Ch.5 Cognitive Development in Infancy

sensorimotor stage

Piaget’s first stage of development, in which infants use information from their senses and motor actions to learn about the world

primary circular reactions

Piaget’s phrase to describe a baby’s simple repetitive actions in the substage 2 of the sensori motor stage; the actions are organized around the baby’s own body

secondary circular reactions

Piaget’s phrase to describe the repetitive actions in substage 3 of the sensorimotor period; the actions are oriented around external objects

means-end behaviour

purposeful behaviour carried out in pursuit of a specific goal

tertiary circular reactions

deliberate experimentation with variations of previous actions that occurs in substage 5 of the sensorimotor period

object permanence

the understanding that objects continue to exist when they can’t be seen

deferred imitation

imitation that occurs in the absence of the model who first demonstrated it

object concept

an infant’s understanding of the nature of objects and how they behave

violation-of-expectancy

a research strategy in which researchers move an object in one way after having taught an infant to expect it to move in another

object individuation

the process by which an infant differentiates and recognizes distinct objects based on her mental images of objects in the environment

schematic learning

organization of experiences into expectancies, called schemas, which enable infants to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar stimuli

intelligence

the ability to take in information and use it to adapt to the environment

infant-directed speech (IDS)

the simplified, higher-pitched speech that adults use with infants and young children

language acquisiton device (LAD)

an innate language processor, theorized by Chomsky, that contains the basic grammatical structure of all human language

interactionists

theorists who argue that language development is a subprocess of general cognitive development and is influenced by both internal and external factors

cooing

making repetitive vowel sounds, particularly the uuu sound

babbling

the repeptitive vocalizing of consonant-vowel combination by an infant

receptive language

comprehension of spoken language

grammatical words

words that pertain to the rules of langauge and propper sentence construction, such as articles, prepositions, and auxiliaries

lexical words

words with a high level of meaning, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and adverbs

expressive language

the ability to use sounds, signs, or symbols to communicate meaning

holophrases

combinations of gestures and single words that convey more meaning than just the word alone

telegraphic speech

simple two- or three-word sentences that usualoy include a noun and a verb

inflections

grammatical markers attached to words to indicate tense, gender, number, and the like, such as the use of the ending -ed to mark the past tense of a verb in English