Infancy and Childhood, Exam 4

How does language develop?

Some of it has to come from environmental experience

• You’re not born knowing English or Japanese

• Pragmatics differ cross-culturally

• We listen, interact with, and imitate the communication/language of those around us

• How much older people talk to, read to, and listen to babies/little kids dramatically influences their language development

But a lot of language ability seems to be an innate part of our human biology: nativist perspective

• All humans seem to do it in the same way

• Sensitive period for it

• We are good at it despite bad environmental input

• Kids often ignore environmental input

• We’re the only species with syntax/infinite generativity

Interactionist approach

• The human brain is prewired/genetically prepared to learn language, but you need specific environmental input for the brain to “work on” and the amount and quality of that input matters a lot

• Every child will learn to speak their native language; question is how long will it take and how good they will be at it

Early stages of language development

Cooing

• 2-4 months

• All vowels

  • Easiest sounds to make

Babbling

• 4-8 months

• Vowel + consonant sounds

• Gradually focuses on sounds in baby’s language

  • Early babbling sounds the same across different languages, then shifts toward sounds in native language

  • Early babbling is not communication, just practicing vowel/consonant sounds in order to learn how to talk

Increased social/pre-linguistic interactions

• 8-12 months

• Pointing/peek-a-boo

• Social turn taking

• Babbling sounds very language like

One word stage

• 12 months

• Single spoken words

• Lots of meaning

Two word stage

• 18-24 months

• Focus on content words

• Importance of word order

• Start of significant increase in vocabulary

  • 10-20 words a week

  • Language explosion - happens at 2 years

    • Realize there’s a word for everything

Basic emotions

Happy

• Social smile from around 2 months of age

• Laugh around 3-4 months

General distress/anger

• Distress is from birth

• Anger is about 4-6 months

  • Requires cognition/thought - need to be angry at something

Sadness/distress - not empathy

• 2-7 months

Fear

• 6-12 months

• Fear of strangers - 8-12 months

• Babies aren’t afraid of anything - heights, fires, snakes, etc, bc fear requires cognition; if you’re scared, you’re scared about something

  • Not afraid of anything bc they haven’t been hurt yet

  • Physical + emotional - once they can crawl, they move around and get hurt

Understanding others emotions

• Emotional contagion - one kid starts crying and other kids in the room start crying; early

• Interpreting facial expression - 7-10 months

• Social referencing - knowing how to act based on how other people act

  • Ex: Kid is playing chase and falls down - if parent acts like they’re fine, they act like they’re fine, if parent runs over and asks if they’re hurt, they cry and act hurt

Self-conscious emotions

• Shame - you are something bad; leads to belief that they can’t do anything about it, no chance for improvement

• Guilt - you did something bad, but you are a good person; can take accountability

• Embarrassment

• Envy

• Pride

• Show up around 24 months

• Kids need help figuring out how to deal with self-conscious emotions

• Babies do not try and “push your buttons”

Attachment vs temperament

Attachment

Attachment - a close emotional relationship between the infant and the caregiver

• Develops over time through daily/frequent interaction

  • Not bonding

  • Bonding - feeling/emotional shift that some moms feel and others don’t; about the mom, not the baby

• Not based on feeding

  • Social

• Erikson trust vs mistrust

  • First stage in Erikson’s theory is trus vs mistrust

  • Are they taken care of consistently? If they are, baby develops trust. If they are not, baby develops mistrust.

• Biological basis

  • Baby and caregiver wired to do this

  • Attachment is social, but does have a biological basis

  • Every baby gets attached

• Usually attached to more than 1 person

  • Attachment hierarchy

Attachment hierarchy

• One primary caregiver at the top, usually the mom. The person the baby prefers over everyone else. Then all other caregivers in decreasing order of preference:

  • Dad

  • Siblings

  • Grandparents

  • Babysitter/nannies/daycare providers

What does attachment measure/predict?

Internal working model of social relationships

• Can I trust you to take care of me?

• Am I a person worthy of care?

Later social relationships/social ability and self concept

• Strong data into preschool

• Some data into middle childhood

People care about attachment bc 1) it happens to everyone and 2) it’s the first social relationship

The strange situation

Strange situation - a structured observation that measures attachment

• Chairs and toys in a room baby has never been in

• Baby and mom come into room. What does baby do?

• What does baby do if mom leaves?

• What does baby do if stranger comes?

Looks at 3 main points:

• Secure base - use mom as a secure base to explore the environment

• Separation - how child reacts when mom leaves

  • Going to be upset, question is how much

• Reunion - how child reacts when the mom comes back

  • Primary measure of attachment

Attachment classifications

Secure

• 60% of North American infants

• Use mom as secure base

• Cry at separation

• Comforted quickly at reunion

Insecure

• 15% of North American infants

• Mostly ignore mom, play alone, do not use mom as secure base

• Significantly less upset at separation

• Little contact seeking at reunion

Disorganized/disoriented

• About 15% of North American infants

• Flat or inappropriate affect

• Dazed and confusing behavior

• Every kid gets attached; type of attachment is different

• All attachment are normal development except disorganized/disoriented

Culture and attachment

• Broadly western countries - secure

• How common each insecure style is varies

• Germany vs Japan

  • Germany - more insecure avoidant → independent; order-driven parenting and focus on following the rules

  • Japan - more insecure resistant → interconnected; mom and baby are always together

Infant temperament

Stable individual differences in quality and intensity of behavior

• Some genetic basis

• Some link to adult personality

Measuring temperament

• Reactivity

  • Activity level

  • Attention span persistence

  • Fearful distress

  • Irritable distress

  • Positive affect

• Self-regulation

Temperament classifications

• Easy child

• Difficult child

• Slow to warm up

  • Less intense version of difficult

• Not classified

  • Mixture of characteristics

  • Behavioral pattern is determined by situation

Chart

Goodness of fit model

• Does the care-giving style match the child’s social interactional style?

• Easy and difficult children need a certain type of caregiving

  • Difficult needs patience and consistency + quiet, predictability, and know what’s going to happen

• Importance of continuity and sensitivity of caregiving over time

  • Need to change as the kid changes

• Figure out who you are, who your kid is, and how your needs fit together/meet in the middle

• Don’t worry about temperament and attachment classification, worry about goodness of fit

Broad trends - physical development in early childhood

Getting bigger, stronger, faster

Brain growth

• Significant brain growth between ages 2 and 6

  • Grows to 90% of adult weight

    • Connections

  • Reshaping and refining due to environmental experience

    • Overabundance of synaptic connections need to be pruned and refined

  • Cortex is using more energy than any other point in development

    • Reduces to adult levels by about age 10

• Cognitive skills also increase

  • Physical coordination, perception, attention, memory, language, logical thinking, and imagination

  • Example again of interrelatedness of different aspects of development

Handedness

• 90% of people are right-handed worldwide, with some variability across cultures

  • Reflects brain lateralization - most people are left-hemisphere dominant

• Lefties are right hemisphere dominant or evenly split between hemispheres

• Some evidence of slightly higher incidence of problems like intellectual disabilities and mental illness in lefties, also evidence of more flexible thinking and greater verbal/math skills

Sleep

• Sleep issues are now more social than biological, since sleep/wake cycle is established

• Adequate sleep is crucial to development

• Amount needed:

  • 2-3 years old: 11-12 hours

  • 4-6: 10-11

  • Fair amount of individual variability

• Naps

  • 2-3 year olds need a nap, older preschoolers may not

  • Possible use of “quiet time” vs. a nap for older kids

• Family/shared beds

  • Most kids will want their own space by about age 7

• Sleep “problems”

  • Routine is good: stable routine, no electronics, appropriate time

  • Often caused by other underlying issues in family

  • Kids may need less sleep than you would like

    • Individual difference

    • Changes with age

Food

• Parents worry and fight with their preschoolers a lot about food. Don’t - if you turn food into a battle, you will lose.

  • Preschoolers appetites generally decrease bc of slowed physical growth

  • They are wary of new foods bc this is both evolutionarily adaptive and an example of developing agency and a sense of self

• Do not pressure kids to eat more or less

  • Kids told to eat less are more likely to be overweight; kids pressured to eat more are more likely to be underweight

• Don’t:

  • Pressure kids to try new foods

  • Use sweets as rewards

• Do:

  • Eat what you want your kids to eat

  • Provide new foods several times in a low pressure manner

  • Keep mealtimes happy.stress free

  • Provide smaller portions and allow them to determine to a reasonable extend what they eat

Childhood injuries

Individual differences

• Gender: boys 1.5x more likely to be injured than girls, and their injuries are more severe

• Mothers judge chances of preventing injury in sons to be lower, a belief that might keep them from exercising proper controls

• Temperament

Risk factors

• Poverty, single parenthood, low parental education

• Societal conditions in developing nations

• Poverty, childcare shortages, teen parents in the US

Childhood injuries: prevention

• Laws prevent many injuries (safety seats, helmets, flameproof clothing)

• Many parents and children still behave in ways that compromise safety

  • Safety seats -  27% of parents don’t place their children in child safety seats, and of those that do, 84% either install them or use them incorrectly

  • Parents expect small children to recall safety rules, rather than monitoring and controlling access to hazards

Fine and gross motor skills - chart

Motor skills: individual and sex differences

• Body build

  • Taller and more muscular bodies move more quickly, acquire skills faster

• Sex

  • Boys: better at power and force

  • Girls: fine motor skills, balance, foot movement

  • Social pressures help channel activities

Enhancing motor skill development

• Mastered through everyday play

  • Formal lessons have little impact

  • Preschoolers should have at least 60 minutes of unstructured physical play every day

• Daily routines support fine motor development

• Provide appropriate play space and equipment

• Promote fun and positive attitude

Cognitive development in early childhood: intro

• Age 3 to 6/7

• Dramatic advances and limitations

• The first time that most adults will begin to deal with kids as real human beings

  • You can converse and reason with a 4 year old

  • A 4 year old can think about and grasp a great deal of their world in more adult-like terms

Piaget

• Called this point the pre-operational stage

  • Argued that these kids are not capable of logical, adult-like reasoning

• Underestimated what these kids could do

• Preschoolers are better thinkers than Piaget believed and adults are worse

Pre operational

• Piaget thought that adults and older kids reasoned using formal logic

• Preschoolers are pre (formal) logical

• Pre operational = pre logic

Piaget and limitations on early childhood cognition

• Egocentrism

• Appearance vs reality

• Centration

• Animism

• Irreversibility

• Classification

• Cause and effect reasoning

Egocentrism

The inability to see the world from another person’s perspective; belief that what you think, believe, and know is what everyone believes, thinks, and knows

• Cognitive limitation, not selfishness

• Ex: 4 yo gets mom a firetruck as a bday present bc from their POV, that is the best present in the world

  • Can’t consider that their mom’s wants/likes are different from theirs

Test of egocentrism

3 mountains task

• Ask child to pick their own perspective

• Then ask them to identify the doll’s perspective

• 3 year olds generally can’t, 4 year olds generally can

• Results indicate decline or egocentrism between 3 and 4

Conservation

The ability to understand that the essential nature of an object in the world has remained the same (been conserved) despite changes in some (often striking) properties of that object

• Just because something looks different does not mean that it is different

• Piaget thought that preschoolers did not understand conservation and were too focused on object appearance in their (illogical) reasoning

Piaget thought that preschoolers had 3 consistent logical reasoning problems that caused their conceptual difficulty with conservation:

1. Centration - preschoolers can only focus on one primary object property at a time when making conservation judgments

2. Irreversibility - preschoolers are cognitively unable to mentally undo a physical/appearance change to an object

3. Appearance vs reality - preschoolers believe that appearance determines reality - what you see is what is

Conservation of liquid experiment/explanation

Experiment

• Beakers A and B are identical, while beaker C is thinner and taller

• A and B are filled with the same amount of colored liquid

• In front of the child, pour liquid from B into C

• They are asked if there is more/less liquid in A vs C

Explanation

• If the child responds that there is more liquid in beaker C this indicates an inability to understand conservation

  • Centration: child is wrong bc they focus (centrate) on beaker C’s height and ignore its narrower width

  • Irreversibility: child is wrong bc they are unable to mentally reverse the pouring of liquid from B to C

  • Appearance/reality: beaker C appears to have more so it must have more

• Same logic/lack of conceptual understanding can be applied to all the conservation tasks

Other conservation tasks

• Conservation of number - quarters

• Conservation of mass - graham crackers

Limitations on Piaget

• Again similar to the babies

• Underestimation of capabilities

• Piaget results are due in part to:

  • Task complexity

  • Content familiarity

  • Heavy reliance on language

• Cognitive development IS much more continuous than stage-like