BCS 172 Lecture 11

The Relation of Child Care to Cognitive and Language Development

• Controlling for maternal vocabulary score, family income, child gender, quality of home environment, and maternal cognitive stimulation

  • Center-based care associated with better outcomes than participation in other types of care

  • Outcomes noted 9-12 months following daycare participations

  • Maternal care result in equivalent gains

  • Quality of daycare associated with better outcomes

Spoken Language

• Initially, “vegetative” sounds (e.g., burping) and crying

• Around the 2nd month - social change… e.g., cooing, smiling, laughter, consonant sounds around 4 months…

• By 6-9 months - babbling, e.g., repeated syllables…unless child is congenitally deaf

Intersubjectivity

Between about 9 and 12 months…

• Interaction between infants and adults, referencing objects with their gaze (at people, at objects) to direct others gaze… early “communicative exchange”

• “Joint referencing”

  • When a child sees an interesting object and smiles at you, they are inviting you to join in looking at this perplexing object 

• Gestures, like raining arms to be picked up

Gestures - A Cognitive Bridge between comprehension and word usage

• First, gestures are “routine” (e.g., “bye-bye”)

• Gestures for common objects develop next (e.g., cup)

• “Shuh” + gestures of closing book

  • People with autism don’t animate with their hands as much

5 Domains of Language

• Phonology

  • The rules of speech sounds; how phonemes are used

• Morphology

  • The rules of word structure; how morphemes are used

• Syntax

  • The rules of sentence structure

• Semantics

  • The rules relating to the meaning of language

• Pragmatics

  • The rules that occur within social situations

Lexical Development - Learning What Words Mean

• Note: “natural pedagogy” - provided by caregivers - naming, pointing, emphasizing objects and activities… “ostentacious utterances”, including “Look at…” and “Are you…”

• Hart and Risley (1995) - higher SES = 487 utterances per hour; low SES = 187 utterances per hour; significant discrepancy in language input by CA = 4

• First words = objects (e.g., “Mommy”), action (e.g., “gone), recurrence (e.g., “more”), and social routine (“bye-bye”)

• Receptive development outpaces expressive development, particularly in the early years… Growth = incremental

  • Child’s first word is mostly an object or person

Naming insight

• Around 18 months, infants appear to understand that objects have names, setting the stages for rapid vocabulary growth. They may grow their vocabulary from about 50 words in 18 months to 10,000 by 6 years.

• “Fast mapping” - children at this stage are primed to learn new words - predisposed, ready. Over time, the child learns more fully the dimensions of a word - this may take weeks

Additional features of Word Learning

• “Whole Object Assumption” - assumption is that a new word labels and entire objects

• “Mutual Exclusivity Principle” - assumption that objects have a single label

• “Taxonomic Principle” - extension of word meaning to objects that are of the same kind (e.g., “cat”)

Development of Syntax

• Structure of words within an utterance

  • At around 18 months, children begin emitting multiple-word utterances (e.g., two-word statements)

  • Particular word combinations appear regularly, not randomly in the child’s language

  • “Pivot grammar” - children identify a few frequently used words to “pivot” their thoughts around (e.g. pivot word is either at beginning or end)

Pragmatic Language Development

• Accurate perception and understanding of speech

• Appreciation of cultural norms

• Production of intelligible speech

• Inhibition of inappropriate speech or behavior

ALL lead to pragmatic development (arrow diagram on slides)

Sign Language/Deaf Persons

• Deaf infants/deaf parents who use sign language development follows a very similar trajectory as hearing individuals

• Deaf infants/hearing parents (majority of deaf infants) - if introduced to sign language later in life, child will not demonstrate same fluency and judgment as infants who use sign from the start

Benefits

• Bilingualism can…

  • Improve overall cognitive efficiency

  • Nonverbal and verbal tasks

  • Increased perceptual sensitivity

  • Provides some protection from the effects of aging

  • May delay the onset of dementia