PSYC 304 Midterm 2

Classic Narratives

Around age 6 in which children add a resolution.

Audio Listening #2

Artificial stimuli that vary across a continuum (synthesized speech and the different sounds all vary equally from the next) People may hear the switch in sounds earlier or later based on their native language.

First Words

At 6mos they understand word meanings. At 1yr, first spoken words build on sensorimotor foundations described by Piaget and on categories infants have formed. The earliest words usually include people, objects that move, foods, animals, familiar actions, outcomes of such actions, and social terms. They begin using underextensions and overextensions.

Preverbal Gestures

At the end of the 1st year, they use this to direct adults' attention, influence behavior, and convey helpful information. Using language leads to desired results and predicts faster vocabulary development over the second year. They adapt gestures to the needs of others. They pointed more often to an object whose location an adult did not know than did know.

Structural Complexity

Adding ending -ing or -s is structurally less complex than using forms of the verb "to be"

Phonological Strategies

1.5yr children move from trying to pronounce whole syllables and words to trying to pronounce each individual sound within a word. In an experiment with phoneme patterns, at first children produce minimal words and focus on stressed syllables, then pronounce the consonant-vowel combination, then add ending consonants, then adjust vowel length, and then add unstressed syllables. Errors are similar across range of languages. The rate of phonological progress depends on complexity of a language's sound system and the importance of certain sounds for conveying meaning.

Topal Et Al's A-Not-B Experiment

10mos Ostensive Communicative Condition (OC): The experimenter is socially engaged with the child in normal interaction. Cues -> They induce the kid to extract general knowledge about where the object is most likely going to be found. Non-Communicative Condition (NC): The experimenter is at an angle, not facing the child; there is no interaction. Non-Social Condition (NS) : The experimenter is behind a curtain and the only object movement and hiding is seen by the kid. Results: There is a higher error rate in the OC condition than in the two other conditions. Conclusion: Piaget's A-Not-B Error is not true proven by the results in conditions OC v NC. Furthermore, condition NS shows that kids can search in B, if we change the social context.

Baillargeon and the Use of Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies: Unveiling Phenomena

12.5mos are able to reason about the size of protuberance only qualitatively. 13.5mos no longer have difficulty representing absolute size of the protuberance and comparing it with that of each dog.

Swingley/Aslin (2002)

14mos Training: They held up a picture of baby and a picture of some other object the child is familiar with (e.g. car). They say the word "baby" and see which picture the child looks at longer. Test: They are testing for small differences in sounds. They change the word to Vaby. The children still look at the baby (slightly less). Conclusion: The word sounds more like baby than car. V is on edge of the B category. When they changed the word to Raby, the children don't look at the baby. R is outside of the B category.

Language Negatives

2.5-3yrs in the following order: nonexistence - the child remarks on the absence of something rejection - the child expresses opposition to something denial - the child denies the truthfulness of something

Hermer and Spelke's Hidden Toy in Room Experiment (1996)

21mos Test: They put them in rectangular room an hid a toy in one of the corners Results: Children tend to look more at the corner on the side (left/right) that they remember the toy being in depending on what side (front/back) they're facing. They painted the wall on the correct side (front/back) blue and the results were the same, the blue wall didn't help. Children are still using the geometric form of the room, but the clue didn't help them. They did an experiment with a toy on one side or bear on the other side and a toy hidden in one of the corners, but the results remained the same. They are able to use geometric information but are really not using other types of information.

Wang Et Al's Hidden Toy in Room Experiment (1999)

21mos Test: They put the children in a plain, square room with a toy hidden in the corner. Results: They look fairly equally to any corner for the toy. They color one wall in the square room and the results don't really change. They brought the kids in the day before and trained them on the red wall and have them do the experiment the next day, leading to the same results. They trained them 2.5 hours over 3 weeks leading to same results. They put shapes extending from walls (like pillars), which does help them find the hidden toy.

Bernard Et al (2011)

24mos Test: An object is put on a platform that falls when the blue side is placed on the platform but stays when the orange side is placed on the platform (heavy). Another object stays on the platform regardless of the side. When blue stays, this is surprising. They took a pillow and showed it could be smushed down and placed each side separately on the pillow. Some kids saw orange sink and others saw blue sink. Results: They looked longer at blue sinking, they think orange is heavy. When we see which box they pick up, between orange and blue, they pick up the blue one more than the orange one. Children prefer to pick up light things to heavy things.

Language Milestones

2mos cooing - pleasant "oo" quality 4mos - infants observe with interest as the caregiver plays turn-taking games (pat-a-cake, peek-a-boo) 6mos babbling - infants repeat consonant-vowel combinations 7mos - babbling starts to include many sounds of spoken languages 8-12mos - infants become more accurate at establishing joint attention with the caregiver, who often verbally labels what they're looking at. Infants actively participate in turn-taking games, trading roles with the caregiver infants use preverbal gestures, such as showing and pointing, to influence others' goals and behaviour and to convey information. 12 mos - babbling includes sound and intonation patterns of the child's language community. Speed and accuracy of word comprehension increases rapidly. Toddlers say their first recognizable word 18-24mos - Spoken vocabulary expands from about 50-200 words. Toddlers combine two words.

Baillargeon and Devos' Ramp Displacement Experiment (1991)

3.5mos Training: There is a screen in front of the ramp and a roll. If the roll goes down the ramp, it should come out from the side of the screen. Test: If there is a screen in front of the ramp and roll and a box in the way of roll, the roll should not come out from the side in the possible event. In the impossible event, it will come out from the side. If they are trained on the ramp, they should expect the roll to come out from behind the screen. They measured the time of looking at both events. Results: Children found it surprising in the impossible event because the box was thought to still be there (but it was moved by the experimenter) The child seemed to understand depth (box in way v not in way) and the children acknowledged box's blocking ability like adults.

Interactive Games

4-6mos - Interaction between caregivers and babies begin to include give/take (pat-a-cake, peek-a-boo). At first parents start and the baby is an amused observer sensitive to structure and the timing of interactions and smiling more to organized than disorganized peek-a-boo. 12mos - they participate actively, trading roles. This is practice for the turn-taking pattern of human conversation, a vital context for acquiring language and communication skills. Play maturity and vocalizations during games predict advanced language progress in the second year.

hespos/baillargeon (2001)

4.5mos They used tall and short barriers to see what the child thinks when the object is behind each barrier. Test 1: The object was taller than the short barrier, but it disappeared when placed behind (collapsable object). The child looks longer, showing they notice the difference in height. Test 2: They used containers that are analogous to barriers with different set of kids. The object always vanishes inside (compressed or shorter) and the child doesn't care. Maybe the child possibly doesn't record the height until the second just before it disappears. Maybe the child may record the height and choose or not choose to notice it. The child notices the difference between inside and behind. Things going into things and disappearing is less common that things going behind things. Results: By 4.5 months, children are encoding and using something about the height in barriers/occlusion. It is not until 7.5 months that they encode containment. 12mos - covering 14mos - tube (take container and cut out bottom) Conclusion: Different categories of physical events have different consequences for how objects will interact.

Baillargeon's Rotating Screen Study (1987)

4.5mos Training: The screen will move screen movement all the way down, front and back, when an object is not present. Test: A box was shown, then the screen was raised (the box was hidden) Option 1: They lowered the screen and rotated it (the screen is at an angle because the box is behind) Option 2: They lowered the screen entirely (The screen is flat because the box was "secretly" removed) Results: The child was surprised by Option 2 over Option 1, showing that they somehow knew that the box was still there. They seem to know something about hidden object. Conclusion: No searching does not mean no object permanence. The screen and box were familiarized and therefore Option 1 was expected.

Starkey and Cooper's Number of Dots Experiment (1980)

4mos First Phase: They showed babies over a series of trials a certain number of dots, each trial being the same number but a different perceptual arrangement (some shown small, others large numbers). Results: Attention to the number displays declines Second Phase: A number change to see if number change brings interest back up. Results: When the number of dots was small, the babies looked at the displays with the new number of dots for a relatively long time and seemed to recognize a change in their number. Conclusion: It is possible that infants were aware of the total size taken up by the items in the display and not the number of items.

Freedmen and Bryant's One-To-One Correspondence in Sharing Experiment (1988)

4yrs Test: They asked to share candy between two recipients. The experimenter counted aloud the candy given to one and asked how much was given to the other. Results: Just under half correctly inferred that the second set contained the same number as the first. Just over half were unable to make that inference. All children probably understand one-to-one correspondence, but not all apply it to number words.

Wynn, Bloom, and Chiang's Moving Circle Clump Experiments (2002)

5mos Training: They habituate the kids to either six or twelve objects in the form of circles on a computer screen that are always in movement in clumps of three, all the same size. Test: Eight objects in two clumps of four or four clumps of two, each kid getting both tests Results: Paying attention to clusters, after being trained on two clusters they look longer at 4, vice versa Conclusion: Kids can use these continuous variables, but that's not all they can do. They can still distinguish smaller units.

Xu and Spelke's Moving Dots Experiment (2000)

6mos The children habituate to 8 dots moving around and test to 16 dots moving around. They look at different proportions (8 v 12) Kids at six months only do this when the ratio is doubled (can do 8 v 16, 12 v 24, but not 8 v 12).

Bergelson and Swingley's Study on Learning Words at 6mos

6mos already know the meanings of several common nouns for foods and body parts. Vocabulary learning and sounding out syllables begins at 6mos Test: 33 infants aged 6-9mos and 50 children aged 10-20mos sat on their mothers' laps in front of a computer connected to an eye-tracking device. The mother asked the child to look at one of the pictures on the screen. Results: The child looked longer at the referenced picture v the other picture. Recognition of words for foods and body parts increased substantially at 14mos. Conclusion: At 14mos there is an improved understanding of sentences and the experiment is seen as a game of object searching. 6-9mos probably understood that certain sounds stood for or regularly accompanied specific objects. Learning to understand words rather than just perceive sounds between 9-15mos due to a capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions.Either infants can already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6mos or infants can learn words before this ability emerges. It is suggested that learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins. 6-12mos learn to perceive their native language's consonant and vowel categories. They recognize the auditory form of frequent words and employ stored word forms to draw generalizations about sound patterns of their language using cognitive capacities for pattern finding.

Baillargeon, Devos, and Graber's A-Not-B Experiment (1987)

7-8mos There are two spots (A on left, B on right) on the floor and an object is placed on one of them. A screen placed in front of each spot (screens slightly separated). An object is retrieved from either the correct side or wrong side. Different delays before taking out the object tests memory ability. They used delays of 15s, 30s, and 70s Results: Children were surprised when the object comes out of the wrong side in every delay condition (even 70s). The problem is not that they can't remember where object is, and is not as complex as A-not-B error.

Concept

A psychological grouping together of entities, objects, events, or even characteristics on the basis of some more or less functional commonality, including some understanding of their interrelationship. They are lexicalized (usually associated with word or short phrase) and are more powerful than categories because entities that are included in a concept are, in some way, functionally related. They are powerful sources of inference and prediction. They have a distinct set of items that are included, phenomena involving members of the set of items, and a set of causal relationships that apply within the domain and explain observations within the domain but do not apply to other domains.

Marcus et al (1999)

7mos Training: Habituated to look at sentence structures AAB and ABA (where A and A are the same syllable) and at different syllables with one of the two forms. Test: They use the (Head Turn Preference) HTP method Results: Children showed preference for novelty Test: They implement the pattern with another stimuli to see if it was just the language domain (2007) and none of these worked. They did a matching test with what the children learned in training. They did a syllable test after having animal sounds in training. The test had animal sounds or syllables. Results: They don't differentiate between test items for the animal sound test. Conclusion: They recognize the pattern with syllable test items and are able to learn the pattern, but not willing to show us with animal test items. Test: Syllable training with an animal test. Results: They distinguish between patterns of animal sounds after being trained with a pattern in syllables. Conclusion: They only show evidence of learning on syllables, once they learn it, they can apply it to other things.

Wang/Baillargeon (2008)

9mos cover They have a pairs of covers that are exactly the same except height Training: They show them how containers work with three pairs of covers and three different objects (tall enough to be covered by one but not the other) Test: They use a test new pair of covers and a new, collapsable object. Results: The children look longer at the short covering. Test: They remove the comparison in the teaching event in another experiment by never putting it down, the child cannot see that one is taller than the other. Results: They look equally at the short and long covers during the test Test: They took away the kid's ability to understand why the cover covered the object in the teaching event in another experiment. They made the cover solid to the brim, but the solid cover covered the object fully. Another solid cover did not cover the object. Results: They look equally at short and long covers.

Basic Level Categories

A category that is most easily processed at a basic level first learned by children, and within which inferences are more generously drawn. Child-basic categories are slightly more general than adults' basic level categories 3mos infants more easily discriminate entities that belong to different basic-level categories than they discriminate entities between a single basic-level category. Organization around basic level categories develops between infancy and early childhood. The nested hierarchy of categories confers greater inferential power than a collection of unrelated categories Age 3 primacy of basic-level categories affects how children draw inferences. Children are more likely to draw inferences within basic-level categories than from a basic-level item to a superordinate level item. A child is more likely to make an inference from a basic-level object to a member of the subordinate category than the reverse.

Head Turning Preference (HTP) Method

A child in relatively dark room is looking at a flashing light. When the child looks at the light, sounds begin to play. As long as the child keeps looking at the light, it gets to continue to hear that sound, but when it looks away, the light stops and the sound stops and a different light begins. The child realizes they control the sound by where they look and can listen longer to one or the other

Child Directed Speech (CDS)

A form of communication made up of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation, distinct pauses between speech segments, clear gestures to support verbal meaning, and repetition of new words in variety of contexts. It is done similarly in sign language. From birth, infants prefer this. From 5mos, they are more responsive to it. It uses joint attention, turn-taking, and sensitivity to toddlers' preverbal gestures. It creates a zone of proximal development in which the children's language expands.

Hespos and Baillargeon's Frog Leg Experiment (2005)

A frog with long legs is put behind a barrier. They tested 5.5-7mos and 7-8.5mos. Test: The barrier was lifted with two options, one large container and one small container, with green legs sticking out of both. Results: 5.5-7 = 12 reach for tall, 41 reach for short 7-8.5 = All kids that follow directions reach for the tall one Test: Another one done with screens rather than containers. Results: 4.5mos+ correct All kids that follow directions reach for the tall one.

Audio Listening #3

A long list of syllables viewed on a synthesizer (basically the same syllables repeated in different order and some in the same order)

Piaget's Suggestion of Mature Categorization

A person could identify which items were included and excluded from the category. A person understood that membership in one category disqualified membership in another category at the same level. Children categories are organized hierarchically and are perceptually bound due to being in the preoperational (2-7yrs) and concrete operational (7-11yrs) phases. Young children are more likely than older children to change criteria in the middle of the sorting task, which was seen as a sign of immaturity by Piaget. He concluded that children did not have categories. However, they grouped things thematically (horse/stable, dog/doghouse). Piaget described these groups as complexes - groupings that were more fluid and less well defined than a category and that did not rely on classic definitions.

Inductive Method

A research method in which a researcher asks a child what kinds of inferences he can make from one entity to another in order to probe the child's categories in terms of membership and internal structure. This can reveal what categories children hold and what inferences are warranted within a category.

Language Making Capacity

A set of procedures for analyzing the language they hear that supports the discovery of grammatical regularities

Baillargeon and the Use of Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies

A strategy is said to be quantitative if it requires infants to encode and use info about absolute quantities. A strategy is said to be qualitative if it requires infants to encode and use info about relative quantities. After identifying continuous variable, infants appear to succeed in reasoning qualitatively before quantitatively. Hypotheses: When first reasoning about a continuous variable, infants either do not spontaneously encode information about this variable or do not encode swiftly enough or precisely enough for it to be of use in these tasks. Infants could encode the necessary quantitative information but have difficulty assessing or processing this information in the process of deriving new and unfamiliar predictions.

Interactionist Perspective of Language Development

A theory based on interactions between inner capacities and environmental influences, it includes the information processing perspective. Some assume children make sense of complex language environments by applying powerful cognitive capacities of a general kind. Regions of brain housing language also govern similar perceptual, motor, and cognitive abilities This perspective is probably not sufficient to account for mastery of higher level aspects of language (intricate grammatical structures). Grammatical competence may depend more on specific brain structures than other components of language. Two year olds process sentence structures using the same neural system as adults. An active child, well-endowed for making sense of language, strives to communicate. This cues caregivers to provide appropriate language experiences which help them relate content and structure of language to its social meanings.

Topic-Associating Style

African american children use this method in blending several similar anecdotes.

Chronological Narratives

Age 4.5-5 when children place events in temporal sequencing build to a high point.

Audio Listening #1

Alien sounds (It is actually saying: "A steady drip is worse than drench rain"), it is sine-wav speech. In the experiment they used the stimuli of names, "lips, knee.." comparing sine-wav speech vs. regular speech.

Carey's Give __ a Number Experiment

An experimenter asks the child to give them a certain number objects from the set of objects in front of the child. They would either give that number or randomly grab. Different 3, 4, and 5yrs can be classified quite convincingly as one-knowers, two-knowers, or three-knowers or as counting principle knowers (above 3 or 4). This shows developmental changes in children's learning about the counting system.

Perceptual Category

An implicit classification of perceptual stimuli into discrete sets in spite of a lack of physical discontinuity in the stimuli.

Language Acquisition Device

An innate system that contains a universal grammar or set of rules common to all languages.

Classic Category

Any category can be defined in terms of its necessary and sufficient features. Any entity that has all of the features should be included in the category and any entity that lacks one or more of the features should not be included in the category. Concepts are actually believed to be mentally represented as definitions. Everything in this category is an equally good example. Everything that is not in the category is equally disqualified. The idea that this is how the mind represents categories and concepts is now universally rejected by developmental psychologists. Wittgenstein (1953) challenged the idea that most real-world categories have a classic definition. People do have indecision with respect to some items.

Overextensions

Applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate, this happens later and reflects a sensitivity to categories. It may be due to a difficulty recalling or they have not yet acquired a suitable word. They are also substitutions for hard pronouncing words. They disappear as vocabulary and pronunciation improve.

Behaviorist Perspective of Language Development

BF Skinner discussed operant conditioning (as baby makes sounds, parents reinforce those most like words with hugs, smiles, speech in return). Children rely on imitation and can combine that with reinforcement. Imitation and reinforcement are known for supporting rather than explaining language.

State Words

Between 2 and 2.5 yrs, state (modifier) words expands to include labels for attributes of objects (size, color), and possession. Words referring to functions of objects appear soon after. When related in meaning, general distinctions appear before more specific ones (size, temporal).

Eye Contact Milestones

Birth - prepared for some aspects of conversational behaviour and initiate interaction through eye contact and terminate it by looking away. 3-4mos - infants start to gaze in same general direction as adults are looking 10-11mos - babies realize that others' focus offers information about their communicative intentions or other goals. 12mos look where an adult is looking only when their eyes are open and realize that a person's visual gaze signals vital connection between viewer and his/her surroundings and want to participate. 12-14mos likely to engage in gaze following when no obstacles block an adult's line of sight to an object

Baillargeon and the Identification of Initial Concept and Variables in Infants (2000): Collision Phenomena

By 2.5mos, infants already possess clear expectations that the stationary object should remain so when not hit and should be displaced when hit. It is not until 5.5mos-6.5mos that infants are able to judge after seeing that the medium moving object causes the stationary object to be displaced, that the stationary object should move farther with the larger, but not smaller, moving object. Younger infants have no difficulty remembering where the stationary object was displaced with the moving object, but still isn't surprised when the stationary object is displaced to the end of the track with both the large and small moving objects. Prior to 5.5-6.5mos, infants are unaware that the size of the moving object can be used to reason about the length of the displacement of the stationary object. One Interpretation: When learning about collision events between a moving and stationary object, infants first form an initial concept centred on a distinction between impact and no impact. With further experience, infants begin to identify variables that influence this initial concept. By 5.5-6.5mos, infants realize that the size of the moving object can be used to predict how far the stationary object will be displaced. After seeing how far the stationary object moves with a moving object of a given size, infants readily use this information to calibrate their predictions about how far the stationary object will travel with moving objects of different sizes.

Baillargeon and the Identification of Initial Concept and Variables in Infants (2000): Support Phenomena

By 3mos, infants expect the box to fall if it loses all contact with the platform and to remain stable otherwise. Two developments between 3 and 6.5mos: 4.5-5.5mos - Infants begin to appreciate that the amount of contact between the box and the platform affects the box's stability. (Initially, infants believe that the box will be stable even if a small portion of its bottom rests on the platform.) By 6.5mos, Infants expect the box to fall unless a significant portion of its bottom surface lies on the platform. Conclusion: When learning about the support relation between two objects, infants first form an initial concept centred on a distinction between contact and no contact. With further experience, this initial concept is progressively revised. Infants identify first a discrete locus of contact and later a continuous amount of contact variable and incorporate these variables into their initial concept, resulting in more successful predictions over time.

The Function of Categories and Concepts

Categories allow people to behave adaptively in the world in a way that ultimately increases survival and reproductive success. Our cognitive and memory capacity would be swamped by information if we did not categorize. We are unable to hold all of the individual objects and events we encounter in memory, so we categorize for storage efficiency. However, we often do remember individual items even though they've been categorized, which actually challenges memory further. There is no known reason that the human mind would not be able to record every event and every object it encounters. Creating a category and then knowing that a particular object belongs in the category allows it to make inferences and thus provides a rich source of information for a species that uses information as heavily as humans do. It makes broad predictions in large categories and precise predictions in smaller categories. Categories are functional. They allow people to behave in a way that confers a survival and hence reproductive advantage. In early concept formation, function matters. The categories that children have allow for functional action contingent upon what they see and how they categorize what they see.

German Essentialist Experiment (1988)

Children as young as 4 seem to have a different way of thinking about natural kinds and artifacts that reveals essentialist thinking with respect to natural kinds e.g. could answer questions about which objects are made by people and which objects are not made by people

Fast Mapping

Children can connect a new word with an underlying concept after only a brief encounter, even 15-18mos, except with more repetitions.

Susan Carey's Individuation Hypothesis (2004)

Children learn about number in several different ways, specifically human infants are born with a parallel individuation system, which makes it possible for them to recognize and represent very small numbers. It only operates for sets of 1, 2, and 3 objects. Children know 1 as a distinct quantity, but do not know that the word "one" relates to it. They progress from "one-knowers", to "two knowers", to "three knowers".

Carey and Bootstrapping

Children lifting themselves up by their own intellectual bootstraps takes place in 4th or 5th year. Children begin to learn about ordinal properties. Because the count list they learn goes beyond three, they eventually infer that the number words represent a continuum of distinct quantities which also stretches beyond 3. This is shown in the give __ a number experiment.

Motor Perseveration

Children repeat a movement rather than modify it to fit new events. This may be a tendency of certain motor behaviours to become habits or may be related to immature brain development that makes it difficult for infants to inhibit responses.

Piaget Testing Child Categorization

Children were tested to see if they could sort a number of items into a prespecified number of groups. The experimenter would not tell the child on what basis to categorize so the subject was free to create the rule. The number of groups was sometimes given by the experimenter and sometimes left up to the child. Piaget believed that the experimenter could infer the categories that were in the child's head from the groupings that they created. Children do not show evidence of representing categories in a way that is consistent with the classic view.

Evaluation

Comments about how and why events took place or about their own and other's thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Preschoolers don't do this.

Extended Language Meanings Through Metaphor

Concrete, sensory comparisons permit children to communicate in vivid and memorable ways.

Possible Object Segregation Cues

Configuration - ex: texture, shape Physical - ex: support Experience

Babbling in Deaf Babies

Deaf Babies will babble, but if they are not exposed to sign language, they will stop babbling entirely. If they are, though, they will babble with their hands. Babies can receive a cochlear implant.

Nativist Perspective of Language Development

Developed by Noam Chomsky (1957), language is a uniquely human accomplishment etched into the structure of the brain. Rules for sentence organization are much too complex to be directly taught to or discovered by child. We are born with a language acquisition device paired with necessary training from parents. Newborn babies are remarkably sensitive to speech sounds. Children everywhere reach major language milestones in a similar sequence. The ability to master a grammatically complex language system is unique to humans. There is evidence for specialized language areas in the brain. If the left hemisphere is injured in the first few years, other areas take over language (similar areas on right hemisphere). These areas develop as children acquire language. There is a sensitive period for language development.

Object Permanence

Developed by Piaget, the idea that objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible or detectable through other senses. Babies demonstrate object permanence only when they begin to search actively for an absent object, or when they uncover a toy they have just seen the experimenter hide under a cloth or behind a barrier. It first appears at around 8 months, but is not mastered until 2.5 years. This theory has since been proven unreliable.

Expansions

Elaborating on children's speech, increasing it's complexity.

Cochlear Implant

Electronic device surgically inserted into the ear that converts external sounds into a signal to stimulate the auditory nerve. If not installed until after age 2, children remain behind in language development. If installed after age 4, language delays are severe and persistent. Deaf babies babble with hands, but to develop further, infants must be able to hear human speech.

Later Semantic Development

Elementary aged children enlarge vocabulary by analyzing the structure of complex words and deriving word meanings from context. They benefit from engaging in conversation with more expert speakers and reading results in growth. A reflective and analytical approach permits them to appreciate multiple meanings. adolescence = abstract words, sarcasm, irony

A-Not-B Error

Evidence that the child remembers the existence of the object but cannot reason systematically about it. However, it may not be a failure to represent and reason about the object but other developmental limitations including memory and motor skills.

Shape Bias

Evident after acquiring 75 words, the pervious learning of nouns based on shape heightens attention to the shape properties of additional objects.

Individual and Cultural Differences

Girls are slightly ahead of boys in early vocabulary growth. Girls have a faster rate of physical maturation that promotes earlier development of left cerebral hemisphere. Shy toddlers often wait until they understand a great deal before they speak. Once speaking, vocabulary increases rapidly, although slightly behind age mates. Negative toddlers acquire language more slowly because high emotional reactivity diverts them from processing linguistic information. The more words caregivers use, the more children learn/ Mothers talk much more to little girls than boys. Parents converse less often to shy than sociable children. Limited parent/child book reading results in slower language development. Language development depends on referential or expressive styles of viewing words. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children speaking start with more verbs and social routines.

Vygotsky's View on Child Categorization (1962)

He came to a similar conclusion as Piaget when he tried to teach children classic categories that he had designed. He found evidence on children's reliance on thematic associations rather than classic categories. He believed that there was a qualitative shift from a young child who was perceptually bound in their categorical thinking to an older child who was conceptual. children younger than 7 = pre conceptual children 7+ = conceptual

Piaget and Number

He claimed that children are at first held back by their lack of logic and have to acquire logical abilities in order to understand mathematics and young children may know number words quite well and yet do not actually understand what they are doing when they count.

Greco (1962)

He gave 4-8yr three versions of the conservation of number task. First: Children saw two identical looking sets, judged correctly that the two sets were equal in number, then saw the appearance of one of the sets being altered and were asked to compare the quantity of the two sets Results: older children often wrong, believing that spreading out alters quantity, but not number. Second: Same except after the transformation the children had to count one of the sets and were then asked to infer the number of the second set. Third: Children were required to count both sets after the transformation and then were asked whether they were equal in quantity. Results: Most children younger than 6yr failed this because they thought that the more spread out one had more numbers, even though they were shown that the number didn't change, maybe didn't know what the word "eight" meant.

Werker and Colleagues on Language Sound Discrimination in Infants

Hindi words Bal, Dal, and Tal are very hard to distinguish as an English speaker. Between 6-8mos, infants can distinguish easily between all three sounds, whether they are English speaking or not. 10-12mos is the change to language specific hearing in which children only discriminate between language specific sounds.

Functional Fixedness

If we believe that something belongs to a particular category, we may be unable to think of using it for a different purpose. This looks different in younger children 5yrs do not show the classic pattern of functional fixedness. They performed better than 6-7yrs and adults. Young children have broader category regarding artifact's function.

4-8mos Object Permanence (Piaget 1954)

Infants will retrieve toys that are partially concealed or placed behind a semitransparent cover, but their continuing failure to search for objects that are completely concealed suggested that disappearing objects no longer exist.

Enriched Parallel Individuation

Integrating representations of natural language quantifiers with the external serial ordered count list (knowing that five is one more than 4, four is one more than 3)

Keil and Bateman's Rule Driven Categorization Experiment

Kindergarteners, 2nd grade, 4th grade Test: they come up with list of rule-like categories that can be defined and have characteristics and ask them questions manipulating definitions and characteristics to see which children pay attention to. Results: kindergarten uses characteristics, 2nd varies, 4th uses definition

Speech Registers

Language adaptations to social expectations that are sensitive as early as preschool.

Bilingualism

Learning two languages in childhood by acquiring both languages at the same time in childhood or learning a second language after mastering the first. School age children take 5-7yrs to attain speaking and writing skills on par with native age mates. Children who become fluent in two languages are advanced in cognitive development and have denser neuronal connections in language areas of the left hemisphere.

Telegraphic Speech

Like a telegram, they focus on high-content words, omitting smaller, less important ones. They rarely make gross grammatical errors.

Word Coinage

Making up a related word based on words they know when they don't know a word, they do this at about 2yrs using a rule-governed approach.

Natural Kinds Concepts

Naturally occurring categories that allow for rich inferences because members of a group have predictable characteristics in common. The human mind appears to develop an interest in and impressive competence with these.

12-18mos Object Permanence (Piaget 1954)

Object concept improves, toddlers now track the visible movements of objects and search for them where they were last seen. The child cannot make mental inferences necessary to understand invisible displacements (if you hide something in your hand, and move your hand behind a barrier and drop the toy and ask the child where the toy is, they will look in your hand, where the object was last seen.)

One-To-One Principle

One must count all the objects in a set once and once only: each one must be given just one number tag.

Stable Order Principle

One must count by producing the number words in a set order and in the same set order each time.

Instinct Blindness

Our failure to appreciate the uniformity and the usefulness of our concepts that prevents us from noticing that there are commonly held concepts and equally logically possible but absent concepts.

Communicative Support for Grammatical Development

Parents correct word meaning, but rarely ever grammar. They often correct grammar indirectly to inform the child about conventional usage while still keeping the conversation going. Parents reformulate as many as 2/3 of children's incorrect expressions across error types and children by using recasts and expansions and by asking children to clarify what they mean so interaction can continue.

Syntactic Bootstrapping

Preschoolers discover many word meanings by observing how words are used in syntax or the structure of sentences.

4mos Object Segregation Cue

Previous Knowledge: Training: A box was shown plain and alone to familiarize the child. Test: A box was then shown with a hose and could either move with or without the hose. Results: Moving Together -> The child finds this surprising, they look longer Moving Alone -> This is expected because we acknowledged the box as 1 object. If a child receives no prior training, the child will not show any difference in how long they look at the different test possibilities. If a different box is used (yellow with spots), configuration cues should be used. However, there is no difference between moving alone and moving together. The child doesn't see a difference.

Code Switching

Producing an utterance in one language that contains one or more guest words from another without violating grammar of either language.

Natural Kinds Categories

Psychological groupings of the classes of entities that are seen to be natural categories or objects grouped together as they are perceived to be in nature, these are concepts that children and infants form themselves.

Recasts

Restructuring inaccurate speech into correct form.

Quinn Et Al's Categorization Experiment (1993)

She showed a lot of dogs and then showed a bird v last dog Results: Looks at the bird more if they know the category, but looks at both equally if they don't know the category. Kids get the opposite study and always look longer at the one they're not familiarized with. They look longer at a dog when habituated to cats, but look equally at pictures of dogs and cats when habituated to dogs. Newborns cannot categorize between a triangle and circle, but can categorize between a triangle and cross. 4mos can categorize between any shapes.Balchadha (1996) got the same results with inanimate objects for 3-4mos. Conclusion: They can tell difference between dog v bird. Same results with cat v bird. Cats look more similar to each other than dogs. Cats are in perceptual similarity of dogs. The previous pattern arises between habituations when controlling for similarity between dog pictures. Newborns can categorize between opened and closed shapes

Grammatical Morphemes

Small markers that change the meaning of sentences

Prototype and Family Resemblance View

Some members of a category are more central to that category than others; they more closely resemble the prototype. The more prototypical item is not necessarily the most frequently encountered item. It is more prototypical of a category if it shares features with other members of the category and a less prototypical member of the category if it shares more features with members of other categories.

Over Regularization

Some morphemes with irregular forms are acquired before morphemes with regular forms. Once children apply a regular morphological rule, they extend it to words that are exceptions.

Shading

Speaking initiates a change of topic gradually by modifying the focus of discussion. This happens from age 5-9.

Baillargeon and the Identification of Initial Concept and Variables in Infants (2000): Unveiling Phenomena

Test: A cloth is removed to unveil an object. Results: 9.5mos infants realize that the presence or absence of a protuberance in the cover signals the presence or absence of an object beneath. Infants are not yet aware that the size of the protuberance can be used to infer size of object. Providing infants with a reminder of the protuberance's size has no effect. At 12.5mos, infants showed reliable surprise at a large object being retrieved from a small protuberance. Conclusion: When learning about unveiling phenomena, infants first form an initial concept centred on a distinction between protuberance and no protuberance. Later on, infants identify a continuous variable that effects this concept. They begin to appreciate that the size of the protuberance in the cover can be used to infer the size of the object under the cover.

Baillargeon and the Use of Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies: Barrier Phenomena

Test: A moving object and a stationary barrier Results: 4.5mos are able to reason about the box's height and location only qualitatively, they can predict the screen's stopping point only when they are able to rely on a simple alignment strategy. 6.5mos can use their representations of the occluded box's height and distance from the screen to estimate, within broad limits, at what point the screen will stop.

Miura and Colleague's Cross-Cultural Counting Experiment (1987)

Test: Children were given quantities of bricks that are either in units or joined together in groups of 10 and were asked to produce a certain number of bricks - 21, 34, or 53. Results: Asian children combined the 10s and units more often than European children.

Baillargeon and the Use of Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies: Collision Phenomena

Test: Small, medium, and large moving objects are placed side by side at the start of each event, allowing infants to compare sizes directly. In subsequent experiments, only one moving object was present for each event. Results: 6.5mos did not show surprise when a small moving object caused a stationary object to move to the end of the track 7.5mos showed surprise when a small moving object caused a stationary object to move to the end of the track Conclusion: 5.5-6.5mos are able to reason about the moving object's size only qualitatively. They can predict the effect of modifications in the moving object's size only when they are able to encode such modifications in relative terms. When infants are forced to encode and compare the absolute sizes of the moving objects, they fail because they are not shown side by side. They overcome this limitation by 7.5mos and succeed.

Miller and Stigler's Cross-Cultural Counting Experiment (1987)

Test: They asked 4-6yr American and Taiwanese children to count up to just over 100 and also to count sets of objects which were either arranged in a straight row or messy. Results: Taiwanese children did better than american children at free counting. American children has trouble at teen numbers whereas Taiwanese children did not. Both groups were similar in some ways and different in others when counting concrete objects. Both groups made more mistakes with randomly placed objects. Americans were just as good as Taiwanese in applying the one-to-one principle. Americans made many more mistakes in producing the wrong next number.

German and Colleagues Puppet Counting Experiment

Test: They asked pre school children to make judgements about a puppet which they saw counting. Sometimes it counted correctly, sometimes it didn't. Conclusion: Results supported that young children do have some understanding of the how to count principles.

Huuttencolher and Lurenco's Hidden Toy in Room Experiment (2007)

Test: They put the child in a square room and decorate the walls in a different way than the other experiments, they put large spots on two of the walls and tiny spots and the adjacent walls, making it appear rectangular. Results: This does in fact help in locating the object, they use it like they use a rectangular room. They test with two walls blue and two walls red, lending to results similar to the plain square room in previous experiments. They test with grey walls perpendicular to the toy (same luminance as black/white spotted wall) and make the other walls have spots (big or small), but it did not effect the results. Conclusion: Cues have to be on a single scalar dimension (bigger/smaller, more/less, taller/shorter).

Clearfield and Mix (1999)

Test: Varying the amount of material while holding the number constant Results: Change did provoke increased interest Test: Varying the number of items while holding the total amount of material constant Results: Babies showed no sign of revived interest.

Metalinguistic Awareness

The ability to think about language as a system. Age 4 - children know that word labels are arbitrary and not part of the objects to which they refer and understand syntactic judgements (eg knowing when a spoken sentence is said backwards) Age 5 - good sense of the concept of a word Ages 4-8 - phonological awareness Preschoolers - rhyme, word sounds Third graders can identify all the phonemes in a word School age - ability to manipulate word endings and generalize them into novel contexts Age 8 - judge grammatical correctness of a sentence even if meaning is false or senseless.

Limitations of the Nativist Perspective

The absence of a complete description of abstract grammatical structures or even an agreed-upon list of how many exist or best examples of them. How children link rules with strings of words they hear is unclear. Children refine and generalize many grammatical forms gradually, engaging in piecemeal learning and making errors.

Mutual Exclusivity Bias

The assumption that words refer to entirely separate categories.

Joint Attention

The child attends to the same object or event as the caregiver. Around 12mos infants realize that a person's visual gaze signals vital connection between viewer and their surroundings and want to participate. Children who engage in this sustain attention longer, comprehend more language, produce meaningful gestures and words earlier, and show faster vocabulary development through 2yrs. Gains at end of 1yr enables babies to establish common ground with the adult through which they can figure out the meaning of the adult's verbal labels.

Frank Keil's Transformation Experiment

The child is asked to consider an object that starts out as a member of one category but after a series of transformations has the outward appearance of something else Children of all ages accept the transformation of the artifacts, as do adults. Older children and adults reject the idea that natural kinds can change category membership.

The Early Phase of Language Development

The easiest sound sequences start with consonants, end with vowels, and include repeated syllables. They sometimes use the same sound to represent a variety of words. Toddlers and young preschoolers with more words in their spoken vocabularies can pronounce more speech sounds and syllable structures. Languages cater to young children's phonological limitations. "Mama" "Dada" and "Papa" resemble words for parents throughout the world. These are the first words produced by children everywhere. Children first learning to talk know how familiar words are supposed to sound even after mispronouncing them. When learning a new word, toddlers often do not pick up the fine details of its sounds, which contributes to their pronunciation errors.

Class-Inclusion Experiments

The experimenter presents the child with two sets of objects, each a subset of a larger set. They are asked if there are more of a subset or more of the superset. They fail to appreciate that it must necessarily be the case that the superordinate category is equal or greater in number to the subordinate category.

Esther Thelen and Colleagues and The Dynamic Systems Approach v A-Not-B Error

The idea that it is unnecessary to invoke the idea of permanence limitations to explain infants failures on the A-not-B task or to invoke the idea of mental concepts such as object permanence to account for ultimate success. Infants' behaviours on tests of object permanence are the result of the dynamics that emerge from the immediate circumstances and the individual's history of perceiving and acting in similar circumstances. Infants' experiences with specific objects, their current memory of those experiences, and their current motor skills all interact in their solving the specific problems posed by whatever task faces them. Infants' growing abilities to better coordinate all the various systems involved in both sensorimotor and conceptual intelligence required by the task at hand.

Language Comprehension

The language they understand develops ahead of production. They must recognize the meaning of a word. There is a 5mos gap between comprehending 50 words and producing 50 words.

Last-Number-Counted Principle

The last number counted represents the value of the set.

Semantic Complexity

The number and difficulty of the meanings they express.

Abstraction Principle

The number in a set is quite independent of any of the qualities of the members in that set.

Cardinality

The numerical principle that states that any set of items with a particular number is equal in quantity to any other set with the same number of items in it.

Ordinality

The numerical principle that states that numbers come in an ordered scale of magnitude: 2 is more than 1, 3 is more than two, and 3 is more than 1. It is based on transitive inferences (this, this, therefore this).

Order Irrelevance Principle

The order in which members of a set are counted makes no difference and anyone who counts a set will come to the same answer as someone who counts it from the opposite direction.

Perseveration

The persistent repetition of a particular behaviour.

Turnabout

The speaker not only comments on what has just been said but also adds a request to get the partner to respond again.

Capture Error

The tendency of all people at all ages to continue using a once-successful solution whenever possible.

Essentialism

The view that for any given entity, there is an essence, or some property that every entity of a given kind must possess in order for it to belong to a given category. This defies classic definitions that rely on a defining set of features. An essence does not change no matter how we dress up or disguise that entity. We cannot quite put our finger on what essence is, it's just there. There is a strong association between natural kinds and essentialist beliefs We have an intuitive sense that natural kinds have an essence, something inside of it that gives it its category membership.

Language Production

The words and word combinations children use. They must recall a word and what it stands for.

8-12mos Object Permanence (Piaget 1954)

There are clearer signs of emerging concept of objects, but not object permanence. The child will search for a hidden object where they saw it previously rather than where they saw it last (A-not-B error)

Object and Action Words

There are more object than action words. Nouns refer to concepts that are easy to perceive. When adults point to, label, and talk about an object, they help the child discern the word's meaning. Verbs require more complex understandings of relationships between objects and actions. When adults use a verb, the selected action usually is not taking place. They benefit in many examples of the same verb used in many contexts. Chinese children hear greater variety of verbs denoting physical actions, which are easiest to master.

Tincoff and Jusczyk's Parent Naming Association Experiment (1999)

They found out for each family what they refer to for the parents and that is the word that the kid got tested with. They used real pictures of the kids' parents. 6mos Test: They say the word and put up both pictures and see which picture the child looks at longer. They naturally look at the mother longer. Result: The amount of mom looking goes up when they say "mom" and look more than before at the dad (not necessarily more than mom, but more than baseline) when saying "dad". Test: They wanted to see if children call all women "mom" or all men "dad". Some kids get tested with pictures of someone else's parents. Results: Children can distinguish between their parents and someone else's.

Vouloumanos and Werker's Newborn Sound Preference Experiment (2007)

They gave newborns the choice of sucking to listen to a bunch of sounds. Test: These were speech v non speech (sine wave in audio #1). They would suck to listen to the actual speech v the non speech. The sine wave audio actually matches actual speech in many conditions, but to the human ear it sounds very different. Results: When they filtered the sounds of the actual speech and the non-speech, the kids actually didn't prefer the actual speech (there was no preference). By filtering the sounds, this is what the child would have heard in the womb therefore it shows that children actually no longer like what they would have heard in the womb. Conclusion: Children have a biological preference for the speech versus the non-speech.

Eimas Et Al Speech Continuum Experiment (1971)

They habituated 1-4mos to one of the sounds (on the continuum) and then test them on the new sound Test: The new sound would cross the line on the continuum to slowly become the new sound.When the switch happens, the child should be excited to hear the sound as long as it crosses the line on the continuum from B to P. If the sound switched but didn't cross the line, it would still sound like B therefore children shouldn't be excited to hear the sound. Results: Children noticed the change when it crossed the boundary and failed to notice the change when it didn't cross the boundary. They appear to have the same boundary as adults, however is this innate or is it learned? Conclusion: The auditory system might have a bias to hear sounds only when they cross over the boundary and sounds that don't cross the boundary are harder to learn.

Aguiar and Baillargeon's Screen and Box Experiment (2002/1999)

They held a screen in front of a box and cut either a high or low window into the screen. A small box with a low window allows for the box to be seen coming out from the other side, an event expected by kids. If kids aren't surprised, they acknowledged that movement exists behind the screen and can track trajectory. When a large box passes by a low window and the box is not seen in the window, this is surprising. The window violates expectation. Results: This shows evidence for perception of trajectory, evidence for object permanence, and evidence for perception of continuity.

Maye Et Al's Bi- and Mono-Distribution Sound Differentiation Experiment (2002)

They played synthesized sounds from a "da" to "ta" continuum for 6-8mos and 10-12mos english babies. Training: They play a bi-distribution or mono-distribution of sounds on the continuum. Children hear the same eight sounds, just on different levels of the continuum. After bi-distribution habituation, 1 and 8 should be heard as differently if the training worked. After mono-distribution habituation, 1 and 8 should be heard as the same if the training worked. Test: They alternated 1 and 8 or only played one of them. The kids distinguished between alternating and non alternating after bi-distribution habituation, but not mono-distribution habituation. Younger kids had the same pattern as older kids. Conclusion: They may be tracking sounds to learn the sounds in their language. They don't have to know the meanings and can do this before speaking.

Expressive Style

They produce many more social formulas and pronouns and they are uttered as compressed phrases that sound like single words. They believe words are for talking about feelings and needs.

German and Gallistel's Set Counting Experiment (1978)

They recorded how well children, aged between 2 and 5yrs, count sets of objects. Sets varied from 2 - 19. Test: They asked children to count each set, recorded whether children always produced number words in the same order and always counted each object once and whether they seemed to recognize that the last number counted signified the number of the set. Results: Children respected counting principles more with large number sets than small ones. Conclusion: principles-before-skills hypothesis - children grasp the principles long before they can put them into effect consistently Children's mistakes with larger sets are due to difficulties in applying the right procedures in increasingly difficult circumstances.

Questions: Early Preschool Years

Using rising intonation to convert an utterance into a yes/no question. A correct question form in english requires that children invert the subject and auxiliary verb, but they often omit the auxiliary verb and fail to invert the subject and auxiliary verb in some sentences, but not others. There are sometimes errors in subject-auxiliary verb agreement.

Referential Style

Vocabulary consists mainly of words referring to objects. They believe words are for naming objects. Vocabulary grows faster in this style. This is more common in english speaking.

Jeanne Shinskey and Yuko Munakata and The Role Of Experience v A-Not-B Error (2005)

They studied if infants gradually develop stronger representations of objects through their experience with them and if stronger representations are required for some tasks than for others. They focused on the process through which infants build mental representations rather than on whether, and at what age, infants reliably demonstrate the capacity to represent objects mentally. They predicted that object permanence would be stronger for familiar objects than for novel objects. Test: 7mos were presented with novel and familiar objects under visible and hidden conditions. Visible Condition: Either a novel or familiar object was set in front of the babies. Infants reached more for the novel object, demonstrating preference for novelty. Hidden Condition: The condition that actually tests for object permanence, babies were presented for a novel or familiar object and then the lights were turned off. Babies tended to reverse their previous novelty preference, reaching for the more familiar object. Conclusion: Once infants have mastered information contained in one stimulus, seeking the novelty of a new stimulus is an adaptive strategy for acquiring new information about the world. When infants showed preference for the novel object in the visible condition, they were demonstrating that they had processed the familiar object sufficiently well that it had become less interesting to explore. Reaching for the familiar object in the hidden condition suggests that their experience with the object had helped them develop a stronger representation of it than of the novel object. Formation of mental representations depends largely on experience. The joint processes of evolutionary processes and experiences are available.

Nazzi Et Al's Language Distinguishing Experiment (1998)

They studied newborns and were looking at whether they can discriminate between their own language & others. A melody or prosody is basically what children should experience before they are born therefore when they are born, they should be familiar with this. They looked at different languages: French, English, Japanese. The difference between these languages is that they have different prosody patterns. French: they have equal syllable time, relatively equal time for syllables English: they have equal stress times, relatively equal stress on syllables Japanese: they have equal mora times Adults are sensitive to these differences so they wanted to view if children are also sensitive to them Test: They made children suck to see if they were sensitive to the difference. Results: They suck harder to hear French because that is what they know & they didn't listen to the English or Japanese the same so this shows that they distinguish between English and Japanese. Also looked at American English and British English but the children didn't distinguish between the two. Test: older US English children (3 months old) Results: They can distinguish between British English, Japanese, and Italian but cannot distinguish the difference between Italian and Spanish. They can distinguish between British English and Dutch and between British English and US English. Older children still can't distinguish all differences, but if the language is similar to their language class, they are better at distinguishing it. Conclusion: We know that children can tell the difference between speech and some kind of non-speech, they have a preference for certain kinds of rhythmic patterns (this must be learned or in the case of English and Japanese for ex. not learned because they are completely different languages).

Sensitive Period in Second Language Development

They tested deaf people who acquired sign language at different ages. Those who learned in adolescence or adulthood never became as proficient as those who learned in adulthood. However, a precise age cutoff has not been established. Second language processing is less lateralized in older than younger learners. Second language competence does not drop sharply at a certain age, but decreases gradually.

Wang and Baillargeon's Priming Covering Experiment (2005)

They wanted to study if one could prime kids to pay attention to height in covering. 8mos Training: They do the barrier experiment first and the logic transfers. They use the cover as the barrier, move it around next to the object, and cover the object. Test Results: They look longer when the short cup covers the tall object. Covering alone (without training) leads them to look at the short and long ones equally.

The Decimal System

This does not come easily to young children. The teen and decade words are more opaque in European languages than Asian languages. Asian children are better at counting and constructing numbers than European and American children.

Renee Baillargeon and Colleagues and The Violations of Expectation Method v A-Not-B Error

This is an object permanence test that exploits the well known tendency of infants to stare at events that violate their expectations. Babies are habituated to a particular event and then presented two variations of that event: one that is "possible" under normal conditions and one that is "impossible" and comes about only through an illusion created by the researcher. If infants are capable of mentally representing their experiences, they should develop specific expectations during the habituation phase and then look longer at events that violate those expectations (impossible events). Training (Habituation): A short carrot moved behind a screen and reappeared on the other side; a tall carrot moved behind the screen and likewise reappeared. Possible Test Event: A short carrot again moved behind a screen and reappeared on the other side. The window in the screen was high enough that the small carrot was hidden from view as it passed behind the screen. Impossible Test Event: A tall carrot moved behind the screen and reappeared in the other side. In this case, the tall carrot should have appeared in the window as it passed behind the screen, but in violation of anyone's expectations, it did not (due to manipulations). Results: Infants as young as 2.5mos looked longer at the impossible event than possible event. Conclusion: They had formed mental representations of their past experiences with habituation events.

Phonological Store

This permits us to retain speech-based info and supports fast-mapping. A good phonological memory results in a better chance of transferring new words to LTM and linking them with relevant concepts. After age 5, semantic knowledge influences the speed with which children form phonological traces and both factors effect vocabulary growth.

Infants' Knowledge of Addition and Subtraction - Wynn's work

This was support for the idea of innate mathematical structures as young as 6mos Test: 1 + 1 Putting a toy on a platform in front of a child then raising a screen in front of this toy so that the child cannot see the toy and then placing another toy behind the screen before lowering the screen so that the child could see how many toys there now were on the platform. The right outcome was 2 toys on the platform. On 1/2 the trials, only 1 toy was left and the child saw an incorrect outcome Test: same experiment with 2 - 1 Results: The infants did look longer at the incorrect outcomes. However, the incorrect outcome in the first experiment was the same as the original set up. The child may have expected any change from the original state Test: same 1 + 1 experiment except the incorrect outcome was 3 (both correct and incorrect outcomes were different from starting point) Results: Infants still showed more interest in the incorrect outcome Criticisms of wynn's work: Wynn did not include subtraction in her second experiment. Infants may just be more interested in larger numbers or it may take them larger to process them. Wackily et al did not get the same results.

Referential Communication Skills

To produce clear verbal messages and recognize when messages we receive are unclear so we can ask for more information. 3-6yrs realize the need for more verbal description over the phone, but still rely on physical gestures and cues that cannot be seen over the phone. At age 3 they start to ask others to clarify ambiguous messages.

18-24mos Object Permanence (Piaget 1954)

Toddlers are capable of mentally representing such invisible displacements and using these mental inferences to guide their search for objects that have disappeared. They fully understand that objects have a permanence about them.

Two Word Utterance Phase

Toddlers learn 1-3 words a week 18-24mos learn one to two words per day. Most children show a steady, continuous rate of word learning that extends through preschool. The 2nd year shows an improvement in the ability to categorize, recall words, and grasp others' social cues to meaning. Their experience broadens, resulting in a wider range of interesting objects and events to label. Age 2 marks words for places and a clearer self image results in more words related to the self and to bodies and clothing. Once reaching 200 words, they start to combine two words. This is done in telegraphic speech. Word-order regularities are usually copies of adult word pairings

Tsao et al (2004)

Training: 12 sessions, 25min/session over 4 weeks. 9mos English babies play with a Mandarin speaking adult. It involves naturalistic playing in which the baby is seeing the experimenter, interacting, and hearing. Results: They can discriminate between two Mandarin sounds after never being exposed, but 10mos cannot. If you didn't train them and tested them four weeks later, they fail. After training, they maintain the difference between sounds after four weeks. If you play the audio from the training to another kid, it doesn't work. Even audio/video didn't work. The language they distinguish is training specific, they won't maintain distinction for other languages. Conclusion: Naturalistic training allows 9mos to maintain the distinction between Mandarin sounds.

Werker/Stager (1997)

Training: They held up an object and say a syllable as a label and held up another object with another label. Test: They only showed one object at a time. They hold up the same object with the same word and measure how long the child looks. They held up the same object with a different word and measure how long the child looks. Results: The child looks longer at the novel word. But maybe they don't learn anything about association, maybe they're just excited to hear a new word. Training: Two different objects with their own labels both learned at the same time. 17mos habituate to both. Training: They see one of the objects with either correct or incorrect labeling. Result: They look longer at the mismatched label here as well. When tested at 14mos it doesn't work, the child looks equally. Conclusion: 17mos may be better learners, 14mos may not be able to do associations quickly. Labels are similar, making words harder. When tested with labels sounding more different, 14mos succeeds.

Acredolo's Maze Experiment (1978)

Training: They put kid in rat maze and always put them on one end and the prize on the other end. The kid will crawl/toddle along and eventually find the toy. If you do this enough times, the kid will figure out where the toy will always be and will consistently find it. Test: 6-11mos and 16mos In the test, they put the kid in the opposite end, and show them they are on the other end. Results: egocentric strategy - may learn you need to go right to get the toy exocentric strategy - orient to the room, understand that the toy is always in the same location regardless of where they are The younger kids end up on wrong (opposite) side (egocentric), and the older kids end up on the prize side (exocentric)

Saffran Et Al's Word Form Experiment (1996)

Training: They strung three syllable nonsense words in random order. Over the time that you hear a specific syllable, you expect a specific different syllable to follow. We do this through statistical learning - descriptive statistics, basically counting and tracking sounds. Test: They took the end of one word and the beginning of another word (part-word) Results: Children were surprised to see this. They can tell the difference between highly probable and low probable sequences. Test: They took the same words as they were in the training. Conclusion: When we speak, speech is continuous if one doesn't extract the right word form, it's hard to map meaning onto the words. Kids are able to track probabilities to take out the parts of sound that could be words that could be useful to eventually attach meaning.

One-To-One Correspondence

Two sets are this if each object in one set has a counterpart in the other set. If the objects in two sets are this, they are equal in number. This was one of Piaget's main evidence of difficulty in cardinality He showed children a row of objects and asked them to lay out another row with the same number. Younger children did not pair off or count the items and usually equated the rows in terms of length rather than number.

Illocutionary Intent

What a speaker means to say, even if the form of utterance is not perfectly consistent with it.

Leapfrog Narratives

When asked to relate a personally important event, 4 year olds typically produce brief renditions, jumping from one event to another in a disorganized fashion.

Underextension

When children first learn words, they sometimes apply them too narrowly. This happens very early.

Baillargeon and the Identification of Initial Concept and Variables in Infants (2000)

When learning about a new physical phenomenon, infants first form a preliminary, all-or-none concept that captures the essence of the phenomenon but few of its details. This initial concept is elaborated with experience. The tested sequences reflect not the gradual unfolding of innate beliefs, but the application of highly constrained, innate learning mechanisms to available data.

Emergentist Coalition Model

Word-learning strategies emerge out of children's efforts to decipher a language. Children draw on coalition cues that shift importance with age. Infants rely solely on perceptual cues. Toddlers increasingly attend to social cues. Further development relies on linguistic cues

Strategies for Word Learning

Young children figure out the meanings of words by contrasting them with words they already know and assigning a new label to the gap in their vocabulary. Once they acquire a basic level name, they add names at other hierarchical levels (more general and more specific).

Quotité and Quantité

Young children sometimes do not realize that the same number is equal to the same quantity. Quotité - the number words Quantité - the actual number The understanding of the children who realize that two sets of objects have the same number and yet may think that there are more objects in the more spread out set. Number words stayed the same, but they didn't realize the actual number stayed the same.

Bergelson and Swingley's Language-Guided Looking or Looking-While-Listening Experiment

Young infants can associate syllables with individual objects after laboratory training. Trial 1: Two discrete images (paired-picture trials) Trial 2: A single complex scene (scene trials) Results: 6-9mos performance on paired-picture trials was not correlated with age and performance on scene trials was negatively correlated with age. Excluding the words "eyes" or "face" made age correlation negligible. Children initially focused the target and distractor equally, then, upon hearing the target word, they shifted gaze to the named picture. Target fixation performance for younger children was below levels shown by slightly older children. Performance was stable with respect to age before 14mos and significantly better afterward. Conclusions: Inferior performance of 8-9mos on the scene trials may be traced to their tendency to fixate the eyes and face regions before the mother named any pictures (but not in paired picture trials). The lack of positive correlation with age and the consistently strong performance of the 6-7mos confirm that the word recognition performance of the 6-9mos sample cannot be attributed to older children, alone. The results reflect acquisition of linguistic knowledge and the development of social or other communicative skills. Paired picture trials showed that infants could understand words whose referents were presented in extremely stripped-down contexts (nose w/o eyes or mouth present). Scene trials showed that infants could differentiate at least some of the tested words from semantically related alternatives.

Adele Diamond and Memory v A-Not-B Error (1991)

Young infants may be capable of representation but fail Piaget's A-not-B task because they simply do not remember where the object was hidden. Test: She varied the time between switching an object from location A to B and the moment when children were allowed to reach for the hidden object. Results: When allowed to reach immediately, 7.5mos babies correctly located the object at position B, but if prevented as little as 2 seconds, they showed the A-not-B error. 9mos could withstand a delay of 5 seconds 12mos could withstand a delay of 10 seconds Conclusion: Young infants are capable of representing objects they cannot see but quickly forget their location and become confused.

Adele Diamond and Perseveration v A-Not-B Error

Young infants may exhibit the A-not-B error not only because of memory limitations but also because of a tendency to engage in motor perseveration. Some infants that make the A-not-B error look at location B but reach for location A. Babies may reach incorrectly for the object at location A because of previous success in finding it there (capture error).

German and Markman's Concept Development Experiment (1986)

showed 4yrs pairs of pictured objects and taught the child new information about the objects. The experimenter showed the child a new picture of an animal that was very perceptually similar to one of the two original pictures but shared a category label with the other. The child was asked which of the newly learned properties could be applied to the new animal. Results: Children's responses were not perceptually driven, they made inferences based on category membership. Experimental Control: Children were asked to judge the weight of each animal and made judgements based on perceptual characteristics, not on category membership. Children rely on perceptual similarity to assign category membership or to make inductions about biological properties.