Developmental Psychology: Unit 2 (Cognition & Language Development

Piagetian Theory

thinking/cognition/higher order thinking develops through physical interactions that the child has with the world around them; though arises from action; Constructivist

Scheme/Schema

basic pattern of action/thought/knowledge that is used to interact with the world around them (the environment)

Assimilation

keeping a schema intact; using schema to understand the world

Accomodation

modifying a schema to match information & experiences

Stage Concept

discontinuous development (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational)

Equilibration

the process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding

Sensorimotor Period

(0-2 yrs) composed of 6 substages; overall crowning achievement is mental representation

Reflective Schemes/Actions

(0-1mo); innate actions that children have that they are born with; the way the child is interacting with the environment

Primary Circular Reactions

(1-4 mo);  reflex schemas becoming more complex & child gains ability to coordinate them; putting together movements directed towards their own body 

• Centered around the infant’s body

• Response stimulates own repetition 

Secondary Circular Reactions

(4-8 mo); children’s movements directed to environment (ie. playing with mobile)

• Centered around the environment

• Concerned with outcome

• Schemes are not learned (accidental)

• No attempt to search for hidden objects (no object permanence) 

Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions

• Intentionality begins

• Understands that actions have effects (physical causality)

• Can solve problems by putting actions together (e.g., uncover, grapes)

• Will look for hidden objects only where they were once successful 

Tertiary Circular Reaction

• Experimental, deliberately vary action to discover outcomes

• Follows displacement of object 

Mental Representation

• Choose one action to produce desired outcome

• Object permanence & deferred imitation achieved 

Preoperational Period

(2-7 yrs); Abilities —> increases in mental representations (make believe play, symbol-real world relations, categorical categorization); Limitations —> children’s thinking is unidimensional, unsystematic, illogical, and perception bound (unable to decenter; egocentrism), animalistic thinking

Concrete Operational Period

(7-11yrs); freed from being perception bound (stability of identity, compensation, reversibility, operational thinking); logical, flexible, organized thinking; Limitations —> works best with concrete information not hypotheticals

Formal Operational Period

critical thinking (“little scientists”); thinking becomes abstract, systematic, & scientific; hypothetic-deductive reasoning: solving problem systematically + hypothesis development

Interpsychological

(between minds): social interaction that child has with others (any skill will first appear in social interactions/contexts)

Intrapsychological

(within mind): within the child (child doing the skill by themselves)

Scaffolding

People with greater expertise organize the physical and social environment to help children learn

Zone of Proximal Development

doing tasks only with the assistance of others (ex. in the zone —> learning —> internalizes activity —> child uses skill in other unfamiliar contexts)

Internalization

Decontextualization

Piaget’s perspective on language

Language is a product of cognition (ie. to learn the word, “ball”, you first need to have the concept of what a ball is)

Vygotsky’s perspective on language

Language is a tool to get things done; mediator of development (ie. children organize their thoughts outlaid)

Information Processing Approach

Human mind is a symbol manipulating system that extracts information from environment & transforms it in a way for our minds to understand it.

Basic Store Model

How humans experience/store information from environment; includes Sensory Register (stores sensory information briefly), Short-Term Memory (limited capacity & attention-based), Long-Term Memory (unlimited capacity)

Central Executive

part of the system (IPA) that manages operations; tells systems how it should behave

Working Memory

tells system how it should behave (central executives) & short term memory combined

Executive Functioning

set of cognitive operation and strategies that control self-initiated and goal-directed behavior

Gross Motor Skills

Dynamic systems approach that involve CNS, muscles, sensory mechanism, environmental supports, cognition, etc;

• Posture & Locomotion:

  • Head control [~6 weeks] → rolling → sitting → (belly) crawling → creeping → hitching → standing → walking [~12 mo] → running → climbing → jumping 

Fine Motor Skills

• Eye-hand coordination (reaching); visually directed/guided reaching → Object manipulation (grasping) → Hand preference → Throwing & catching → Self-care & writing

Classical Conditioning

associating neutral environmental cues with biological reflexes

Operant Conditioning

Discovering direct cause-and-effect agency (“my physical actions cause x result”)

• Reinforcer & Punishment

• Behaviors that children are engaging in are voluntary and have an effect on the world

Active Learning

Hands-on physical experimentation to discover spatial/physical properties (“little scientists”)

• Similar to Piaget’s tertiary circular reactions

Statistical Learning

• Implicit pattern tracking for word segmentation in speech and visual scene mapping

Observational Learning

• Social copying, cultural tool acquisition, and understanding goal-directed actions 

  • Imitation: physical → more social 

  • Essential mechanism for cultural learning & social bonding 

Phonology

• Sound system

  • Phoneme: smallest sound unit that helps differentiate meaning (children learn this very early on)

Morphology & Morphemes

• Morphology (morphemes): smallest unit of language that carries meaning

  • Free morpheme: small units of language that can carry meaning on their own (words)

  • Bound morpheme: small units that carry meaning but can’t stand on their own

Syntax

Rules of how your put words together 

Semantics

• System of language that’s focused on meaning (closest area to psychology) 

  • Lexicon & Concepts

Noam Chomsky’s approach to studying language

Children come into world with innate linguistic knowledge (in Language Acquisition Device LAD → universal grammar (UG) & parameters (switches; like gene expression)

• Nativist/innatist perspective 

Jerry Bruner’s approach to studying language

Language is something that children use to communicate with others → we construct reality through language

• Interactionist: 

  • Children’s linguistic knowledge is learned/input based

  • Grammar emerges from everyday use of language

Sensitive/Critical period of language learning

Contentious; idea that there is some period (~2-7yr?) that is ideal of language acquisition (critical period indicates that after a certain point in development, language acquisition cannot be done in the same way as it does in early childhood)

Process of language development

• Breaking into the speech stream

• Development of a lexical base (12 mo –)

• Developing grammatical knowledge (18 mo –) *according to Nativists, when LAD kicks in

Vocabulary Spurt

Time in children’s development where rate of acquisition of words spikes; mixed findings

Expressive Style

Children that learn phrases and apply them in social contexts

Referential Style

Children that learn isolated words (large vocabularies)

Underextensions

Word being used to refer to a subset of adult meaning/references

Overextensions

Word to refer to a larger subset of adult meanings/references

Fast Mapping

Children need minimal exposure to a word to be able to assign some meaning to it 

Syntactic Bootstrapping

Using position of words in a sentence to extrapolate meaning (using grammatical context clues)

Overregularizations

Using a morpheme in the context where it shouldn’t be used; very similar to overextension but demonstrates new knowledge formed 

Semantic Bootstrapping

Using the meaning of a word to know where to put it in a sentence (using meaning to learn grammar) 

Language Making Capacity (LMC)

The nature of the learning mechanism that supports children’s language acquisition is cognitive (i.e. paying attention to how some things go grammatically)

Role of Input

Ways that parents talk to their children → important for all areas of grammatical language development

Habituation

Sensory filtering; ignoring familiar baseline stimuli to prevent sensory overload —> support future learning

• indication of cognitive development: how fast kids lose interest & how fast they recognize

Pragmatics

How you use language in social context