LANGUAGE ~ SOCIAL Development

Why Study Development? “One great blooming, buzzing confusion” – William James The child is the father of the man To understand human cognition, start at the beginning

Themes of Developmental Psych Themes to keep in mind throughout material  Nature vs. Nurture  Nativist vs. Empiricist Models of Development  No development (little adults)  Maturation  Readiness  Stages  Waves  Critical periods

Side note: How do you test infants? Habituation  Procedure: Expose baby to stimulus until he/she no longer attends at it  Test: Introduce new stimulus  If baby looks longer at new image, it’s perceived as new.

Language Humans have it (almost ubiquitously), animals don’t Incredibly difficult to learn  Speech sounds are highly variable:  different speakers  different rates  different genders  accents  different intonation patterns  Speech stream is continuous: the “segmentation problem”

Language Children develop language fast and effortlessly 1 year: 1 word 2 years: 300 words 3 years: 1000 words 4 years: 5000 words 5 years: words 18 years: words

Critical Period? Sometime between age 5 and puberty, language acquisition becomes much more difficult  “Wild Children” (such as Genie) have difficult time acquiring language in adolescence  Congenitally deaf children of hearing parents not exposed to sign language show increased impairments with age  Language capabilities of bilingual adults who acquired their second language at different ages

Critical Period? Performance on a test of English grammar by adults originally from Korea and China was directly related to the age at which they came to the United States and were exposed to English The scores of adults who emigrated before the age of 7 are indistinguishable from those of native English speakers

Language Development Skinner (Behaviorism) – stimulus/response model of language Noam Chomsky – “Skinner’s work can be regarded, in effect, as a reductio ad absurdum of behaviorist assumptions”  Endless new combinations of words  Children learn rapidly without formal instruction  “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”

Innateness of Language? Chomsky’s Solution  Universal Grammar: all natural languages share a common structure that arises from the way our brain is designed to construct and process language. We have evolved specialized mechanisms for language because communication is advantageous Problem - “Universal” structure could come from the constraints of the environment and communicative needs

Arguments for Innateness Fast mapping / mutual exclusivity

Whole object assumption “GAVAGAI”

Arguments for Innateness Dedicated brain regions – Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas  Damage to Broca’s area, near the motor cortex, is associated with difficulties in producing speech  Damage to Wernicke’s area, which is near the auditory cortex, is linked to difficulties with meaning FOXP2 gene

General Mechanisms We evolved general cognitive/social mechanisms that support the development of language  Mechanisms not specific to language  Language is the byproduct of genetic traits being selected for Word learning constraints – could be result of cognitive constraints

General Mechanisms Statistical Learning pre-tty-ba-by ~93% < 5 %

General Mechanisms How quickly could you pick out a word from a stream of speech like the one shown here? It takes 8-month- old infants only 2 minutes

Social word learning - That’s a blicket! Wow, a blicket!” Children only assigned the word “blicket” to a toy if the speaker is looking at the toy

Alternative explanation for brain localization – Interactive Specialization (Mark Johnson)  Brain regions become specialized through the dynamic interplay between between input and systems  Congenitally blind children show language activation in visual areas and not in typical language areas till much later (Rebecca Saxe)

Social Development Standing on the shoulders of giants

Social Development Vygotsky  Children are social beings, intertwined with other people who are eager to help them gain skills and understanding  Humans are seen as unique because of their inclination to teach each other and to learn from each other  Cognitive development occurs in social interactions  Zone of Proximal Development

Social Development Tomasello “most, if not all, of the species-unique cognitive skills of human beings are not due to a unique biological inheritance directly, but rather result from a variety of historical and ontogenetic processes that are set into motion by the one uniquely human, biologically, inherited, cognitive capacity” Ratchet Effect – knowledge shared and built upon

Imitation Blind imitation – mimicked behavior Imitation proper – imitated behavior with attention to outcome (goal of behavior) Goal emulation – imitation with the completion of unfulfilled goal

Imitation of use for novel objects (Meltzoff)  Imitation proper – by 14 months – infants repeat action of touching forehead to a box until it lights up (understand the goal of imitated action)  Goal emulation – by 18 months infants are completing the attempted action of adults

Evidence for understanding goals by 5-7 months

Theory of Mind – the understanding that we have a mind (intentions, desires, knowledge, beliefs) and that other people have a mind of their own (2-5 yrs)

Attachment: infant forms a relationship with caregiver and uses them as a secure base to explore the world  Ainsworth: Strange situation

Social referencing – Children look to social partners for guidance about how to respond to unfamiliar events (visual cliff example) social referencing