Ch.5 – Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood – Flashcards
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What does sensorimotor intelligence refer to?
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It refers to a child's ability to assimilate information into their schemes (looking, listening, sucking, and grasping) and later accommodate their schemes based on their experiences.
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Describe the circular reactions.
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Primary Circular Reaction- repetitive actions (substage 2) such as looking, listening, sucking, and grasping; Secondary Circular Reactions- repetitive actions (substage 3) associated with external objects; Tertiary Circular Reactions- experimentation (substage 5) with objects.
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According to Piaget, when are infants first able to use symbols?
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Around 18 to 24 months (substage 6 or the beginning of mental representation)
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What is object permanence? When does it develop?
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This is when a child understands that when an object is out of sight is still exists. Object permanence develops around 8 to 12 months (substage 4 or coordination of secondary schemes).
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What is a delay in object permanence associated with later?
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Mental retardation.
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How have researchers since Piaget (e.g., Baillargeon) shown that object permanence occurs earlier than Piaget thought?
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Researchers have used computer technology to track the eye movement of children finding that babies as young as 4 months old have developed object permanence.
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At what age do infants start "learning."
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After birth.
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In Rovee Collier's studies, how long could a two-month-old remember to kick when seeing the mobile? Three-month-old? Six-month-old?
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Two month olds can only remember for 1 day, three month olds remember for over a week, while six month olds remember for over 2 weeks.
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Describe Skinner's theory of language development. What is a major critique of his theory?
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Skinner believed that the babies babbling was reinforced by the parents; thus babies who made word-like sounds would continue to make these sounds due to their parent's reinforcements. One major critique to his theory is that most parents respond to all types of baby babble.
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Describe G. J. Whitehurst's study on dialogic reading.
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He had parents ask their children questions that could not be simply answered by pointing, rather by explanation. The other group of parents was not given any special instructions while reading to their child. The children whose parents used dialogic reading had a larger vocabulary.
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Describe Noam Chomsky's theory of language.
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He believed that all children posses the language acquisition device LAD); an innate language processor which contains the basic grammatical structure for all human language.
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Describe the interactionist view of language development.
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Interactionists believe that language is part of a broader process of cognitive development and involves both internal and external factors.
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Who initiates the majority of verbal interactions between mother and child?
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Children.
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What is infant-directed speech? In what ways does it seem beneficial to infants?
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It is the higher pitched way of speaking that adults do with infants. Children prefer IDS and it helps them to identify sounds in their language.
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Describe how poverty can impact language development.
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Children born into poverty are less likely to develop good reading skills which can impact their language; they begin to use shorter and less complex sentences.
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What is babbling? When does it occur?
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Babbling in definition is repetition of consonant-vowel combinations, and it occurs around 6 or 7 months.
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Describe receptive and expressive language. When does each appear?
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Receptive language is the child's ability to comprehend spoken language, while expressive language is the child's ability to use signs, sounds, and symbols to communicate. Receptive language usually appears around 9 or 10 months, while expressive language occurs around 12 or 13 months.
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When does the vocabulary explosion occur?
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Between 16 and 24 months.
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What is telegraphic speech? When does it appear?
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It is when a child uses two word sentences using a noun and verb, and it appears around 18 and 24 months.
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Describe the advantages and disadvantages of growing up bilingual.
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Growing up bilingual does not inhibit the babbling stage, helps the child think about language, and read discriminately between the two languages. The downside of growing up bilingual is that children think more slowly in the language that they don't know as well; this can cause problems if the language they are less fluent in is the main language at their school.
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What percentage of children who talk late will continue to have language delays after they begin talking?
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Less than 50%.
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Describe the differences between an expressive style and referential style of language. What other characteristics do children with these two styles have?
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Expressive style is a learning style that uses low rates of noun-like words and high rates of personal-social words such as no, yes, want, and please. Referential style is another learning style in which the child focuses mainly on the names of things and people as well as their descriptions.
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Describe similarities and differences in language development across cultures.
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All babies all over the world coo before they babble, understand language before they speak it, and speak their first words around 12 months. In some cultures babies use a noun/verb sequence versus a verb/noun sequence. Also, in some cultures, children do not go through a simple two-word sentence stage and their language is rarely ungrammatical.
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Describe the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. How well does it predict later intelligence? Why?
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The Bayley Scales of Infant Development is an intelligence test that assesses motor and sensory skills for infants. It is not very useful for predicting later intelligence because it does not test the same parts of cognition as childhood and adult intelligence tests.
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What does Dr. Sinha say that neuroscientists would say happens if a blind human eye is fixed after four or five years of age?
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He says that the chances of your brain learning how to see is very slim or none.
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What does project Prakash do?
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Provides care to children who can't get treatment and to test the limits of vision placidity. It contains outreach, treatment, and study.
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What does Dr. Sinha's research suggest about a critical stage for eye development?
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He suggests that critical periods for eye development may happen later in life rather than as an infant.
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What happens to the blind person's ability to perceive objects? How does that change once vision is restored?
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Some blind people can make out small parts of a picture but don't see the whole thing. Dr. Sinha's example was placing a circle and square together (overlapping); the blind person sees three objects instead of two. Once their vision is restored they will begin to be able to place parts of images together to make it whole.
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What is a baby's vision at birth like?
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Babies are born almost blind; their vision is 20/800.
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What is the visually tracking of a child with autism like?
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Autistic children visually track objects just by following them with their eyes instead where most children can predict where an object might go.
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What does "universal grammar" mean?
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It basically means that there is some genetic component to grammar.
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When does Dr. Chomsky say the capacity for language developed? What does he say the implication of this if for language capacity around the globe?
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Around 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. We all have this genetic component but with slight variations.
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What does Dr. Chomsky think an alien visiting earth would think about the languages around the globe?
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There is only one type of human and language just with variations.
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What change in the view of universal grammar occurred in the 1980s?
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Principles and Parameters view; there are fixed principles and a number of options (parameters) depending on language.
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Why did Dr. Baillargeon conduct her object permanence studies?
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Dr. Baillargeon conducted her object permancence studies because Piaget's theory did not make any sense to her.
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What did Dr. Baillargeon do in her studies?
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She showed babies two events: one magical and the other possible. For the impossible event, babies watched the screen with a drawbridge that impossibly passed through a wooden box. For the possible event, babies would watch the same drawbridge but it would be stopped by the box behind it.
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What did Dr. Baillargeon find?
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She found that babies looked longer at the impossible event, showing that they knew something was wrong.
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Why does Dr. Schultz say kids learn not to touch a hot stove?
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Their parent's tone of voice scares the kid to not touch the hot stove. Anticipatory fear reminds the child not to touch the hot stove in the future.
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What does Dr. Schultz say would happen if we had no emotion?
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There would be no learning, especially learning good behavior.
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What does it mean that the emotions contain the "wisdom of the ages"?
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It means that our emotions have evolved and helped us to survive.
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What does it mean that basic emotions are universal?
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It means that basic emotions such as fear, sadness, happiness, and anger are found all around the world. These can be found on our facial features.
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When do people tend to smile?
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People tend to smile more often when others are around, for social communication.
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What is social referencing?
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Using others' emotional expressions to decipher the meaning of ambiguous situations.
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Describe the extent to which different emotions have specific physiologies?
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Some emotions are meant to elicit physiological arousal. For example, anger and fear activate the opening of blood vessels to respond with either a flight or fight response. There have been studies that have found that negative emotions activate the right hemisphere while positive emotions activate the left. Some theorize that emotions tend to either have an approach or avoidance response.
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At what age does Dr. Kuhl say we see a drop in our ability to learn a second language?
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7 years old.
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What does Dr. Kuhl study in her research?
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She studies the critical periods in which babies try to model sounds of their language.
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What procedure does Dr. Kuhl use with infants in her research?
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She has infants sit on their parents lap and train them to turn their head when a sound changes. If they turn their head a panda bear appears on the screen playing the drums.
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When does Dr. Kuhl say infants have learned their sounds? What does she base this?
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Infants learn their own sounds before their 1st birthday. Both babies from Japan and the U.S. can differ from the "ra" and "la" sounds before 8 months, but after the Japanese babies do a lot worse because these sounds are not important to their native language.
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How did Dr. Kuhl test if babies can take statistics on a brand new language?
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She exposed American babies to Mandarin during their critical period.
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What happened when Dr. Kuhl trained to train infants to be sensitive to sounds via video and audio (but not a real person)?
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The babies did not take the statistics of the new language.
