋅ Do young children appreciate generality of norms? ⋅ Do they enforce norms as an unaffected observer? ⋅ Do they have an impersonal perspective ("One should do X")? Moral judgment in action ⋅ Experimental studies ⋅ How do children react when they witness norm violations? (Rakoczy, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2008). ⋅ 2- and 3-year-olds were taught a novel game called "daxing". Then children witness puppet playing the game wrong. ⋅ 3-year-olds intervened using "normative" language. ⋅ "No you shouldn't do that." ⋅ "No that is not how it goes." ⋅ "One has to put it there." Norm enforcement in peer interactions 3- and 5-year-olds. ⋅ Incompatible condition: conflicting rules ⋅ Child A: Hedgehogs here, ducks there ⋅ Child B: Green ones here, yellow ones there ⋅ Compatible condition: same rules ⋅ Child A: Green ones here, yellow ones there Hedgehogs here, ducks there ⋅ Child B: Hedgehogs here, ducks there Green ones here, yellow ones there Normative Conflict ⋅ Both 3- and 5-year-olds protested and corrected their peers' actions ⋅ "No that is not how it goes. You have to put the yellow ones there" ⋅ It took 3-year-olds much longer to resolve the conflict and agree one a rule than 5-year-olds. ⋅ What the peer is suggesting is a "reasonable" alternative. ⋅ 3-year-olds did not realize that the experimenter was the reason for disagreement. ⋅ The normative understanding gets more flexible in later preschool years. Is norm enforcement universal? Kanngiesser at al., (2021) ⋅ 5- to 8-year-old children from eight highly diverse societies enforced conventional norms (i.e., game rules) when they observed a peer who apparently broke them. ⋅ Germany, Argentina (2 samples), Kenya (2 samples), Namibia, India, Bolivia ⋅ Style of enforcement varied across societies. ⋅ Imperative protest vs normative protest ⋅ Third-party enforcement of conventional norms appears to be a human universal that is expressed in culturally variable ways. Intervention against moral norm violations Property rights: "Mine!" ⋅ Rossano, Rakoczy, & Tomasello (2011): 2- and 3-year-olds. ⋅ An actor took away and threw away objects belonging to ⋅ himself, ⋅ the child ⋅ a third party. ⋅ Both 2- and 3-year-olds protested frequently when their own object was involved. ⋅ Only 3-year-old children stood up for the property rights of a third party So why do children transgress? Possible reasons: 1. Don't know it's wrong (failure of knowledge) 2. Didn't consider that it would hurt someone else (failure of empathy/perspectivetaking/theory of mind) 3. Knew it was wrong or would hurt someone but did it anyway (failure of inhibition) Do other species have norms? ⋅ Understanding of norms ⋅ Social groups of chimpanzees: when there is food in the middle, the dominant chimp eats everything (Melis et al., 2006). ⋅ Is this "routine" a norm? ⋅ Perhaps respect for the alpha male? ⋅ Dominance! ⋅ Subordinate chimps let alpha male to eat everything out of respect but out of fear. ⋅ Chimps do not have this "collective" understanding. **Summary** Contrary to the traditional views, young children are not amoral agents. By age 3, young children display sophisticated understanding of morality. ⋅ - They intervene to third-party norm violations, when they are the observer and unaffected by the transgression - In their interventions they use "normative" protests highlighting "obligation" and "agent-neutrality": - Everybody playing this game has to follow these rules. This agent-neutral understanding of norms paves the way to larger social contracts and social institutions: marriage, laws, etc **Week 10: Theory of Mind.** **What is theory of mind?** - Our everyday understanding of people is mentalistic, we think of people in terms of their goals, beliefs, desires, hopes and feelings. - People act in accordance with their goals and beliefs coherence. - However, mental states are invisible, opaque, and private -- how do children ever learn about the mental states of others? - Theory of mind: proposed to explain this acquisition process and development. **Mental states:** **Goals/intentions and desires** - People act in accordance with their goals - People with different goals would act differently **Understanding perception and knowledge "access"** - Visual perspective taking: can others see what I can see? - Seeing is not necessarily the same thing as knowing. **Beliefs or representations of the world or reality.** - True belief -- correctly represents the reality. - Ignorance -- unaware of the reality. - False belief -- incorrectly represent the reality. - Second-order beliefs -- beliefs about beliefs. **Goals and intentions** - Unsuccessful actions allow us to explore "goals" of agents - Behne, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello (2005): 6-, 9-, 12-, and 18-month olds - An adult fails to hand infants a toy for different reasons: - Unwilling adult teases the infant or play with the toy herself × Unable adult (tries but) drops the toy so can't give it to the infant. - Only 9-, 12-, and 18-month olds were more "impatient" or "frustrated" (e.g., banging, looking away) in the unwilling condition than unable condition - Infants adapted their responses to different intentional acts of the experimenter. **Desires** - × Children often assume everybody likes what they like (e.g., goldfish crackers) and everybody dislikes what they dislike (e.g., broccoli). - × When the adult expresses that she likes "broccoli"; and she hates "goldfish crackers"... - × Then the adult said, "Can you give me some?" - × Children younger than 2: handed in "gold-fish crackers" (could not perceive how one can like broccoli!) - × Children around age 2: handed in "broccoli" (so they could appreciate people might have different likes and dislikes.) **Perception & knowledge "access"** 12-month-olds (Moll & Tomasello, 2004) - When an experimenter looks behind a barrier and shows excitement "Oh!", 12-month olds walk around to look at what is behind the barrier. 24-month olds (Moll & Tomasello, 2006) - An adult entered the room searching for an object. - Object 1 was out in the open - Object 2 was visible for the child but not to the adult (behind an occluder). - When asked to help the adult find the sought-for object, 24-monthold children handed him Object 2. **Beliefs: True vs. False** - People act on their beliefs. - BUT what they believe may not always correspond to reality: A false belief - I know you are looking for your keys, I know your keys are on the floor, but you don't. And you are looking for your keys in the drawer: "Ah! She must think her keys are in the drawer!" - False-belief tasks assess whether children can recognize that people would have multiple representations of one situation. - Someone thinks something that is not true and children are asked to contrast this "false belief" with "reality". - "A child's understanding that a person has a false-belief -- one that contradicts reality -- provides compelling evidence for appreciating this distinction between mind and world" (Wellman, Cross & Watson, 2001, p.655). A variety of tasks have been used, mainly variations on one of two: - Unexpected location task. - Unexpected contents/identity task. **Unexpected location task** **Wimmer and Perner (1983)** - Maxi puts chocolate in the kitchen cupboard and leaves the room. - His mother then moves the chocolate from the cupboard to a drawer. - Where will Maxi look for the chocolate? - 3-year-olds typically answered "the drawer" and acted on how the world is as opposed to understanding that we act on our beliefs and knowledge about the world. - 4- to 5-year-olds answered "the cupboard" Unexpected contents task Experimenters ask children what they believe to be the contents of a box that looks as though it holds a candy called \"Smarties\". After the child guesses (usually) \"Smarties\", it is shown that the box in fact contained pencils. The experimenter then re-closes the box and asks the child what she thinks another person, who has not been shown the true contents of the box, will think is inside. **False belief questions:** If I showed this to your friend, what would he/she think was in here? - 3-year-olds: "pencils" - 4-year-olds: "smarties" What did you think was in here at first? - 3-year-olds: "pencils" - 4-year-olds: "smarties" At age 3, children do not seem to understand that another person could have a false belief about the world. Implicit ToM vs Explicit ToM: - Explicit theory of mind: more conscious tracking of other's mental states measured by standard false belief tasks. For example, interviews with 3-to-5 year olds. - Implicit theory of mind: being able to track others' mental states consciously. For example, with infants, similar stories in false belief tasks are used. Instead of interviews, infants' looking times were measured. Is it "competence" or "performance"? Different models explaining ToM: 1. Conceptual change model Children's early ToM equates to a desire psychology -- a theory of persons based on an initial, simplified understanding of the following internal states: - Goals & intentions - Perception and knowledge access. The development represents a shift from a situation/reality-based to a representation-based understanding of the mind Must explain how children go from believing that belief equates to reality, to believing that belief equates to an internal reality (or representation of reality). 2. Competence model (a critique of conceptual change model). Traditional false belief tasks underestimate young children's abilities because of task demands. - Task complexity: requires verbal ability, memory, attention, counterfactual thinking wording of the questions. - Reason for displacement (deception): salience of the mental states of the protagonist, what if children involved in the story. - Perhaps, it is about executive function: inability to inhibit the knowledge of reality. Wording of the question: Perhaps children thought that the experimenter meant: - Where should Maxi look for his chocolate? - Where will Maxi look for his chocolate? - Where will Maxi look for his chocolate first? - Where does Maxi think his chocolate is? × Where does Maxi say his chocolate is? Deception Provide a reason for the displacement - A hide-and-seek game: The child hides the toy in one of the 4 boxes. If the experimenter cannot find the toy, the child wins - Children younger than age 5 came up with deceptive strategies: false trails! - The adult is going to falsely believe that the toy is in the right box, but actually the toy is another box **Inhibitory Control** **Inhibitory control:** ability to suppress actions or thoughts that are relevant to the task at hand. - False belief tasks requires children to inhibit their knowledge about reality. - This ability develops in preschool years. - When children do not know about the new location of the chocolate but know that it is moved, they can judge who would or would not know about the new location (see Birch & Bloom, 2003). - When Maxi's chocolate is eaten or destroyed rather than "moved to a new location", their performance improves. **Consistent results but...** **In an active behavioural helping paradigm :** - The task was for infants to help an adult achieve his goal -- but to determine that goal, infants had to take into account what the adult believed (i.e., whether or not he falsely believed there was a toy inside a box). - By 18 months of age infants successfully took into account the adult's belief in the process of attempting to determine his goal. False-belief (FB) condition: Adult is outside when the toy is relocated - Children inform him about where the toy is and help him open the box ("He doesn't know where the toy is and he is searching for the toy in the wrong place") True-belief (TB) condition: Adult witnesses the relocation - Children help him open the empty box ("He knows where the toy is so he must want to open the empty box") In both conditions: he is trying to open the empty box Implicit ToM & Implicit false belief tasks with 15-month olds Nonverbal "Violation of expectation" paradigm: looking longer at the surprising scene. **True Belief Condition:** - The actor thinks the toy is in the yellow box. - Toy is in the yellow box. - Children were not surprised and did not look at this scene long. **False Belief condition:** - The actor thinks the toy is in the green box. - Toy is in the yellow box. - Children were surprised and looked at the scene longer. **Conclusion: False-belief tasks** - Some paradigms suggested that when children receive enough scaffolding, their performance improves in the false belief tasks. - However, with some exceptions, the performance of 3-year-olds seems quite unstable and the age difference persists (Wellman et al. 2001). - Therefore, there seems to be a significant developmental change, "a conceptual change" between ages 3 to 5. **Beyond false belief-tasks** Being able to attribute a false belief constitutes a very small part of what it means to understand that we think mentalistically. In this natural interactions they perform "better". We see evidence for this in their spontaneous language (e.g., I thought I saw a cat but it was a dog). There are individual differences. - Correlated with executive function, linguistic skills. - Early family conversation about people's desires predict success in false belief tasks in later age (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995). - Pretend play and ToM (Taylor & Carlson, 1997). - The effect of siblings on ToM (Perner et al.1994). **Is ToM a universal ability?** Are false-belief tasks only suitable for children growing up in WEIRD cultures? - Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic In some cultures, it is against social norms to talk about mental states, it is considered witchcraft. Some languages make more fine-tuned distinctions in mental state verbs than others. Although children might master "mental states" reasoning sooner or later depending on the cultural communities (traditional vs. modern cultures) and the language systems in which they are reared, they all seem to go through the same developmental trajectory in acquiring this ability (Wellman et al., 2001) **Is ToM a uniquely-human ability?** Chimps can understand intentions and goals: Call et al (2004) - Unwilling - Unable **Conclusion: Is ToM a uniquely-human ability?** Primates can perceive others as goal-oriented beings. They are able to track what is visually available to others ("what others know"). - Mostly in competitive settings that revolve around food - In cooperative settings, they are not as skilful. They expect others to act on their false beliefs (implicit ToM). However, in behavioural experiments, they do not display false belief understanding (no evidence yet for explicit ToM. **Summary** - The most common measure of ToM is the false belief task. - Children generally do not pass the task until after 4 years of age, although modifications in the task can sometimes improve performance. - With scaffolding, children's performance can be improved. - The most widely accepted explanation for ToM development is the conceptual shift in children's representational ability. - Multiple factors affect children's ability to pass the test. - The developmental trajectory of ToM seems to be universal - Explicit ToM focusing on false belief understanding is a uniquely human skill.