Chapter 6: Infant Cognitive Development

sensorimotor simple reflexes

• 0-1 months

• many inborn reflexes, taking in a lot of new information

sensorimotor primary circular

• 1-4 months

• the repetition of actions that first occurred by chance and that focus on the infant’s own body

• ex. they may lift their arm repeatedly to bring it into view

sensorimotor secondary circular

• 4-8 months

• the repetition of actions that produce an effect on the environment

• infants may now learn to pull strings in order to make a plastic face appear or to shake an object in order to hear it rattle

• develop object permanence around 6-9 months

sensorimotor coordination of secondary schemes

• 8-12 months

• can interact with the environment and now things are more goal directed; able to recognize faces; tell which facial muscles are moving when looking in a mirror

• ex. they may lift a piece of cloth in order to reach a toy that they had seen a parent place under the cloth

sensorimotor teritiary circular

• 12-18 months

• the purposeful adaptation of established schemes to new situations

• infants may vary their actions dozens of times in a deliberate trial-and-error fashion in order to learn how things work

sensorimotor invention

• 18-24 months

• able to move onto symbolic thinking; having mental representation of objects

peek-a-boo and object permanence

once object permanence develops, babies can anticipate that the hidden person will reappear, making the game more enjoyable

prelinguistic

• 0 months: crying; not regularly crying can be indicative of a delay

• 2 months: cooing (oohs and aahs)

• 6-9 months: babbling (ba, ga, da)

• 10-12 months: echolalia (ah-bah-bah-bah) (sounds more like adult speech)

first words

• 11-13 months: First 1-2 syllable words; usually a consonant followed by a vowel; are around 10-30 words

• 18 months: 50 words

• 18-24 months: starting to form 2 word sentences; 50-300 words they can speak

psycholinguistic theory

the view that language learning involves an interaction between environmental influences and an inborn tendency to acquire language; the emphasis is on the inborn tendency

language acquisition device

in psycholinguistic theory, neural “prewiring” that facilitates the child’s learning of grammar

emergenist theory of language development

• the view that the child’s complex abilities to understand and produce language emerge from simpler processes that are biological, cognitive, and social in nature

• views language as based on wide-ranging genetic adaptations across millions of years

• the major concepts are natural selection, competition among species, and the increasing complexity of organisms over time

sensitive period for language acquisition

from 18-24 months until puberty, forming mental connections very quickly