1. Hail Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

2. First Two Years: Cognitive Development Chapter 6
Human Development & Language
Slides adapted from Worth Publisher slides

3. Fact or Fiction? Fiction Fact
1. If a 5-month-old drops a rattle out of a crib, the baby probably will not look down to search for it.
2. A baby is given keys to grasp, and if the baby is teething, it will be motivated to see if these keys afford an opportunity to chew.
3. Children the world over follow the same sequence in early language development.
Instruction: Click to reveal each question, then the category.
Please note, this page is available to use with a clicker system.
4. When they first begin combining words, infants tend to put them in the correct order, as in “more juice.” 3 3

4. What happens during the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development?
sensorimotor intelligence: Piaget’s term for the way infants think—by using their senses and motor skills.
What happens in each stage of Sensorimotor Development?
Primary circular reactions
Secondary circular reactions
Tertiary circular reactions
Instruction:
In Piaget’s theory, the sensorimotor period is the first period of cognitive development.
Click to reveal more.
In Piaget’s theory, how children think changes with time and experience, and their thought processes always affect their behavior.
Sensation, perception, and cognition cycle back and forth in what Piaget called circular reactions.
Stage 1 (birth – 1 month)
Stage 3 (4 - 8 months)
Stage 5 (12 – 18 months)
Stage 2 (1 – 4 months)
Stage 4 (8 – 12 months)
Stage 6 (18 – 24 months) 4 4 4

5. Piaget’s Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence
Instruction:
Click to play a video about cognitive development of infants and Piaget’s theory.
In this video, you’ll observe infants in various stages of sensorimotor development.
What stages of sensorimotor intelligence did you observe in this video clip? What did the infants do that served as an example of each stage?
Video:
Piaget’s Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence
Piaget’s Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence 5 5

6. Primary Circular Reactions
The first of three types of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence
Involves the infant’s responses to its body
Stage 1: stage of reflexes (i.e. sucking)
Stage 2: stage of first habits (i.e. grabbing a bottle to suck it)

7. Secondary Circular Reactions
The second type of feedback loop
Involves responses to people and objects
Stage 3: making interesting events last
i.e. clapping hands when told to
Stage 4: new adaptation and anticipation
i.e. putting mother’s hands together in order to make her start playing patty-cake

8. Secondary Circular Reactions
Object permanence: the realization that objects (including people) still exist when they can no longer be seen, touched, or hear.

9. Tertiary Circular Reactions
The third type of feedback loop
Active exploration and experimentation

10. Tertiary Circular Reactions
Stage 5: new means through active experimentation
“Little scientist” active and creative exploration using trial and error
Stage 6: anticipate and solve problems by using mental combinations
Deferred Imitation: when infants copy behavior they noticed hours or days earlier

11. Sensorimotor Intelligence

12. Piaget and Modern Research
Habituation
The process of getting used to an object or event through repeated exposure to it
Evidence of habituation is loss of interest
By using habituation and then introducing a new stimulus, we can find more of what babies know and learn

13. Measuring the Brain
Brain research shows that babies can think before they can talk
Techniques Used to Study the Brain:
fMRI: used to locate neurological responses to stimuli
EEG: measures electric activity in cortex
ERP (event related potential): notes amplitude and frequency of electrical activity
PET: like fMRI but requires injection of dye

14. Information Processing
Information-processing Theory
Modeled on computer functioning
Information-processing theorists believe that a step-by-step description of the mechanisms of thought adds insight to our understanding of cognition at every age.
Input, memory, programs, calculation, output
Contrast with Piaget’s stages

15. Affordances
The environment affords opportunities for interactions with what is perceived

16. Affordances
The visual cliff was designed to provide the illusion of a sudden drop-off between one horizontal surface and another.
Mothers were able to urge their 6-month-olds to wiggle forward over the “cliff”, but 10-month-olds fearfully refused.

17. Movement and People Dynamic Perception: focuses on movement and change
Babies work to master the next motor skill
People Preference: an innate attraction to other humans
Babies recognize regular caregivers and expect certain affordances from them (i.e. comfort, food, etc.)

18. Memory
Early Memory
According to classic developmental theory, infants store no memories in their first year.
Developmentalists now agree that very young infants can remember if the following conditions are met:
Experimental conditions are similar to real life.
Motivation is high.
Special measures aid memory retrieval.

19. Reminders and Repetition
Rovee-Collier found that infants could remember after 2 weeks if they had a reminder session
any experience that helps one remember an event, thing or idea
Repeated reminders (repetition) are better than single reminders

20. Memory
reminder session: A perception experience that is intended to help a person recollect an idea, a thing, or an experience, without testing whether the person remembers it at the moment.
A baby learns that when it kicks, the mobile moves… then, as time passes, what happens?
1 week later when ribbon is attached
2 weeks later when ribbon is attached
More than 2 weeks later when ribbon is attached
After reminder session and ribbon is attached
Instruction:
Click to reveal the findings.
This experiment by Carolyn Rovee-Collier indicates that babies remember a previous experience at one week out and sometimes at two weeks out.
During a reminder session in this experiment, the babies watched the mobile move but were not tied to it or positioned in such a way that they could kick.
Many other studies have found that infant memory is fragile, but that reminders and repetition may help even 4-month-olds to remember (S.P. Johnson & Shuwairi, 2009).
After about 6 months of age, infants retain information for a longer time than younger babies, and with less training and reminding. By 1 year, many kinds of memories are apparent—for instance, a 9-month-old may watch someone play with a toy he or she has never seen before; then, if given that toy on the next day, the 9-month-old will play with the toy based on the previous day’s observation.
A day after the reminder session, babies remember to kick
Most if not all babies do not remember to kick
Most babies kick to move the mobile
Not all babies remember to kick 20 20 20

21. Aspects of Memory
Implicit Memory: remains hidden until a stimulus brings it to mind
stored via habits, emotional responses, etc.
Explicit Memory: can be recalled on demand, usually with words
consciously learned words, data & concepts

22. The Universal Sequence: From Birth through 24 Months
Newborn
2 months old
child-directed speech: The high-pitched, simplified, and repetitive way adults speak to infants.
babbling: The extended repetition of certain syllables, such as ba-ba-ba.
3 months old
6 months old
Instruction:
Child-directed speech is also called baby talk or motherese.
Babbling begins when babies are between 6 and 9 months old.
Click each image to hear milestones in language development.
Infants respond vocally to adult noises and expressions, as well as their own internal pleasures and pain—with crying, cooing, and a variety of other sounds.
They like alliteration, rhymes, repetition, rhythm, and varied pitch (Hayes & Slater, 2008; Schön et al., 2008)—like lullabies.
When parents use signs with their deaf children, at 10-months-old, the child uses about a dozen distinct repetitive hand gestures, as if babbling—and all babies express concepts with gestures sooner than with speech (Goldin-Meadow, 2006). 22 22 22

23. The Universal Sequence: From 9 Months through 24 Months
9 months old
12 months old
holophrase: A single word that is used to express a complete, meaningful thought. (For example: “Dada!”)
naming explosion: A sudden increase in an infant’s vocabulary, especially in the number of nouns, which begins at about 18 months of age.
18 months old
24 months old
Instruction:
Click each image to hear milestones in language development.
At around the one-year mark, babies are no longer just singing and talking to themselves (as in babbling) but communicating in language.
Once they reach a vocabulary of about 50 expressed, words (understood words are far more extensive), it builds rapidly, at a rate of 50 to 100 words per month, with 21-month-olds saying twice as many words as 18-month-olds (Adamson & Bakeman, 2006).
Although all new talkers say names, use similar sounds, and say more nouns that any other part of speech, the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives varies from culture to culture. 23 23 23 23

24. First Words At about 1 year, babies speak a few words.
Spoken vocabulary increases gradually (about one or two new words a week).
Holophrase- A single word that is used to express a complete, meaningful thought.
All new talkers say names and utter holophrases.

25. First Words
Naming explosion- A sudden increase in an infant’s vocabulary, especially in the number of nouns, that begins at about 18 months of age.
After 50 expressed words, vocabulary builds at a rate of words a month.

26. Cultural Differences
Some cultures do not value verbal fluency so speak to their children less
Infants differ in their use of various parts of speech, depending on the language they are learning
e.g. more nouns and fewer verbs.

27. Language comprehension before speech.

28. Putting Words Together
Grammar includes all the devices by which words communicate meaning: sequence, prefixes, suffixes, intonation, loudness, verb forms, pronouns, negations, prepositions, and articles.
Worldwide, people who are not yet 2 years old already use language well.

29. Theories of Language Learning
Theory One: Infants Need to Be Taught
B. F. Skinner (1957) noticed that spontaneous babbling is usually reinforced.
Parents are expert teachers.
Frequent repetition of words is instructive, especially when linked to daily life.
Well-taught infants become well-spoken children.

30. Theories of Language Learning
Theory Two: Social-pragmatic
Infants communicate in every way they can because humans are social beings.
Early communication focuses on the emotional messages of speech and not the words

31. Theories of Language Learning
Theory Three: Infants Teach Themselves
Language acquisition device (LAD)- Chomsky’s term for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language, including the basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation.

32. Theories of Language Learning
A Hybrid Theory:
Some aspects of language may be explained by one theory at one age and another theory at another age
How language is learned depends on the age of the child as well as on the particular circumstances