Psych Developmental Exam 2 (copy)

Comprehension

understanding what others say (or sign or write)

Production

which refers to speaking (or signing or writing)

Components of language

Pieces combine at different levels to form a hierarchy: sounds become words, words become sentences, and sentences become stories and conversations.

Generative

using a finite set of words and our knowledge of the systematic ways in which those words can combine, we can generate sentences and ideas

Phonemes

the smalles usit of sound that creates differences in meaning - e.g., hat vs car; the two phonemes h/ and c/
Infants can hear all phonemes in the first month of life

Syntax

refers to the permissible combinations of words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc). The order in which words appear is important

Pragmatics

the understanding of how language is typically used in a specific cultural

What is required for language?

The human brain; but a single human, isolated from all resources of linguistic experience, could never learn language: exposure is a crucial ingredient for successful language development

A human brain

they key to language development lies in the brain

Brain-language lateralization

for the 90% of people who are right handed, language is primarily represented and controlled by the left hemisphere. Left hemisphere specialization for most aspects of language emerges very early in life

Sensitive period for language development

period during which languages are learned relatively quickly. After this period (which ends sometime between age 5 and puberty), language acquisition outcomes become more variable and, on average, less successful

A human environment

possession of a human brain is not enough for language to develop. Children must be also exposed to other people using language- any language, signed or spoken

Infant directed speech-

the idea that adults adopt a distinctive mode of speech when talking to babbies and toddlers

The process of language acquisition

infants start out paying attention to what people say or sign, and they know a great deal about language long before their first linguistic productions

Speech perception

The first step in language learning is figuring out the sounds of one's native language. Speech perception also involves determining which differences between sounds are important and which can be ignored.

Prosody

the characteristic rhythmic and intonation patterns with which a language is spoken

Categorical perception of phonemes

Both adults and infants perceive speech sounds as belonging to categories. This phenomenon, referred to as categorical perception, has been established by studying people's response to speech sounds.
- In this research listeners hear a speech sound that gradually changes from one phoneme, such as /b/, into a related one /p/. These two phonemes are produced the exact same way except the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start to vibrate

Developmental changes in speech perception

Infants increasingly home in on the speech sounds of their native language, and by 12 months of age, they become less sensitive to the differences between nonnative speech sounds.

Perceptual narrowing of phonemes to native language

• Babies born to English- speaking parents, listen to phonemes within an unfamiliar language (Hindi)

• Can hear the difference between phonemes not used in English at 6 months, but lose this ability by 10-12 months

Word segmentation

Infants have to figure out where the spoken words start and end (in terms of sentences). They begin this process of word segmentation during the second half of the first year.

Distributional properties of speech

sounds that are part of the same word are more likely to occur together than are others

reparation for production

Newborns' repertoire of sounds is extremely limited: they cry, sneeze, sigh,burp, and smack their lips. At about 6 to 8 weeks of age, infants begin to coo —producing drawn-out vowel sounds, such as "ooohh" or "aaahh." They click, smack, blow raspberries, squeal—all with apparent fascination and delight. Through this practice, infants gain motor control over their vocalizations. While their sound repertoire is expanding, infants become increasingly aware that their vocalizations elicit responses from others, and they begin to engage in dialogues of reciprocal cooing with their caregivers. Indeed, infants with more responsive caregivers are more likely to use more mature vocalization patterns

Babbling

begins between 6 and 10 months of age (on average around 7 months). They produce strings of consonant - vowel syllables "papapa" drawn from fairly limited set of sounds

Early interactions

In a conversation, mature participants alternate between speaking and listening. Learning to take turns in social interactions is facilitated by parent-infant games, such as peekaboo and "give and take," in which caregiver and baby take turns giving and receiving objects. The infant has the opportunity to play an active and passive role in the conversation.

Intersubjectivity

two interacting partners share a mutual understanding

Joint attention

the caregiver follows the baby's lead, looking at and commenting on whatever the infant is looking at.

First words

to learn first words infants must map sounds (or signs) into meanings.

Early word recognition

Infants begin to understand highly frequent words. When 6 months old hear either "mommy" or "daddy", they look toward an image of the appropriate person

Early word production

first word. Infants produce first words between 10 and 16 months of age, but these early words are mispronounced in a variety of predictable ways.

Overextension

using a word in a broader contect than is appropriate. Eg., a child using dog for any 4 leg animal

under extension

using a word in a more limited context than appropriate. Eg., dog refers to only the child's dog

Word learning

after producing their first words, children typically plod ahead slowly, reaching a productive vocab of 50 or so words by 18 months of age •
- 18-month spurt- at 18 months the rate of learning appears to accelerate, leading to a vocab spurt

Whole-object bias-

children expect a novel word to refer to a whole object rather than to a part, property, action, or other aspect of the object

Mutual exclusivity

children expect that a given entity will have only one name

Pragmatic cues

paying attention to the social context in which the words are used

Cross-situational word learning

determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels and meanings across scenes and contexts

Syntactic bootstrapping

children also figure out the meanings of new words by using the grammatical structure of the sentences in which those words occur

First sentences

most children begin to combine words into simple sentences by the end of their second year.
- Young children understand word combinations much earlier than when they can produce them

Telegraphic speech

short utterances that leace out non-essential words

Grammar

a tool for building new words and sentences

Wug experiment

• Pre-schoolers were shown a picture of a made-up animal, which was referred to as "a wug"

• Then the children were shown a picture of two of the creatures and the experinenter said "Here are two of them, what are they"

• Children as young as 4 readily answered "wugs"

• Showed that children didnt have to be familiarized with a term to generalize the English plural

Overregularization

with irregular plural words like man → men. Children treat irregularm forms as if they were regular

Conversational skills

Young children are eager to participate in conversations, their conversational skills lag well behind their burgeoning language skills. For one thing, their speech is often directed to themselves, rather than to another person.

Collective monologues

when young children converse with other children, their conversations tend to be egocentric. Piaget labeled young children's talk with their peers as collective monologues

Narratives

descriptions of past events that have the form of a story

Speaker's goals and beliefs

The development of conversational perspective-taking ability is related to children's level of executive function; as children become more able to control their tendency to assume their own perspective, it becomes easier for them to take the perspective of a conversational partner.

Cultural norms of conversation

In tasks that require participants to take the experimenter's perspective, infants and young children who are monolingual perform worse than those who are bilingual—and also worse than those who, while not bilingual themselves, live in multilingual environments

• Bilingual children are also better at adapting to the needs of their communication partner than monolingual children

• Living in a diverse linguistic environment may attune children to the challenges of communication—and the need to take others' perspective in order to effectively communicate—in a way that monolingual environments do not.

Later development

While children continue to develop their language skills beyond the ages of 5 or 6 years, this later development is less dramatic than in the early years of life. For example, the ability to sustain a conversation, which grows so dramatically in the preschool years, continues to improve into adulthood.

Nicaraguan sign language

• Completely new language that has been evolving over the past 40 years

• An education program brought hundreds of deaf children together in two schools in the city of Managua

• For most of the children it was their first exposure to other deaf people

• Teachers didnt know formal sign language and neither did the children, only simple home signs used to communicate with their families

• Children began to build on each others existing informal signs, constructing a relatively crude, limited sign language

• What happened next was astonishing. As younger students entered the schools, they rapidly mastered the rudimentary system used by the older students and then gradually transformed it into a complex, fully consistent language (NSL)

Theoretical issues in language development o Chomsky and the nativist view

• In 1957 reviewed Verbal Behavior -Simple associations can't explain word learning

• We know rules for combining words that dont seem to be learned -Children do not get good language input from other people- the stimulus (input) is poor

• We must have some innate capacity to organize language in order to learn it

Universal grammar

a hard set of principles and ruled that govern grammar in all language

Empiricist / Behaviorist view of language development

-Book: Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner -We learn a language the way we learn everything (according to behaviorists) B.F. Skinner

• Associate words with things

• Hear phrases, repeat them, get corrected

• Only need basic learning mechanisms

• Same as rats & pigeons, just more neurons

Ongoing debates in language development

Theories must explain how language users are able to generalize byond the specific words or sentences they have been exposed to .

• The ways in which various accounts handle these facts differ along two key dimednsions:

• The first dimension is the degree to which these explanations lie within the child (nature) versus within the environment (nurture). The second dimension pertains to the child's contributions: Did the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language learning evolve solely to support language learning (domain specific), or are they used for learning many different kinds of things (domain general)?

o Box 6.4 - "I just can't talk without my hands"

using gestures while you speak.

• Infants often produce recognizable, meaningful gestures before they speak recognizable words

• Infants who gestures more have larger vocabularies when measured months or even years

Nonlinguistic symbols and development

Anything can serve as a symbol so long as it stands for something other than itself. For eg., printed words, numbers, graphs,, pictures and drawings
- Symbolic proficiency involves both the mastery of the symbolic creations of others and the creation of new symbolic representations

Using symbols as information

The primary function of many symbols is to provide useful information. E.g., a map- can be crucial for lactating a particular place

Dual representation

the symbolic artifact must be represented mentally in two ways at the same time, as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself

Drawing and writing

when young children first start making marks on paper, their focus is almost exclusively on the activity, with no attempt to produce recognizable images

• By age 3 / 4 most children begin trying to draw pictures of something § Development of drawing people

• By age 4 children understand a key difference between writing and drawing, namely that written words correspond to specific spoken words, whereas drawing can correspond to many different words

Dividing objects into categories

forming broad divisions for inanimate objects, people, and other animals allowing children to draw accurate inferences about unfamiliar entities.

Perceptual categorization

the grouping together of objects that have similar appearances

Category hierarchies

a category that is organized by set-subset relations, such as animal/dog/poodle

Superordinate level

the general level within a category hierarchy; ex: within animal/dog/poodle, animal would be the superordinate level

Subordinate level

the most specific level within category hierarchy, ex: within animal/dog/poodle, poodle would be the superordinate level

Basic level

the middle level, and often the first level learned, within a category hierarchy; ex: within animal/dog/poodle, dog would be the superordinate level

Causal understanding and categorization:

infants have a rudimentary understanding of causal interactions among objects, such as interactions involving gravity, inertia, and support, and this understanding increases gradually during their first year

Naïve psychology in infancy

commonsense level of understanding of other people and oneself, children are born with a basic understanding of human psychology

Understanding other people

infants in their first year find other people interesting, pay careful attention to them, and learn an impressive amount about them.

Hand vs stick study (Woodward, 1998)

Infants were habituated to the event shown in, a hand repeatedly reaching for a ball on one side of a display. When tested later with displays, infants who saw the hand reach for the other object looked longer than those who saw it reach for the ball (regardless of the ball's position). The pattern of results indicates that the babies interpreted the original reaching as object-directed.

Understanding differences between people

infants understand individual differences among people, as reflected in how they at least partially base preferences among people on the people's actions and characteristics

Good and bad intentions (helper / hinderer study)

In one study using cartoons, Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) presented 10-month-olds with a video showing a ball, a cube, and a pyramid, all with "googly" eyes. To adults, at least, the ball appeared to be trying repeatedly to reach the top of a hill, each time falling back to the bottom. Then, the ball either appeared to be helped toward the crest by the pyramid "pushing" it upward or hindered from reaching the peak by the cube "pushing" it downward. Soon after, infants were shown all three objects and observed the ball either approach the previously "helpful" pyramid or the previously "unhelpful" cube. Infants looked longer when the ball approached the cube that had hindered its progress, presumably indicating not only their understanding of the "intentions" of the objects but also their surprise that the ball seemed to prefer the "hinderer" to the "helper."

Naïve psychology beyond the first year

Several important aspects of psychological understand emerge in the second year and includes insight to their emotions:
sense of self, joint attention, and intersubjectivity

Sense of self

children more explicitly realize that they are individuals distinct from other people

Joint attention

two or more people focus intentionally on the same referent

​​Intersubjectivity

the mutual understanding that people share during communication

Theory of mind:

an organized understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behavior

False beliefs: Smarties task, Sally-Ann experiment

tasks that test a child's understanding that other people will act in accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect

Pretend play

make-believe activities in which children create new symbolic relations, acting as if they were in a situation different from their actual one

Object substitution

a form of pretense in which an object is used as something other than itself, for example, using a broom to represent a horse

Sociodramatic play

activities in which children enact miniature dramas with other children or adults, such as "mother comforting baby"

Essentialism

the view that living things have an essence inside them that makes them what they are

How do children acquire biological knowledge

• During earlier periods of our evolution, it was crucial for human survival that children learn quickly about animals and plants.

• Children throughout the world are fascinated by plants and animals and learn about them quickly and easily.

• Children throughout the world organize information about plants and animals in very similar ways (in terms of growth, reproduction, inheritance, illness, and healing)

Causality

• Causal reasoning in infancy

• Blicket detector experiment

• Causal reasoning during the preschool period

Egocentric spatial representations

encodes the object's position relative to one's body (object-to-self relation), such as “the toy is on my left";

Allocentric spatial representations:

**encodes the object’s position relative to external environment (object-to-object relation), such as “the toy is beside the desk"**

Two basic number systems

small and large numbers

Numerical equality

the realization that all sets of N objects have something in common

Adding, subtracting dolls experiment (Wynn, 1992)

evidence of infant knowledge of arithmetic :

A 5-month-old sees a doll on a stage. A screen comes up, hiding the doll from the infant’s sight. Next, the infant sees a hand place a second doll behind the screen and then sees the hand emerge from behind the screen without the doll, thus seeming to have left the second doll with the first one. Finally, the screen drops down, revealing either one doll or two. Most 5-month-olds look longer when there is only one doll, suggesting that they expected that 1 + 1 should equal 2 and that they were surprised when they saw only a single object. Similar results are seen with subtraction: 5-month-olds look longer when the apparent removal of one of two objects results in two objects being present than when the removal results in one object being there

cardinality

the number of objects in the set corresponds to the last number stated. 

Still face experiment

Mother and infant, around 4 months. Experimental group: first mother must interact with their child normally but then told to maintain a neutral expression, not talking or touching- keep a “still face.” Shows how distressed infant becomes when mother does not interact with them

Watson’s behaviorism

child is shaped entirely by their environment and social interactions provide positive and negative reinforcement to behavior

 **Little Albert test**

baby, “Little Albert”,  was introduced to a white bunny; each time the baby approached the bunny; a loud clang occurred, soon he became fearful of the white bunny and anything white and furry

 Intermittent reinforcement

inconsistent response to a behavior; for example, sometimes punishing unacceptable behaviors, and other times ignoring it

Bandura, Bobo the doll study

Bandura argued that most human learning is inherently social in nature and is based on the observation of the behavior of other people; the Bobo the doll study

Bobo Doll Experiment: vicarious reinforcement

Bobo doll experiment where researchers had preschool children watch a short film where an adult was highly aggressive towards a Bobo Doll, the adult punched the doll and performed other acts towards it. Three groups of children observed the adult receive different consequences; one group saw the adult receive praise, another saw the adult be punished, the last group saw the adult receive no consequences. Researchers wondered if vicarious reinforcement would play a role in how children would reproduce the behavior. Children who saw the adult punished imitated the behavior less than those in the other two groups. Children in all conditions learned from observing the adult’s behavior and remembered what they had seen. Also, boys were more physically aggressive toward the dolls than girls were. 

Vicarious Reinforcement

observing someone else receive a reward or punishment

 Reciprocal determinism

child-environment influences operate in both directions; children are both affected by and influence aspects of their environment

Self-socialization

active process during development whereby children’s cognitions lead them to perceive the world and to act in accord with their expectations and beliefs, through their activity preferences, friendship, and so on

Hostile attributional bias

a general expectation that others are antagonistic to them

**Achievement motivations: Learning vs performance goals**

Learning to actually master a concept vs. Only doing work for recognition 

Entity vs Incremental theories of intelligence

Entity: belief that abilities are fixed and cannot change, when one fails they feel helpless and don’t believe they can improve; performance goals, only doing it for credit/recognition vs. Incremental: belief that abilities are learned and can change through effort, when one fails they feel as though they can improve with hard work; learning goals, learn to actually gain knowledge