Infancy: Cognitive, Language, Learning

Process of Cognitive Development

• Cognitive equilibrium: balance b/w the processes of assimilation and accomodation

• Disequilibrium: leads to cognitive growth because of the mismatch b/w children’s schemas and reality

  • infants are driven to figure things out

Sensorimotor Reasoning

• birth - 2 years

• infants learn about the world thru their senses and motor skills

• to think about an object, infants must act on it by viewing, listening, touching, smelling and tasting it

• Piaget believed that infants are not capable of mental representation

  • thought they lacked object permanence

  • assumed that baby assimilates incoming information to the limited array of schemes they are born with (looking, listening, sucking) and accommodates those schemes based on her experiences

Substage 1: Reflexive

• 0-1 months

• newborn is entirely tied to the immediate present, responding to whatever stimuli are available

• they forget events from one encounter to the next and does not appear to plan

• reflexes are strengthened and adapted

Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions

• 1 - 4 months

• beginning of coordinations b/w looking and listening, reaching and sucking (features of how they explore the world)

• primary circular reactions: refers to the many simple repetitive actions seen at this time, each organized around the infant’s own body

  • produces a chance event (eg. accidentally suck thumb, find it pleasurable and repeat the action)

Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions

• 4 - 8 months

• baby repeats some action in order to trigger a reaction outside her own body (external environment)

• eg. baby coos and Mom smiles, so baby coos again

Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions

• 8 - 12 months

• show beginnings of understanding causal connections

• drive to explore leads to means-end behavior: the ability to keep a goal in mind and devise a plan to achieve it

Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions

• 12 - 18 months

• exploration of the environment becomes more focused

• emergence of tertiary circular reactions: baby doesn’t merely repeat the original behavior but tries out variations to achieve the same goal

• the baby’s behavior has a purposeful experimental quality

Substage 6: Mental Representation

• 18 - 24 months

• the ability to manipulate mental symbols, such as words and images

• allows the infant to generate solutions to problems simply by thinking about them, without the trial and error behavior of substage 5

• means-end behavior becomes more sophisticated than earlier stages

• thus cannot be left unsupervised, even for short periods of time

Object Permanence

• the understanding that objects continue to exist outside of sight

• the ability to think about an object internally is an important step toward language development because language uses symbols

• Piaget discovered that babies acquire this gradually during the sensorimotor period (8-12 months)

  • in reality, its ~4 months

• after babies acquire object permanence, they become fascinated with activities that involve putting objects into containers that partially or fully obscure the objects from view

Object Permanence in Substages

2) rudimentary expectation about the permanence of an object, but shows no signs of searching for a toy that fell out the crib, or has disappeared beneath a blanket/screen

3) will look over the edge of the crib for dropped toys or on the floor for spiled food, will search for partially hidden objects

4) will reach/search for completely covered toys, appear to grasp that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible, A-not-B error

5) infant searching strategies are more logical

6) A-not-B error is resolved, full understanding of behavior, space and appearance of objects emerges near end of age 2

Imitation (Piaget’s view)

• as early as first few months of life, infants could imitate actions they could see themselves make, eg. hand gestures

  • imitation of 2-part actions develops around 15-18 months

• they could not imitate others’ facial gestures until substage 4

  • requires some kind of intermodal perception, combining the visual cues of seeing the other’s face with kinesthetic cues (perception of muscle motion) from one’s own facial movements

• imitation of any action that wasn’t already in the child’s repertoire did not occur until about 1 year 

• deferred imitation: child’s imitation of some action at later view, was possible only in substage 6 b/c it requires internal representation

Challenges to Piaget

• his methods made it impossible to tell whether younger infants failed to exhibit object permanence because they were physically unable to perform the task of moving the blanket

• now, researchers use computer tech to track how infants’ eyes respond when researchers move objects from one place to another

  • demonstrated that 4 month olds show clear signs of object permanence

Critique of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Reasoning

• modern developmental psychologists generally agree with Piaget’s description of infants as interacting wth the world, actively taking in information and constructing their own thinking

• however, most disagree that all knowledge begins with sensorimotor activity

• instead, infants are thought to have at least some innate cognitive capacities

Exceptions to Piaget’s Imitation Studies

Facial gestures: newborns will imitate certain facial gestures, like tongue protrusion

• happens only if the model sits with their tongue out, looking at the baby for a long period

• young babies are capable of tactile visual intermodal transfer, or perception

Deferred imitation: most studies of deferred imitation support Piaget’s model, but some indicate that 6 week olds can defer imitate for at least a few minutes.

• This improves as the infant gets older

Violation of Expectation Tasks

A method in which infants are shown events that appear to violate physical law

Measuring Intelligence in Infancy

• the most often used standardized measure of infant intelligence is the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (BSID)

• designed for infants from 1 month thru 42 months

• measures motor, cognitive, language, social-emotional and adaptive behavior

• performances of infants often vary from one testing session to another

• scores vary depending on current state of arousal and motivation

  • suggesting that care must be taken when interpreting scores

  • infants who perform poorly should be re-tested 

Advantages/Disadvantages of Infant Intelligence Tests

• proven to be helpful in identifying infants and toddlers with serious developmental delays 

  • however scales that measure development in the first 2 years tend to underestimate later rates of impairment in such children

• infant tests, including Bayley Scales, haven’t been useful for forecasting later IQ scores or school performance 

• what is measured in typical intelligence tests is not the same as what is tapped by commonly used childhood or adult intelligence tests

Classical vs Operant Conditioning

Classical: A neutral stimulus becomes linked to a stimulus that naturally causes a response. 

• about associating two stimuli

• eg. Pavlov’s dogs learned to salivate (response) when they heard a bell (neutral stimulus) because it was repeatedly paired with food (natural stimulus)

Operant: A behavior is strengthened or weakened based on what follows it.

• about associating behavior with consequences

• eg. A rat learns to press a lever (behavior) to receive food (reward), increasing the likelihood it’ll press the lever again

Modeling

• infants can learn by watching models, especially at age 2

• by 14 months, infants distinguish between successful and unsuccessful models, and are more likely to imitate those who succeed at an attemped task

Schematic Learning

• organizing of experiences into expectancies, or “known” combinations

• these expectancies are often called schemas, built up over many exposures to particular experiences

• once formed, they help the baby to distinguish between the familiar and unfamiliar

Memory

• babies as young as 3 months can remember specific objects and their own actions with those objects over periods as long as a week

• infant memories are strongly tied to the specific context in which the original experience occurred

• lost infant memories can be reactivated with the use of cues that remind the baby of the association between a behavior

• babies’ memories are highly specific, with age their memories become less and less tied to specific cues or contexts

Behaviorist View of Language Acquisition

• language development begins with babbling, where babies accidentally make sounds that somewhat resemble real words spoken by their parents

  • parents hear the wordlike sounds and respond to them with praise and encouragement, serving as reinforcers

  • leading to babbling becoming more frequent, while utterances that do not resemble words gradually disappear from babies’ vocalization

• correct grammar is reinforced and becomes more frequent, but incorrect grammar is extinguished thru nonreinforcement

Nativist View of Language Acquisition: Chomsky

• guided by the innate language acquisition device (LAD), which contains the basic grammatical structure of all human language

  • tells infants what characteristics of language to look for in a stream of speech: two types of sounds, consonants and vowels

  • enables them to properly divide the speech they head into the two categories so that they can analyze and learn the sounds that are specific to the language they are hearing

• infants are biologically programmed to learn language (innate capacity)

Nativist View of Language Acquisition: Slobin

• proposed that babies are preprogrammed to pay attention to the beginning and endings of strings of sounds and to stressed sounds

• eg. in English, the stressed words in a sentence are normally the verb and the noun, which are the words that English-speaking children use in their earliest sentences

Interactionist View on Language Acquisition

• argue that children’s language follows rules because it is part of the broader process of cognitive development

• led researchers to examine the kinds of environmental influences to which children are exposed during different phases of language development

• integrates nature (maturation) and nurture (context), noting that the brain is wired from birth to learn language and that interactions with others shapes development

5 Basic Components of Language: Phonology

• knowledge of sounds used in a language

  • shaping mouth, knowing how to articulat

• eg. differenciating between consonant sounds

5 Basic Components of Language: Morphology

• the understanding of the ways that sounds combine to form words

5 Basic Components of Language: Semantics

• the meaning or content of words and sentences

  • words can have many different meanings

5 Basic Components of Language: Syntax

• the knowledge of the structure of sentences

  • order in which we present our words

5 Basic Components of Language: Pragmatics

• the practical application of language for everyday communication

Language Development (Slides)

• involves understanding each of the aspects of speech

• infants begin to discriminate, understand and form sounds for words

  • can quickly learn many words

  • allows them to start making sounds/words

  • they understand more than what they can say

Language Development in Infancy (slides)

• newborns are naturally drawn to speech and show a preference for their native language (familiarity)

• language development is a social process

  • developing capacities and preferences for sounds are influenced by context

3 Aspects of Development on Language Development

Physical: developing control over mouth, eg. tongue, lips, articulation, watching other ppl speak)

Cognitive: memory, info processing, finding the meanings of words

Socio-emotional: language is communication, picking up on body language

Infant-Directed Speech (aka motherese, parentese)

• characterized by a higher pitch than that exhibited by adults and children when they are not speaking to an infant

• tend to repeat a lot, introducing minor variations, shorter words and sentences, slower rate, longer pauses

• facilitates language development by making sounds more exaggerated

• expansion/ recasting: may repeat the child’s sentences in slightly longer, more grammatically correct forms

Infant-Directed Speech: Influence on Perception of Language Sounds

• babies as young as a few days old can discriminate b/w IDS and adult-direct speech

• they prefer to listen to IDS, even in non-native languages and both female and male voices

• IDS helps infants identify the sounds in their mothers’ speech that are specific to the language they are learning

Infant-Directed Speech: Influence on Grammar Development

• the quality of IDS that is attractive to babies is its higher pitch

• once the child’s attention is drawn by this special tone, the very simplicity and repetitiveness of the adult’s speech may help the child to pick out repeating grammatical forms

Parents on Language Development

• primary influence on language development

• children whose parents talk to them often, read to them regularly and use a wide range of words in their speech differ from children whose parents do not

• these children begin to talk sooner, develop larger vocab, use more complex sentence and learn to read more readily when they reach school age

Language Development: Poverty

• by 30 months, the difference in vocabulary between poor and better-off children is already substantial, and the gap widens 

• 4-year olds from poorer households use shorter and less complex sentences

• the richness and variety of language a child hears is significant, including being read to less often

• children from lower SESs are at risk for malnutrition, slower growth, deficits in cognitive and language development

Early Milestones of Language Development

• newborns are only able to communicate thru crying

• at ~1-3 months, infants begin to make laughing and cooing vowel sounds (i.e repetitive vowel sounds such as “ahhh”, “ohh”)

  • spontaneously occurs

  • usually signals of pleasure and may show variation in tone and pitch

• consonant sounds appear at ~6-7 months, frequently combined with vowel sounds to make a kind of syllable (babbling)

• at ~age 1, infants speak their first word. Around this age, infants will use holophrases (learn to emphasize certain words)

Holophrases

One-word expression used to convey a thought

• often combined with a gesture

Intonational Patterns

• the rise and fall in pitch within a speaker's voice that conveys different meanings, attitudes, and grammatical information

• infant’s babbling gradually acquires intonational patterns of the language they are hearing

  • rising intonation at the end of string of sound to signal a desire for response

  • falling intonation requires no response

Narrowing of the Sound Repertoire

• when babies first start babbling, they typically babble all kinds of sounds, including some that are not part of the language they are hearing

• at ~9-10 months, their sound repertoire gradually begins to narrow down to the set of sounds they are listening to, with the nonheard sounds dropping out

Gestures

• gestural language begins to develop at ~9-10 months

• babies begin demanding or asking for things, using gestures or combinations of gestures and sound

  • eg. stretching and reaching for a toy, opening and closing their hands while making whining or whimpering sounds

Receptive vs. Productive Language

Receptive: ability to understand spoken and written language

Productive: the ability to use language to express oneself through speaking and writing

Word Recognition

• children apply built in biases or constraints when learning words

• infants discriminate between stressed and unstressed syllables at ~7 months and use syllable stress as a cue to identify single words

  • thus when English-learning infants hear a stressed syllable, they may assume that a new word is beginning

Fast Mapping

• process by which children learn new words after only a brief encounter, connecting it with their own mental categories

• kids are very responsive to their environment (eg. swearing)

Naming Explosion/ Vocabulary Spurt

• between 16-24 months

• period of rapid vocabulary learning (includes hearing how words are combined)

• learn new words with few repetitions and generalize these words to many more situations

• vocabulary spurts begin begin at about the time the child has acquired 50 words

• learn many nouns, as they occur more frequently than verbs in natural speech 

Expressive Language

• the ability to produce, understand and respond to meaningful words

• typically appears ~12-13 months

• often, a child’s earliest words are used in specific situations in the presence of many cues

  • early word learning is slow, requiring many repetitions for each word

• involves learning each word as something connected to a set of specific contexts

  • the child has not grasped that words are symbolic, they refer to objects or events

The First Sentences

• sentences appear when a child has a vocabulary of ~100-200 words

• short, generally two or three words and are simple

  • aka telegraphic speech

• nouns, verbs and adjectives are usually included but virtually all grammatical markers (inflections) are missing

  • eg. not adding s for plurals

• at this stage, children create sentences following rules (not adult rules)

  • they focus on certain types of words and put them together in particular orders

  • they also manage convery a variety of different meanings with their simple sentences

Individual Differences in Language Development

• the speed of which children acquire language skill varies widely

• one factor is the number of languages to which a child has daily exposure

• the majority of children who talk late eventually catch up

• most of those who do not catch up are children who have poor receptive language

Toddlerhood Language Development

• toddlers transitioning from infancy to early childhood tend to use telegraphic speech

• they learn different elements of speech

  • unfamiliar with irregular verbs

Language Development and Culture

• language development varies by culture

• caregivers from different cultures vary in their response patterns to infants

  • eg. back and forth conversation or kid listens only

• regardless of culture, response patterns that are warm, consistent and infant-centred are associated with positive language development

  • holophrases appear differently in different languages in the word order

    • there are even some languages in which there is no simple two word sentence stage

• particular inflections also vary

Bilingualism and Multilingualism

• children are capable of simultaneously learning two languages

• research suggests that from birth, infants build two different language systems