Notes: The First Two Years (Cognitive & Language Development)

An Innate Desire to Learn

  • Infant brain has inborn readiness to learn; an innate drive to explore and make sense of the world.
  • Perception biases & attentional patterns show this readiness:
    • § Gaze-following: infants tend to follow where others are looking, scaffolding joint attention.
    • § Caregiver gaze following instinctively without cues: infants align their attention with caregiver cues to learn about objects and events.

Early Logic and Intuition about the Physical World

  • § Infants possess some innate logic about how the world works (baby physics).
    • Infants look longer at and explore impossible scenes, indicating expectations about physical events.
    • § Impossible events violate infants’ expectations (Baillargeon, 2016).
  • § Baby math capabilities inferred from Wynn studies:
    • Karen Wynn (1992, 2000, 2008) showed 5-month-olds numbers with one or two objects.
    • Objects are hidden behind a screen and then one is visibly removed or added.
    • When the screen is lifted, infants sometimes double-take and stare longer if the number of objects is wrong, suggesting an expectation about numerosity.

The Eager Mind

  • § Infant memory:
    • Implicit memory is evident by 3 months and begins to stabilize by 9 months; continues across the lifespan.
    • Explicit memory is more language-dependent and takes longer to emerge.
    • § Rovee-Collier’s mobile kicking research demonstrated early memory and learning in infancy.

Learning How to Learn

  • Implicit learning strategies are learned early in life.
  • Learning can be effortful or easy, and infants display goal-directed problem solving even with new toys.
  • Example setups (toy tasks) illustrate progression from baseline effort to successful solution:
    • Toy 1: Container with toy inside
    • Toy 2: Carabiner with keychain
    • Toy 3: Music toy
  • Across demonstrations, infants show:
    • Effortful problem solving when needed
    • Gradual improvement and persistence over time
  • These early learning patterns suggest that learning mechanisms become more efficient with practice and context.

Cognitive Development in Infancy & Childhood

  • § Cognitive development refers to how we come to think, know, remember, and communicate.
  • § Jean Piaget:
    • Observed age-related similarities in problem-solving strengths and deficits across children.
    • Proposed that the mind develops through a series of universal, irreversible stages—from simple reflexes to abstract reasoning.

Basic Assumptions of Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

  • n Babies (and children) are active learners who construct meaning.
  • n Children construct knowledge by interacting with their physical and social environments (experience).
  • n Their maturing brains build schemas that are used and adjusted through assimilation and accommodation.
  • n The primary motivation for learning is to reach equilibrium.
  • n Children think in qualitatively different ways at different ages.

Theory of Cognitive Development: Core Processes

  • We compare new information with our schemas through two processes:
    • § Assimilation: when new information is consistent with an existing schema.
    • § Accommodation: when new information is inconsistent, we modify the existing schema.
  • When there is harmony between thoughts and environments we experience
    • § Equilibrium (balance) as a central motivator.
  • Core idea: learning involves moving between assimilation and accommodation to maintain equilibrium.

Disequilibrium, Adaptation, Organization, Equilibration

  • Key concepts in Piagetian theory:
    • § Disequilibrium prompts adaptation (assimilation + accommodation).
    • § Organization is the mind’s tendency to integrate knowledge into coherent systems.
    • § Equilibration is the drive toward balance between cognitive schemes and environmental demands.

Stages of Cognitive Development

  • Piaget proposed four stages:
    • n Sensorimotor stage
    • n Preoperational stage
    • n Concrete operational stage
    • n Formal operational stage
  • Each stage is hierarchically organized and qualitatively different from the others.

Piaget's Sensorimotor Intelligence

  • § Senses and motor skills are the raw materials for infant cognition.
  • § Interplay of sensation, perception, action, and cognition occurs in six stages within three circular reactions.
  • § There is no beginning or end to learning; experience leads to the next stage, which loops back.

Piaget's 6 Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence

  • Stage One (birth to 1 month): Primary Circular Reactions – infant’s responses to its own body
    • Reflexes: sucking, grasping, staring, listening
    • Example: sucking anything that touches the lips or cheek
  • Stage Two (1–4 months): First acquired adaptations – coordination of reflexes
    • Example: sucking a pacifier differently from a nipple or bottle
  • Stage Three (4–8 months): Secondary Circular Reactions – making interesting sights last; responding to people & objects
    • Example: clapping hands when mother says, “patty-cake”
  • Stage Four (8–12 months): New adaptations & anticipation – more deliberate when responding
    • Example: putting mother’s hands together to make her play “patty-cake”
  • Stage Five (12–18 months): Tertiary Circular Reactions – goal-directed actions and ideas; “little scientist”
    • Example: putting a teddy bear in the toilet and flushing it
  • Stage Six (18–24 months): Mental combinations – thinking before doing; goal-directed behaviors
    • Example: Pausing and removing teddy bear from toilet to avoid upsetting mom

Piaget's Sensorimotor Stages (Repeat Outline)

  • The sensorimotor stages are outlined with the same six stages above, emphasizing the progression from reflexive actions to cognitive planning.

Secondary Circular Reactions and Object Permanence

  • § Secondary circular reactions: interaction between baby and external world (beyond the infant’s body).
  • Stage Four introduces new adaptations and anticipation (means-to-end controllability).
  • § Object permanence: understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of sight.
  • Before 8 months: no search for hidden objects.
  • At 18 months: A-not-B error appears.
  • By 2 years: practical object permanence is developed.

Language Development: Universal Sequence

  • § Language development follows a universal sequence across cultures.
  • § This development begins at birth, and infants acquire much of their native language before producing their first word.

Language: The First Two Years

  • § Listening and responding
  • § Babbling
  • § Gestures
  • § First words
  • § Cultural differences influence language exposure and development
  • § Naming explosion
  • § Putting words together

Language: Listening and Responding

  • § Child-directed speech (motherese): high-pitched, simplified, repetitive speech directed at infants.
  • § Preference for human voices over other sounds.
  • § Babbling typically begins around 6–9 months.
  • § Babbling becomes gradually more like the ambient language in accents, cadence, consonants, and gestures.
  • § Babbling is universal; even deaf babies babble.

Language: Gestures and First Words

  • § Gestures are a powerful communication tool; pointing is particularly important.
  • § Baby signing may enhance responsiveness for both deaf and hearing babies.
  • § First words appear around 1 year and commonly coincide with a milestone like walking.
  • § Vocabulary growth is gradual, roughly about one new word per week.
  • § First words often become holophrases (single words that convey an entire idea).

Language: Cultural Differences

  • § Early communication transcends linguistic boundaries; human baby noises are understood across languages and experiences.
  • § Cultures differ in how much child-directed speech children hear.

Naming Explosion

  • § Once vocabulary reaches about 50 expressed words, growth accelerates rapidly at roughly 50 ext{ to }100 words per month.
  • § By 21 ext{ months}, children say about twice as many words as at 18 ext{ months}.
  • § The noun-to-verb ratio varies by place; meanings vary by language; words that are difficult to say are often simplified.

Putting Words Together

  • § Grammar emerges and includes all devices by which words communicate meaning:
    • Sequence, prefixes, suffixes, intonation, volume, verb forms, pronouns, negations, prepositions, and articles.
  • § Proficiency in grammar correlates with sentence length, measured as Mean Length of Utterance: MLU.

Theories of Language Learning

  • § Theory 1: Infants need to be taught (Behaviorist perspective)
    • B.F. Skinner (1957) observed that spontaneous babbling is reinforced; parents and caregivers teach children to speak.
    • The view: well-taught infants become well-spoken children.
  • § Theory 2: Social impulses foster language (Sociocultural perspective)
    • Infants communicate because humans are inherently social; social impulses drive language learning, not teaching alone.
    • Challenges technology-supported attempts to encourage language learning.
  • § Theory 3: Infants teach themselves (Genetic/biological programming)
    • Language learning is innate; adults do not need to teach it, nor is it merely a by-product of social interaction.
    • Noam Chomsky argues language is too complex to be learned solely by conditioning; language is experience-expectant.

Language Acquisition: Integrated Perspectives

  • § All three perspectives offer valuable insights into language development.
  • § Multiple attentional, social, and linguistic cues contribute to early language learning.
  • § Different elements of the language apparatus may have evolved in different ways.
  • § Neuroscience perspective:
    • Language arises from multiple brain regions with contributions from hundreds of genes and neural areas.
  • § Language is interrelated and complex, reflecting interactions between biology, environment, and culture.