3.4 and 3.5

cognition

all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

schema

a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.

assimilation

interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas.

accommodation

in developmental psychology, adapting our current schemas (understandings) to incorporate new information.

sensorimotor stage

in Piaget’s theory, the stage (from birth to nearly 2 years of age) at which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activities.

object permanence

the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived.

preoperational stage

in Piaget’s theory, the stage (from about 2 to 6 or 7 years of age) at which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic.

conservation

the principle (which Piaget believed to be a part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects.

egocentrism

in Piaget’s theory, the preoperational child’s difficulty taking another’s point of view.

concrete operational stage

in Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (from about 7 to 11 years of age) at which children can perform the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete (actual, physical) events.

formal operational stage

in Piaget’s theory, the stage of cognitive development (normally beginning about age 12) at which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts.

scaffold

in Vygotsky’s theory, a framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking.

theory of mind

people’s ideas about their own and others’ mental states — about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, and the behaviors these might predict.

language

our agreed-upon systems of spoken, written, or signed words, and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

phoneme

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

morpheme

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word

grammar

in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.

universal grammar

humans’ innate predisposition to understand the principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages.

babbling stage

the stage in speech development, beginning around 4 months, during which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds that are not all related to the household language

one-word stage

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

two-word stage

the stage in speech development, beginning about age 2, during which a child speaks mostly in two-word sentences.

telegraphic speech

the early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram —“go car”— using mostly nouns and verbs.

aphasia

impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing understanding).

Broca’s area

a frontal lobe brain area, usually in the left hemisphere, that helps control language expression by directing the muscle movements involved in speech.

Wernicke’s area

a brain area, usually in the left temporal lobe, involved in language comprehension and expression.

linguistic determinism

Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.

linguistic relativism

the idea that language influences the way we think.