Developmental Psychology: Prenatal, Cognitive, Language, and Intellectual Development

Comprehensive practice flashcards detailing key vocabulary terms and theoretical models across prenatal development, cognitive milestones, language acquisition, executive functioning, and intelligence theories.

Preformationism

The historical belief that a sperm or egg contains a completely formed miniature human, or homunculus, that simply grows larger during development.

Epigenesis

The developmental principle, embraced by Aristotle in rejection of preformationism, stating that new structures and functions emerge gradually over time.

Period of the Zygote (Germinal Period)

The prenatal stage lasting from conception to two weeks, ending when the blastocyst implants into the uterine wall following rapid cell division.

Period of the Embryo

The prenatal stage extending from the 3rd to the 8th week post-conception, during which major organ systems and bodily structures develop via cell division, migration, differentiation, and apoptosis.

Period of the Fetus

The prenatal stage extending from the 9th week until birth, characterized by rapid body growth, physical structure refinement, and increasing levels of behavior, sensory experiences, and learning.

Apoptosis

A genetically programmed, controlled process of cell death essential for normal physical development, such as the formation of distinct fingers and toes.

Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia

A condition in which high levels of androgens are produced, leading to masculinized external genitalia in a genetic female.

Ectoderm

The outer embryonic germ layer formed during the second week, which gives rise to the nervous system, nails, teeth, inner ear, eye lens, and epidermis.

Mesoderm

The middle embryonic germ layer that develops into muscles, bones, the circulatory system, and inner layers of the skin.

Endoderm

The innermost embryonic germ layer that develops into the digestive system, lungs, urinary tract, and glands.

Cephalocaudal Development

The developmental pattern in which growth and differentiation proceed from head to tail.

Proximodistal Development

The developmental pattern in which growth and motor control proceed from the center of the body outward (inside to outside).

Age of Viability

The point in fetal development (reached around 28 weeks, with rare survival possible at 22 weeks with intervention) when the brain and lungs are developed sufficiently to allow survival outside the womb without major medical intervention.

Teratogen

Any external agent that has the potential to harm the developing organism, causing birth defects, growth restrictions, or functional abnormalities.

Dose-Response Relation

A relationship in which the severity of a teratogenic effect increases with the amount and duration of exposure to the agent.

Sleeper Effects

Teratogenic effects of an agent that do not appear at birth but manifest years later, such as adult cancers resulting from prenatal drug exposure.

Thalidomide

A sedative prescribed in the 1960s to alleviate morning sickness that caused severe limb malformations (flipper-like limbs) when ingested between the 4th and 6th weeks of pregnancy.

Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome

A condition of drug withdrawal experienced by a newborn infant after birth due to maternal opioid use during pregnancy.

Genotype

The complete inherited genetic material transmitted from an individual's parents.

Phenotype

The observable expression of an individual's genotype, encompassing both physical appearance and behavioral characteristics.

Synaptogenesis

The process by which neurons form synapses with thousands of other neurons, mostly occurring postnatally at varying rates across the cerebral cortex.

Synaptic Pruning

The developmental elimination of excess or unused synapses, which preserves actively stimulated connections and fails to occur typically in conditions like fragile X and autism.

Plasticity

The capacity of the brain to be shaped, altered, and reorganized by experience, which gradually decreases as an individual gets older.

Experience-Expectant Processes

Brain development processes that rely on species-typical environmental inputs that the brain is genetically prewired to expect during sensitive periods.

Experience-Dependent Processes

Brain development processes involving the creation of unique neural connections driven by individual, idiosyncratic experiences throughout life.

Constructivism

Piaget's theoretical perspective portraying children as active learners who generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and draw conclusions to build understanding.

Assimilation

The cognitive process of integrating incoming information into pre-existing concepts or mental schemes.

Accommodation

The cognitive process of altering existing schemes or creating new ones in response to novel environmental information.

Equilibration

The continuous regulatory mechanism that balances assimilation and accommodation to transition from cognitive disequilibrium to a stable state of equilibrium.

Piaget's Cognitive Stages

The four invariant, qualitatively distinct developmental stages proposed by Piaget: Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years), Preoperational (2 to 7 years), Concrete Operational (7 to 12 years), and Formal Operational (12 years and up).

A-not-B Error

The tendency of 8- to 12-month-old infants to search for a hidden object at location A where it was previously found, even after watching it move to location B.

Deferred Imitation

The ability to reproduce a previously observed behavior after a significant time delay, marking the emergence of internal mental representations between 18 and 24 months.

Centration

The cognitive limitation common in the preoperational stage characterized by focusing exclusively on a single prominent feature of an object or event while ignoring other relevant dimensions.

Adolescent Egocentrism

A state of self-absorption seen in the formal operational period marked by beliefs in an imaginary audience (everyone is watching) and a personal fable (one's experiences are entirely unique).

Executive Function

The set of cognitive control processes involved in regulating attention and determining actions based on sensory input or information retrieved from long-term memory.

Speed of Processing

The rate at which an individual can execute a cognitive operation, which limits how many mental operations can be performed within a given time period.

Memory Span

The total number of items an individual can retain in the short-term store, assessed by the quantity of unrelated items accurately recalled in exact sequential order.

Working Memory

The workspace capacity to store and actively manipulate information within the short-term system; capacity is typically about two items fewer than simple memory span.

Inhibition

The executive capacity to prevent oneself from executing an automatic, prepotent cognitive or behavioral response.

Resistance to Interference

The executive ability to filter out and ignore irrelevant information so that it does not disrupt task performance.

Cognitive Flexibility

The executive capability to seamlessly shift attention between different rules, demands, or sets of tasks.

Overlapping Waves Theory

An information-processing model of problem-solving stating that children generate and employ a variety of strategies simultaneously, gradually shifting toward more effective strategies over time.

Core Knowledge Theories

Theoretical perspectives proposing that infants possess innate, evolutionarily significant domain-specific knowledge modules in domains such as physics, people, and language.

Sociocultural Theories

Approaches originating from Lev Vygotsky asserting that cognitive development occurs through social interactions and the internalization of cultural tools like language.

Intersubjectivity

The psychological sharing of experience and mutual understanding established between individuals during communication, underlying joint attention and social referencing.

Scaffolding

A temporary instructional structure established by more competent individuals to support a child's thinking and task execution at a higher level than they could attain independently.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

The region between what a learner can do entirely independently (bottom boundary) and what they cannot accomplish even with extensive guided assistance (top boundary).

Dynamic Systems Approach

A developmental framework viewing motor and cognitive skills as self-organizing systems that assemble in real time through interactions between neurological systems, biomechanics, motivation, and environment.

Phonemes

The smallest elementary units of meaningful sound utilized to construct and differentiate spoken words in a language.

Morphemes

The smallest units of linguistic meaning, comprising free units that stand alone and bound units that must attach to other elements.

Semantics

The system of rules and processes governing the comprehension and representation of meaning in words and sentences.

Pragmatics

The practical knowledge and social conventions governing how language is used effectively to communicate across different conversational contexts.

Metalinguistic Knowledge

An explicit, conscious understanding of the properties, rules, and structure of language itself.

Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)

A distinctive, emotionally expressive speech register used across cultures when talking to infants, characterized by higher pitch, exaggerated prosody, clear enunciation, and repetition.

Perceptual Narrowing

The developmental process by which infants lose their initial broad capacity to discriminate non-native phonemic contrasts, tuning auditory perception specifically to native language sounds.

Protodeclarative Pointing

A preverbal communicative gesture directed toward an object with the intent of directing an adult's attention to something interesting.

Protoimperative Pointing

A preverbal communicative gesture in which an infant points to an object or adult to demand or request something they want.

Fast-Mapping

The rapid process of learning a new word simply by contrasting an unfamiliar term with a familiar one upon brief exposure.

Underextension

An overly restrictive error in early word learning where a child applies a categorical label to only a single specific instance (e.g., using 'doggy' exclusively for their own family dog).

Overextension

An overly broad error in early word learning where a child applies a specific verbal label to describe objects or events outside the category (e.g., referring to anything shiny as 'moon').

Shape Bias

The tendency of young children to generalize a novel name to new objects that share the same shape rather than those sharing color or texture.

Syntactic Bootstrapping

The strategy of using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to deduce the meaning of novel words.

Telegraphic Speech

Brief, two-word utterances characteristic of early childhood speech that retain essential content words while omitting grammatical markers and non-essential words, yet preserve proper word order.

Overregularization

Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular, applying generalized grammatical rules (e.g., saying 'foots' or 'goed').

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Noam Chomsky's proposed innate, specialized neural module dedicated to detecting grammatical structures and universal linguistic rules.

Violation-of-Expectation Procedure

An experimental looking paradigm in which infants demonstrate cognitive surprise by looking significantly longer at impossible or unexpected events that contradict internal expectations.

Belief-Desire Psychology

The developmental model showing that perception leads to beliefs, basic physiological states lead to desires, and the combination of beliefs and desires causes actions, producing emotional reactions.

Rouge Test

A visual self-recognition test where blush is placed on a child's nose before placing them in front of a mirror, typically passed around 18 months of age when they touch their own nose rather than the glass.

Theory of Mind (ToM)

The cognitive understanding that other people possess private thoughts, beliefs, desires, and mental states distinct from one's own, and that those internal beliefs guide their behaviors.

False-Belief Tasks

Experimental tasks (such as the Sally-Anne task) used to assess theory of mind by testing whether a child understands that another person can hold an erroneous belief about reality, typically failed by 3-year-olds and passed by 4-year-olds.

Essentialism

The early-developing cognitive belief that living entities possess an unobservable, inherited internal essence (such as a 'dogness') that makes them what they are.

One-to-One Correspondence

The counting principle stating that each object in a set must be paired with exactly one, and only one, unique number word.

Stable Order Principle

The counting principle requiring that number words must always be recited in the exact same consistent sequential order.

Cardinality Principle

The understanding that the final number word spoken in a count represents the total quantity of items in the enumerated set.

Order Irrelevance Principle

The counting principle that objects can be counted in any spatial direction or sequence as long as each object is counted only once.

Abstraction Principle

The counting principle specifying that any discrete collection of entities, whether physical objects, sounds, or conceptual ideas, can be enumerated.

Linguistic Effects on Counting

The cognitive advantage in early numerical counting shown by Chinese-speaking children over English-speaking children due to a base-10 numerical naming system that simplifies counting up to 100.

General Intelligence ($g$)

Charles Spearman's hypothesized construct of general intellectual ability that correlates with processing speed, brain volume, neural transmission velocity, and all broad mental tasks.

Fluid Intelligence

The capacity to think logically, reason abstractly, and solve novel problems independently of acquired formal education, which peaks around ages 20 to 25.

Crystallized Intelligence

The accumulated factual knowledge, language skills, and verbal comprehension acquired through experience and schooling, which continues to increase across the lifespan.

Carroll's Three-Stratum Theory

A hierarchical model of cognitive abilities featuring general intelligence ($g$) at stratum III, eight broad abilities at stratum II, and numerous specific cognitive processes at stratum I.

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

A standardized measure of cognitive ability originally calculated as $\frac{\text{Mental Age}}{\text{Chronological Age}} \times 100$, normed with an average score of $100$ and a standard deviation of $15$.

Percentile Rank of IQ Scores

The normal distribution of standard scores placing a score of $70$ at the $2^{\text{nd}}$ percentile, $85$ at the $16^{\text{th}}$, $100$ at the $50^{\text{th}}$, $115$ at the $84^{\text{th}}$, and $130$ at the $98^{\text{th}}$ percentile.

Passive Gene-Environment Relations

Genotype-environment associations that occur when biological parents provide an environment that correlates with their own genetic predispositions (e.g., parents who love to read filling the home with books).

Evocative Gene-Environment Relations

Genotype-environment associations that occur when an individual's genetically influenced attributes elicit distinct environmental reactions from other people.

Active Gene-Environment Relations

Genotype-environment associations that occur when an individual actively seeks out, selects, and constructs environments that correspond to their genetic predispositions (niche-picking).

Stereotype Threat

The psychological burden experienced when fear of confirming a negative group stereotype induces anxiety that impairs performance or leads to disidentification and decreased task motivation.

Effect of Stereotype Threat on Performance

The empirical finding that framing a verbal task as a test of school problem ability depresses performance in stereotyped minority groups, whereas describing it as 'not a test' eliminates the performance disparity.

Phonological Decoding

The foundational ability to translate letters into their corresponding sounds and blend them together to decode words, serving as the strongest predictor of early reading proficiency.

Chall's Stages of Reading Development

A developmental progression comprising Prereading (birth to kindergarten), Reading/Decoding (grades 1–2), Fluency (grades 2–3), Reading for New Learning (grades 4–8), Multiple Viewpoints (high school), and Construction and Reconstruction (college and adulthood).