Human Development: A Life-span view Ch. 4

Scheme

According to Piaget, a mental structure that organizes information and regulates behavior.

Assimilation

According to Piaget, taking in information that is compatible with what one already knows.

Accommodation

According to Piaget, changing existing knowledge based on new knowledge.

Equilibration

According to Piaget, a process by which children reorganize their schemes to return to a state of equilibrium when disequilibrium occurs.

Sensorimotor period

First of Piaget's four stages of cognitive-development, which lasts from birth to approximately 2 years.

Object permanence

Understanding, acquired in infancy, that objects exist independently of oneself.

Egocentrism

Difficulty in seeing the world from another's point of view; typical of children in the preoperational period.

Animism

Crediting inanimate objects with life and lifelike properties such as feelings.

Centration

According to Piaget, narrowly focused type of thought characteristic of preoperational children.

Core knowledge hypothesis

Infants are born with rudimentary knowledge about the world, which is elaborated based on experiences.

Teleological explanations

Children's belief that living things and parts of living things exist for a purpose.

Essentialism

Children's belief that all living things have an essence that can't be seen but gives a living thing its identity.

Mental hardware

Mental and neural structures that are built in an that allow the mind to operate.

Mental software

Mental "programs" that are the basis for performing particular tasks.

Attention

Processes that determine which information will be processed further by an individual.

Orienting response

An individual views a strong or unfamiliar stimulus, and changes in heart rate and brain-wave activity occur.

Habituation

Becoming unresponsive to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly.

Classical conditioning

A form of learning that involves pairing a neutral stimulus and a response originally produced by another stimulus.

Operant conditioning

View of learning, proposed by B. F. Skinner, that emphasizes reward and punishment.

Autobiographical memory

Memories of the significant events and experiences of one's own life.

One-to-one principle

Counting principle that states that there must be one and only one number for each object counted.

Stable-order principle

Counting principle that states that number names must always be counted in the same order.

Cardinality principle

Counting principle that the last number name denotes the number of objects being counted.

Intersubjectivity

Mutual, shared understanding among participants in an activity.

Guided participation

Children's involvement in structured activities with others who are more skilled, typically producing cognitive growth.

Zone of proximal development

Differences between what children can do with assistance and what they can do alone.

Scaffolding

A style in which teachers gauge the amount of assistance they offer to match the learner's needs.

Private speech

A child's comments that are not intended for others but are designed instead to help regulate the child's own behavior.

Phonemes

Unique sounds used to create words; the basic building blocks of language.

Infant-directed speech

Speech that adults use with infants that is slow and has exaggerated changes in pitch and volume; it is thought to aid language acquisition.

Cooing

Early vowel-like sounds that babies produce.

Babbling

Speechlike sounds that consist of vowel-consonant combinations; common at about 6 months.

Fast mapping

A child's connections between words and referents that are made so quickly that he or she cannot consider all possible meanings of the word.

Underextension

When children define words more narrowly than adults do.

Overextension

When children define words more broadly than adults do.

Phonological memory

Ability to remember speech sounds briefly; an important skill in acquiring vocabulary.

Referential style

Language-learning style of children whose vocabularies are dominated by names of objects, persons, or actions.

Expressive style

Language-learning style of children whose vocabularies include many social phrases that are used like one word.

Telegraphic speech

Speech used by young children that contains only the words necessary to convey a message.

Grammatical morphemes

Words or endings of words that make a sentence grammatical.

Overregulaization

Grammatical usage that results from applying rules to words that are exceptions to the rules.