Unit 3: Early and Middle Childhood Development

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering physical, cognitive, linguistic, and socioemotional development in early and middle childhood based on lecture notes.

Lateralization

The specialization of the two hemispheres of the brain, beginning before birth and influenced by genes and early experiences; develops at 2 to 5 years of age and typically features left-hemisphere dominance that predicts language skills and right-handedness.

Corpus Callosum

A brain structure that coordinates communication between both sides of the body, playing an essential role in bilateral motor activities such as catching a ball or tying shoelaces.

Neuroplasticity (Plasticity)

The brain's capacity to change its organization and function in response to experience, which is greatest in early life when neurons form an overabundance of synapses.

Grey Matter

Brain tissue consisting of unmyelinated neurons resulting from synaptogenesis; unused neurons within it are pruned to allow for more focused brain activity during cognitive tasks.

White Matter

Brain tissue composed of myelinated neurons that increases over childhood, leading to faster neural transmission and improved cognitive performance, especially in the prefrontal cortex.

Cerebellum

A brain structure whose growth and myelination allow for improved balance, motor coordination, and certain reasoning and emotional functions.

Gross Motor Skills

Physical abilities involving large body movements that advance in flexibility, balance, agility, and muscle and bone strength during childhood.

Childhood Obesity

A health condition defined by a body mass index (BMI) at or above the $95^{\text{th}}$ percentile for age and height on CDC growth charts.

Preoperational Stage

Piaget's second stage of cognitive development (ages 2 to 6), marked by advances in representational thinking, symbolic function, and pretend play, but constrained by logical errors such as centration and irreversibility.

Transduction

A preoperational reasoning error where a child links two events as cause and effect simply because they occur close together in time.

Centration

The cognitive tendency of young children to focus on only one aspect of a stimulus or situation while completely excluding other relevant aspects.

Irreversibility

The inability of preoperational thinkers to understand that reversing a process can undo the action and restore an object or situation to its original state.

Animism

The belief held by young children that inanimate objects are alive and possess lifelike qualities, including feelings, intentions, and thoughts.

Egocentrism

The inability to take another person's perspective, leading a child to assume that other people share their exact thoughts, feelings, and viewpoints.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget's third stage of cognitive development (beginning around age 6 or 7), in which children can apply logical operations to concrete, tangible tasks, but cannot yet reason about abstract or hypothetical problems.

Classification

The logical ability acquired in concrete operational thinking to categorize objects and understand hierarchical relationships among sets.

Seriation

The ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension, such as arranging items by length, weight, or size.

Class Inclusion

The ability to consider and comprehend relations between a general, overarching category and its more specific subcategories.

Transitive Inference

The ability to mentally combine separate relations among objects to arrive at a logical conclusion (e.g., if A is taller than B, and B is taller than C, then A must be taller than C).

Conservation

The understanding that physical characteristics of an object (such as number, mass, or volume) remain unchanged even when its outward appearance changes.

Scaffolding

Temporary support provided by a more skilled peer or adult that bridges the gap between a child's current competence level and the task at hand, gradually removed as mastery increases.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Vygotsky's term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for a child to master alone but can be learned through the guidance and assistance of a knowledgeable partner.

Private Speech

Self-directed speech spoken out loud by young children to guide their thoughts, solve problems, and direct cognitive activity.

Executive Function

A set of higher-order cognitive processes that includes controlling attention, coordinating working memory, and inhibiting impulses.

Sustained Attention

The cognitive capacity to maintain focused attention on a stimulus or activity over an extended duration of time.

Selective Attention

The ability to systematically focus on relevant stimuli while deliberately ignoring irrelevant or distracting background information.

Working Memory

The active mental structure where conscious thinking, reasoning, and information processing take place.

Autobiographical Memory

The recollection of personally meaningful past events that took place at a specific time and location, combining episodic and working memory.

Theory of Mind

Children's awareness of their own and other people's mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions) and the realization that others do not share their exact thoughts.

False Belief Task

An experimental assessment used to test theory of mind, requiring a child to recognize that another person can hold a mistaken or incorrect belief about reality.

Metacognition

The capacity to think about thinking, reflecting an understanding of how mental processes and the human mind work.

Metamemory

An individual's knowledge and understanding of their own memory processes, including the ability to monitor and select strategies to improve recall.

Overregularization

A grammatical language error that occurs when children apply standard grammatical rules too broadly, producing incorrect forms (such as saying 'gooses' instead of 'geese').

Pragmatics

The social aspect of language that involves modifying how language is used according to different communicative contexts, social rules, and audiences.

Analytical Intelligence

In Sternberg's triarchic theory, the information-processing component of intelligence that reflects academic aptitude and performance on structured exams.

Creative Intelligence

In Sternberg's triarchic theory, the ability to generate novel insights, adapt effectively to unfamiliar situations, and solve new problems.

Applied Intelligence

In Sternberg's triarchic theory, practical 'street smarts' that allow an individual to navigate, adapt to, or shape real-world everyday environments.

Individualized Education Plan (IEP)

A written legal document tailored specifically to address the specialized educational needs and goals of a qualifying student with a disability.

Least Restrictive Environment (LRE)

An educational mandate requiring students with disabilities to be educated in an environment as similar as possible to the general classroom setting of typically developing peers.

Inclusion

The educational practice of placing and teaching a child with special educational needs full-time inside a regular general education classroom.

Initiative vs. Guilt

Erikson's third psychosocial stage (ages 3 to 6), wherein young children develop a sense of purpose by creating plans, tackling new tasks, and setting goals, but may experience guilt if their attempts conflict with adult standards or fail.

Prosocial Behavior

Voluntary actions intended to benefit others without anticipated personal reward, such as providing instrumental assistance or engaging in selective sharing.

Instrumental Aggression

Aggressive behavior used primarily as a tool or means to achieve a desired end, such as wresting a toy away from a peer.

Relational Aggression

A form of non-physical aggression intended to damage another person's relationships, peer status, or social connections through tactics like gossip or exclusion.

Authoritative Parenting

A parenting style that balances high warmth and sensitivity with firm behavioral expectations, utilizing reasoning, clear discussions of rules, and developmentally appropriate discipline.

Authoritarian Parenting

A rigid parenting style characterized by strict behavioral control, an insistence on unquestioning obedience, low warmth, and minimal autonomy granted to the child.

Indulgent/Permissive Parenting

A parenting style characterized by high warmth and acceptance combined with very few rules, low behavioral demands, and premature autonomy.

Uninvolved/Neglectful Parenting

A parenting style characterized by low warmth, lack of emotional responsiveness, and minimal behavioral demands or supervision.

Inductive Discipline

A discipline approach that emphasizes reasoning, explaining the consequences of actions, encouraging verbal expression of emotions, and teaching conflict resolution skills.

Heteronomous Morality

Piaget's first stage of moral development (around age 6), where children perceive moral rules as fixed, sacred, and unalterable laws handed down by authority figures.

Autonomous Morality

Piaget's second stage of moral development (beginning around age 7), wherein children recognize that rules are flexible social agreements created by groups that can be changed.

Preconventional Moral Reasoning

Kohlberg's level of moral reasoning typical of younger children, where moral decisions are determined primarily by self-interest, the pursuit of concrete rewards, and the avoidance of punishment.

Conventional Moral Reasoning

Kohlberg's level of moral reasoning where individuals uphold social rules to gain approval from others, maintain positive interpersonal relationships, and preserve broader social order.

Distributive Justice

A child's reasoning about how to divide resources fairly, progressing from self-interested allocation in preschool to strict equality and eventually considering merit and need in middle childhood.

Gender Constancy

A child's realization (typically achieved by age 7) that gender is biologically permanent and remains constant despite changes in outward appearance, clothing, or chosen activities.

Gender Schema Theory

A cognitive framework stating that children actively construct mental structures that categorize and organize gender-related information in their culture.

Sociodramatic Play

Collaborative pretend play involving two or more children (ages 3 to 6) who take on distinct social roles, act out storylines, and adhere to shared social conventions.

Rough-and-Tumble Play

Vigorous, wrestling, and physical play that is distinguished from genuine fighting or aggression by positive affect, laughter, and a recognizable 'play face.'

Industry vs. Inferiority

Erikson's fourth psychosocial stage (middle childhood), during which children work to master culturally valued skills and develop a sense of competence, risking feelings of inadequacy if they experience repeated failure.

Mastery Orientation

A motivational orientation characterized by attributing success to internal factors and effort combined with a growth mindset, producing persistence when challenged.

Peer Acceptance

The degree to which a child is viewed as a worthy, desirable social partner by their peer group, serving as a key source of self-esteem in middle childhood.

Resilience

The capacity to adapt and perform positively in the face of significant adversity, overcoming disadvantages to achieve healthy developmental outcomes.