The Develop ment of Thought and Languag e Chapter 11 Thought & Language Chapter 10

The Infant As Explorer  Look selectively at novel objects  Habituation  Seek to control their environments  Babies delight more in objects they can control than in objects they can’t control  Explore increasingly with hands and eyes together  Use social cues to guide their exploration  Social Referencing

Infant’s Knowledge of Core Physical Properties  Babies also look longer at unexpected events than at expected ones  Violation-of-expectancy experiment  Infants looked longer at the impossible event rather than the possible event

Infant’s Knowledge of Core Physical Properties  OBJECT PERMANENCE: understanding that an object still exists even when it is out of view  Piaget’s simple hiding problem  Problem solved after 5 months of age

Piaget’s Theory  Mental development derives from the child’s own actions on the physical environment Mental entities that provide the basis for thought and that change in a stage-like way through development SCHEME Process by which experiences are incorporated into the mind or, more specifically, into mental schemes ASSIMILATION Change that occurs in an existing mental scheme or set of schemes as a result of the assimilation of the experience of a new event or object ACCOMODATION

Four Types of Schemes

Test of Conservation of Substance

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory  Cognitive development is fueled by social interaction  Social  Individual  ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT: the range or set of activities that a child can do in collaboration with more competent others but cannot yet do alone  Child as apprentice

An Information-Processing Perspective  Attempts to explain children’s mental development in terms of operational changes in basic components of their mental machinery

An Information-Processing Perspective  Infants demonstrate implicit memory long before they can exhibit explicit memory (2 months old)  Semantic memories: months old  Episodic memories: 3-4 years of age  Amount of information held in working memory increases throughout childhood and plateaus at about age 15  Also associated with increased speed of processing

Some Universal Characteristics of Human Language MORPHEMES The smallest meaningful units of a verbal language (dog, dogs, antidisestablishmentarianism) CONTENT MORPHEMES nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES articles, conjunctions, prepositions, prefixes, suffixes PHONEMES The various vowel and consonant sounds that provide the basis for spoken language

The Hierarchical Structure of Language  GRAMMAR: entire set of rules that specify the permissible ways that smaller units can be arranged  Phonology: arrange phonemes to produce morphemes  Morphology: arrange morphemes to produce words  SYNTAX: set of grammatical rules that specifies how words can be arranged to produce phrases and sentences

The Course of Language Development  We have an innate ability to hear and understand spoken language, which increases the rate we learn language  Cooing: repeated vowel sounds  Babbling: repeated consonant-and- vowel sounds

The Course of Language Development  Infants understand the meanings of word before they can accurately reproduce them  Rate of learning new words accelerates at months of age  Overextension  Overgeneralization (2yrs –ed means past tense)

The Idea of Special Inborn Mechanisms for Language Learning  Noam Chomsky  Grammatical rules as fundamental properties of the human mind (universal grammar)  LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD): special, innate characteristics of the human mind that allow children to learn their native language

The Language Acquisition Support System  LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION SUPPORT SYSTEM (LASS): refers to the simplification of language and the use of gestures that occur when parents or other language users speak to young children, which help them learn language (motherese)