midterm #1 part 2

understanding why, where, when, and how many: relations among understanding of space, time, and number

-- Piaget thought infants have a concept of bigness but don't distinguish between size, time, and number (but they actually can) -- after habituating to different displays with the same number of objects, infants dishabituate when the number of objects changes even when the space occupied and time for which they are displayed stays the same -- 9-month-olds have a greater sense of magnitude that extends to these three dimensions: were initially habituated to a particular decoration consistently accompanied the larger of two stimuli on one dimension. then the infants were presented displays in which the link between decoration and relative magnitude on a different dimension was apparent. infants dishabituated when the decoration previously accompanying the larger size now accompanied the stimulus that was smaller on another dimension but did not dishabituate when the decoration now accompanied the bigger stimulus on that new dimension. the ratios required for infants of a given age to discriminate between two stimuli are similar regardless of whether the discrimination involves time, space, or number. overlapping brain areas in the intraparietal sulcus are involved in representing all three dimensions

learning and memory: statistical learning

-- example of regularity: sound of mom's voice is accompanied by her face -- infants are highly sensitive to the regularity with which one event follows another. one study habituated 2- to 8-month-olds to six simple visual shapes that were presented one after another with specified levels of probability. in one test, the order of appearance of one or more of the shapes was changed. the infants looked longer, suggesting they had learned the order of the shapes during habituation -- newborns track statistical regularities in the domains of music, action, and speech suggesting that statistical learning mechanisms are available at birth if not before. statistical learning may also play an important role in language learning -- infants prefer patters with some variability over patterns that are perfectly predictable or very complex (random): goldilocks effect (infants preferentially attend to the patterns most informative given their learning abilities)

learning and memory: active learning

-- 16-month-olds were shown pairs of objects and asked to choose one of them by pointing. the experimenter then showed the infants the function of one of the objects in the pair: either the chosen object or the unchosen object. the researchers found that infants learned more about the object when they had chosen it themselves during the pointing task. 2-year-olds given a computerized learning task learn more about object locations when they are required to actively engage with a touchscreen than when they passively observe the screen -- surprise is a driving factor in active learning. when something unexpected happens, infants may be more likely to seek out explanations for what has just occurred. 11-month-olds observed events that violated physical laws: balls passing through walls or toys magically hanging in the air. as the infants watched these surprising events, they heard paired sounds. the infants learned more about the sound-object pairs when they did unexpected things and appeared to test hypotheses about how the surprising objects worked

Debating the Impact of Television and Video Material on Very Young Children: Attention, Learning, and the Developing Brain

-- American Academy of Pediatrics (2001) policy statement: children younger than age 2 should not watch any television or video material because the time spent viewing is time lost from more interactive and brain-enriching activities implicit in social exchanges, language, and play -- Kaiser Family Foundation 2006: on a typical day, about 60% of infants and toddlers watch television or videos for 1-2 hrs. 40% live in households where the television is on most or all the time and occasional viewing begins as early as 3 months of age. 38% of older toddlers can turn on a TV by themselves, 40% can change channels, 7% can put on a video without help, and 19% have a television in their bedrooms -- 30% of parents in a recent survey indicated that learning and brain development were among their primary reasons for providing age-appropriate videos to their infants -- research outcomes: greater readiness for school among preschoolers who watched Sesame Streets and other educational shows, positive association between viewing certain types of television content and language development -- expectation that experiences during the first 3 years can have a unique and powerful impact on brain development that cannot be readily duplicated or undone later when the sensitive period for neural plasticity has passed is a myth -- some studies suggest that extensive television viewing places infants and toddlers at risk for ADHD and poorer performance on tests of reading and short-term memory in childhood while other studies have juvenile rats raised in complex environments have more dendrites, synapses, capillary volume, and astrocytes per neuron and perform better on certain learning tasks than do control animals -- development of the alerting, orienting, and executive components of attention and the neural networks and behaviors that comprise them emerge from endogenous neurobiological processes in interaction with typical sensory, cognitive, and caregiving environments. the alerting and orienting networks that guide the direction of attention and the selection of targets are present at birth in nascent form and mature rapidly over the first 6 months. the higher order executive network provides the basis for the voluntary control of attention and behavior needed to adapt to the demands of particular situations. this network undergoes a protracted period of development with significant advances between 2 and 7 years of age (precursor components of endogenous control and self-regulation appear earlier in infancy) -- deficits in attention are attributable largely to neurological and genetic factors (social factors are of minor importance) -- concerns about TV first raised in the 1970s after the appearance of fast-paced children's programming (Sesame Street) and a correlated increase in reported attention problems in school -- Christakis et al. 2004 analyzed parent-report data from two large-scale 1990s surveys: significant correlation between amount of television children viewed at 1 and 3 years of age and subsequent attention problems that were consistent with ADHD. Zimmerman and Christakis 2007 analyzed a more recent survey: the relation between the amount of television viewed by children younger than 3 years and attention difficulties 5 years later was still significant when the content of the programs was categorized as violent or nonviolent entertainment, but when the content was educational, it was not significant. the amount and type of television viewed by 4- to 5-year-olds were unrelated to later attention. researchers suggested that exposure to the unnaturally fast pace of sound and image change in video material during this sensitive period might alter synaptic connections in the neural networks underlying attention and shorten the infant's attention span. all of this evidence is weak though due to contradicting study outcomes -- however, current research: from as early as 6 months, infants are able to regulate their attention processes during periods of extended viewing. they sustain their attention across changes in the formal features (pace, sound) of the material (especially when it is comprehensible), and coincident heart-rate decelerations and resistance to distraction during extended looking indicate that they process the material at some level. infants and toddlers frequently look away from (or habituate to) video material as toys or other competing stimuli attract their attention -- common though paradoxical finding: infants and toddlers do not readily imitate actions viewed on video media, but they will easily imitate the same actions viewed live (video deficit also seen with object retrieval, word-learning, and language recognition). perceptual, cognitive, and social immaturities make learning from video media difficult for very young children (eg. problems equating 2-D information with its corresponding 3-D source, everyday experience is that video content is not real or directed at them personally). infants and toddlers do not readily imitate from TV before their third year -- however, in other studies, 12- to 18-month-olds played more with toys they saw on television than new toys. 12-month-olds avoided toys after they saw a televised model show negative emotion toward it. 18-month-olds showed a visual preference for a toy after a televised model engaged infants in joint reference during familiarization with another toy. 18-month-olds who viewed video information related to a forgotten sequence of toy-play events had their recollection of the sequence reinstated -- infants are inherently social beings; much of their cognitive development emerges in a social context. from birth, they are increasingly sensitive and responsive to the social cues they get from others. Barr et al. 2008 showed that toddlers who viewed infant-directed videos with their parents looked longer at the videos and were more responsive (eg. vocalizing, pointing) to them when the parents provided scaffolding (descriptions, labeling, pointing) during viewing. such interactions could potentially increase comprehension and learning, especially if they are repeated. the rate of parent-child co-viewing at home is only about 50% (infants and toddlers often watch alone) -- Greenough, Black, and Wallace 1987: experience-expectant (neural and sensory systems require particular types of stimulation during certain time-restricted sensitive periods in order for optimal development to occur; species typical like vision, hearing, emotion; experience confirms early synaptic connections and provides them with functional specialization) and experience-dependent (age and time independent and allow us to adapt and learn from unique experiences across the life span; the neural changes that result from experience-dependent stimulation involve the strengthening of synaptic connections or the generation of new ones). suggest that providing a super complex environment will not necessarily yield additional benefits -- the classes of structures and functions that are experience expectant in their development are quite limited and do not include changes in the brain that result from learning new information from educational video (or books, or music, or flash cards). these changes are experience dependent and therefore are neither critical nor time restricted to the infant and toddler years -- development of the orienting network is tied to neural mechanisms in the visual system whose ubiquitous expected (required) stimuli are the targets that normally appear in the visual field. once synapses have been committed to visual and spatial orienting functions in the early postnatal months, they will not be modified (eg. rewired) by experience-dependent processes such as exposure to video images, even those that change at a pace faster than real time -- since infants and toddlers can and do regulate their attention to video and will likely look away or cry if their viewing becomes excessive or aversive, it is unlikely that there is a significant association between attention deficits and television viewing -- infants learn most effectively from live models in a direct and dynamic social context

motor development: modern views

-- Arnold Gesell and Myrtle McGraw: concluded that infants' motor development is governed by brain maturation while current theorists emphasize that early motor development results from a confluence of numerous factors that include developing neural mechanisms, increases in infants' strength, posture control, balance, and perceptual skills as well as changes in body proportions and motivation -- Esther Thelen (primary proponent of dynamic-systems point of view): in "the case of the disappearing reflex," they held infants under the arms and submerged them waist-deep in water. the stepping reflex typically disappears at about 2 months of age but Thelen thought that the infants' rapid weight gain in the first few weeks after birth may cause their legs to get heavier faster than they get stronger. when weights were put on the ankles of infants who still had the stepping reflex, they suddenly stopped stepping. infants who had stopped stepping resumed stepping when the buoyancy of the water supported their weight -- infants discover affordance (the possibilities for actions afforded by objects and situations) -- every milestone is fueled by what they can perceive of the external world and their motivation to experience more of it. motivation's role results in infants' determination to attempt to walk when they can get around more efficiently by crawling -- individual differences in motor maturity at 5 months of age predict children's academic achievement at 14 years

cognition in infancy

-- Concepts are our semantic memory and mental representations of the world. Babies have concepts (baby looks really scared when the mom blows her nose and then laughs; the baby has an expectation of how a nose should function). 2- to 4-month-old babies who move their leg tied to the mobile will kick their leg again when brought back to the mobile later because they remember what happened the first time. dishabituation does not happen if it's conceptually the same (even if it's perceptually different) for infants at 3 to 4 months old. For habituation research, you're only changing one thing to see if infants recognize the change (looking time). Occlusion is when something is blocking something else while containment is when one thing is inside the other. Infants look longer at impossible containment conditions than at possible occlusion conditions (great piece of evidence for piaget underestimating infants) at 2.5 months old. 4.5-month-olds understand that the size of the occluder matters for physically impossibility and possibility and 7.5-month-olds understand that the size of the container matters (concepts are understood in pieces). Study with a stuffed animal frog who had two legs removed to fit in the container (kids will reach for the big-enough occluder at 4.5 months and the big-enough container at 7.5 months to get the toy and be able to play with it so it's actually about cognition; same results from reaching and looking). At 3 months, infants understand that objects with no contact can't support each other. At 5 months, they understand that one object has to be on top of the other in order to support the one on top. Reaching studies show that infants reach for the actually-attainable toy (the one on top of the box instead of the one attached to the wall; the one fully supported by the box instead of the one balancing on the edge of the box that's not fully supported). Sticky-mittens study: velcro mittens give children more success with picking things up and they show better cognitive development -- concepts happen (mental representations of the world, expectations, knowledge, what is related, allow us to interact with the world; in infancy, concepts tell us what's built in and how they change over development (experience-expectant vs. experience-dependent) -- infants give nonverbal responses so research methods are habituation (impossible events, intention of actor), response recovery (memory for mobiles), action on objects (support phenomena and reaching) -- preferential looking and habituation: infants look at what they can see and what they find interesting/novel and look away when they get bored; infant sees event until habituation during familiarization trials of expected test, a new scenario is presented and the infant dishabituates. infants look longer at impossible scenarios -- occlusion vs. containment: 2.5 month olds differentiate; 4.5 month olds discriminate between possible and impossible occluder conditions; 7.5 month olds discriminate between possible and impossible containment conditions; supported by evidence with reaching for a stuffed animal frog (a more sophisticated behavior). infants don't understand containment before they understand occlusion, but if give them more experience with the concepts, they might understand them earlier (eg. Velcro mittens) -- expectations about support: contact vs. no contact, on vs. against, amount on, and shape of the object. reaching studies conducted -- infants have expectations about how objects behave and interact with a predictable order to what they learn and when, learning has some flexibility, same knowledge revealing in looking and reaching -- imitation studies: tongue protrusion studies in newborns, deferred imitation, imitating the intention but not the action. newborn infants will imitate adult expressions within a few hours of birth; deferred imitation example: human adult tries to pull the end piece of a tinker toy off, but their hand slips off. A machine tries to pull the end piece off, but it slips off. Infants later try to pull the end piece off and do so successfully because they are imitating the human's intention. If they are watching the machine, they don't try to pull the end piece off (they just play with the toy) because they are not trying to imitate the intention of the machine -- development trajectory: elaboration and refinement of basic concept (experience-based knowledge and continuity through development; gradually adding pieces step by step to refine simple concepts throughout development; tends to be in conceptual areas), developmental narrowing (start with lots of abilities, pare down to most relevant like in phonological development where infants parse continuous acoustic variations into speech sounds and infants are sensitive to non-native language distinctions -- perceptual narrowing: perception is refined by experience (Werker's findings of phoneme perception, other-race effect in face perception with 3-month-old Caucasians recognizing Caucasian, African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese faces, 6-month-olds only recognizing Caucasian and Chinese faces, and 9-month-olds only recognizing own race. infants start with a broader set of discrimination abilities than they need and they narrow down to only what they need (different languages around the world use different sound units as their building blocks and infants start out with being able to discriminate all of these sound units); narrowing tends to be in perceptual areas -- mechanisms of cognitive development in infancy: core-knowledge, specialized learning mechanisms, general learning mechanisms, no real knowledge (just perceptual/motor skills). infants are born with some aspects of cognition that are innate; learning to track statistical probabilities is a general learning mechanism -- infant cognition: no nice summary of what 6-month-old does in all domains even though there is lots of data on types of discriminations infants make in a variety of tasks at different ages. infant cognition is a relatively new study; the goal is to put all domains that we know about together into an integrated model about what an infant can do at a certain age

the baby lab

-- Elizabeth Spelke: babies come into the world mentally equipped with certain basic systems for ordering it. even at 2.5 months, infants understand that objects are cohesive and distinct and cannot pass through solid surfaces, and that they move along expected trajectories unless something obstructs them. newborns understand that things still exist when they can no longer see them. babies see others as "goal-directed" agents and naturally orient themselves in space. she conducted a study of blind or blind-folded toddlers who succeeded at moving objects from one location to another on a path different than the one they walked between the researchers. another study using habituation (bored them with one set of dots): six-month-old infants can distinguish between displays of 8 and 16 dots. a 2005 study: they can tell the difference between 16 and 32. 2-year-olds are engaged in the task of mastering encyclopedic knowledge about objects, events, places, and people. she believes that males and females are born with the same cognitive tools -- babies have to be held by parents in labs (who sometimes can't resist coaching their babies). babies are difficult research subjects because they can't speak and get distracted and uninterested easily. "fussouts" are babies who get dropped from studies for excessive crying. babies quit easily -- Charles Darwin published a baby biography in 1877 while Piaget and his wife observed their three children, sometimes minute-by-minute -- Deb Roy and Rupal Patel are videotaping the first 2-3 years of their son's life to analyze language acquisition -- preferential-looking: looking longer at one thing implied infants' ability to distinguish between two items and prefer the one they looked longer at -- Robert Fantz: put an image of black-and-white stripes next to an image of a solid gray block. infants looked longer at the stripes. the stripes narrowed until they blended into gray and the infants couldn't tell the difference. people used Fantz's preferential-looking study to discover: infants differentiate between colors (and preferred red) and could distinguish between facial expressions -- Frances Horowitz: visual habituation studies -- Spelke's violation-of-expectancy studies with looking time: ball rolling across the stage with an obstruction in the middle. screen lowers. ball is either resting against the obstruction or rolling away on the other side of it. stick blocked by wooden barrier and moving across the stage: infants surprised (stared thirty seconds longer) if they see that the stick is actually two sticks (common movement) -- looking time only reveals knowledge understood by attentional systems -- Rebecca Rosenberg's study: two-year-olds are shown a cabinet with a shelf in the middle and a sliding door that conceals the front. a ball gets dropped with the door closed and the 2-year-olds forget about the shelf. only at 3 years do they understand that the ball would be on the shelf -- adults can't describe verbally the path a ball takes or draw it but can grab the ball from its ending location after it rolls around and around a circular ramp -- can't use an MRI on babies because they don't lie flat and still unless they are sleeping -- Eleanor Gibson's visual cliff: platform was 3-feet-high -- Piaget thought intermodal perception was developed in toddlerhood; Spelke's study showed babies two films on side-by-side screens while playing the soundtrack for just one of them. babies looked longer at the one for which the soundtrack matched -- Spelke and Susan Hespos: korean speakers distinguish between loose and tight fitting while English does not. 5-month-old babies living in English-speaking households differentiated loose and tight fitting through looking time -- study: Mundurukí in the Amazon have a sense of geometry for navigation without physical or linguistic representations of it. they also have a core concept of addition and subtraction -- study: 12-month-olds are more likely to choose food offered by a stranger who speaks their parents' language even if they are not speaking it at that time -- Spelke: males and females prefer different geometric strategies -- 2006 study: Ethiopian infants raised in Israel showed no preference for faces of people from either race

perception: overview and vision

-- Habituation paradigm example: do infants recognize the difference between solids and liquids? Familiarization phase/habituation part involves rotating the liquid around in the glass (some children saw a blob of solid blue stuff not moving in the glass that the researcher was moving in the same way). Looking time goes down a little bit (habituation). They transfer a liquid or solid from one glass to the other (switched whether it was liquid or solid) and the child dishabituated if the liquid switched to a solid (so infants do recognize the difference between solids and liquids). Perception is an active, meaning-making inference process. William James, the founder of functionalism school of psychology, thought infants came into the world without any innate perception tools. Infants prefer things they can actually see well with their immature visual perception, infants don't integrate depth perception until they start to produce locomotion themselves. Visual cliff: one side of plexiglass is painted and the other side is transparent so the novice crawler is not wary of having to cross the transparent side while the crawler has been crawling for a month is hesitant about crossing the transparent side to their parent. This was tried across species (humans were born immature while baby mountain goats were born mature. Baby mountain goats try to jump over the visual cliff because they are ready to do that while baby turtles try to dive into it). Size constancy (just because an object is close to your face, that doesn't mean it's bigger than the same object far away) shown from the first week of life. Infants perceive common fate and good continuation movement. -- newborns are legally blind, 0-6 months (high contrast, low spatial frequency, motion), 6 months-14 years (fine gradations, example: face perception), limited visual acuity in newborns, actively explore environment, depth perception (influenced by physical abilities, visual cliff), prefer patterned to plain stimuli, preference for human faces, size and shape constancy from first week of life, boundary issues with motion and spatial arrangement -- William James: the newborn's world is a "big blooming, buzzing confusion." however, modern research has shown that infants come into the world with all their sensory systems functioning to some degree and that subsequent development occurs rapidly. sensation is the processing of basic information from the external world by receptors in the sense organs (eyes, ears, skin) and the brain. perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information about the objects, events, and spatial layout of the world around us -- newborns do not see as clearly as adults do, but their vision improves extremely rapidly in their first months -- infants can't understand or respond to instructions so the preferential-looking technique was created by Fantz: two different visual stimuli are displayed side by side. if an infant looks longer at one of the two stimuli, the researcher can infer that the baby can discriminate between them and prefers one over the other. Fantz established that newborns would rather look at something than at nothing. when a pattern of any sort was paired with a plan surface (solid gray field), the infants looked longer at the pattern. modern version: automatic eye trackers that use a camera to measure eye movements via infrared light reflection to detect where on a screen infants are looking. they also use head-mounted infant-eye trackers that show where infants are looking as they move their eyes freely around the room -- another method is habituation: repeatedly presenting an infant with a particular stimulus until the infant habituates and their response declines. at that point, a novel stimulus is presented. if the infant dishabituates (their response increases) in response to the novel stimulus, the researcher infers that the baby can discriminate between the old and new stimuli -- visual acuity and color perception: preferential-looking method allows researchers to assess visual acuity (determine how sharply or clearly infants can see). in adults and children, acuity is measured using eye charts with letters and numbers. young infants generally prefer to look at patterns of high visual contrast (such as a black-and-white checkerboard) because they have poor contrast sensitivity (can detect a pattern only when it is composed of highly contrasting elements) -- one reason for infants' poor contrast sensitivity: immaturity of their cone cells. newborns' cones are spaced 4 times farther apart than adults' cones, and they catch only about 2% of the light striking the fovea compared with 65% for adults. in their first month, babies have only about 20/120 vision (a level of acuity that would enable an adult to read only the large E at the top of a standard eye chart). visual acuity develops so rapidly that by 8 months of age, infants' acuity approaches that of adults. for the first month, newborns do not appear to perceive differences between white and color. by 2 months of age, infants' color vision is similar to that of adults and prefer colors that are unique hues over colors that combine hues. a study of color perception focused on infants who do not yet have words for colors. the researchers used fNIRS to determine whether 5-month-old infants categorize colors the same way adults do. like adults, infants' brains responded to a change from a color in one category to a new color in a different category but not to a new color in the same category. infants' brains represent at least some color categories prior to learning the labels for colors -- visual scanning: newborns start scanning the environment right away and are especially attracted to moving stimuli but their eye movements are jerky. at 4 months, they are able to track slow-moving objects smoothly because they developed the use of smooth pursuit eye movements (gaze shifts at the same speed and angle as a moving object). development is a function of maturation because preterm infants develop smooth visual tracking later than full-term infants. when presented with a simple figure like a triangle, infants younger than 2 months old look almost exclusively at one corner. with more complex shapes like faces, they tend to scan only the outer edges. when 1-month-olds look at a line drawing of a face, they tend to fixate on the perimeter (on the hairline or chin) where there is relatively high contrast with the background. by 2 months, infants scan much more broadly (they pay attention to internal features). at 4 months of age, before the onset of productive speech, infants fixate on the eyes of the talking face but after they being babbling, they fixate on the speaker's mouth. bilingual infants show this shift earlier than do infants acquiring just a single language. bilingual infants learning two similar-sounding languages pay even more attention to the talker's mouth -- infants' face perception: infants are drawn to face-like shapes and configurations with more elements in the upper half than in the lower half. studies show that newborn humans are equally interested in human faces and monkey faces as long as they are presented right-side up. after exposure to their mother over the first few days after birth, infants look longer at her face than at the face of another woman. over the next months, infants develop a preference for faces depicting the gender of the caregiver they see most often. studies with infant head cameras: for their first few months, infants view faces for 1/4 the time they are awake. researchers in Toronto found that 70% of these faces were female and 96% were the same race as the infant. similar statistics were observed for infants living in Hangzhou, China. the heavy focus on faces decreases with age, dropping to 5 minutes of every hour by the end of the first year. at that point, infants are more focused on hands and the objects they manipulate. perceptual narrowing shapes face perception: infants become face specialists. study shows adults, 9-month-olds, and 6-month-olds could all readily discriminate between two human faces but only the 6-month-olds could discriminate between monkey faces. 6-month-olds are still generalists while 9-month-olds have become specialists for human faces. the other-race effect emerges in infancy. while newborns show no preference for own-race faces over other-race faces, 3-month-old white, African, and Chinese infants prefer own-race faces. by 9 months, infants have more difficulty discriminating between other-race faces than between own-race faces. infants appear to learn more in experimental tasks where the information is provided by an own-race face than by an other-race face. however, 3-month-old African emigrants to Israel who were exposed to both African and white caregivers showed equal interest in African and white faces. a study suggests that the facial-scanning abilities of biracial infants who are exposed to the facial features characteristic of two races in the home are more mature than those of mono racial infants. manipulation of experience through picture books or videos providing additional other-race experience can alter or reverse perceptual narrowing effects. infants prefer to look at faces judged by adults to be attractive. this preference also impacts infants' behavior toward real people as demonstrated by a study where 12-month-olds interacted with an experimenter whose face was either very attractive or very unattractive (determined by professional masks on one person). infants were more positive and playful when she was wearing the attractive mask. infant preferences for non-faces, particularly geometric shapes, may provide an early indication that the infant will eventually be diagnosed with autism. an eye-tracking study found that autistic toddlers preferred a display of geometric shapes over a display of dynamic human images. autistic toddlers who most strongly preferred the geometric images had poorer language, cognitive, and social abilities than other autistic toddlers. another eye-tracking study showed that autistic toddlers looked at faces half as often -- object perception: perceptual constancy is perceiving a constant shape and size even as the object moves closer and farther away. one study had newborns be repeatedly shown either a large or a small cube at varying distances (the cube's actual size remained the same while the retinal image projected by the cube changed from one trial to the next). then, if infants look longer at the larger but farther-away cube, researchers conclude that the child has size constancy because even though both had the same-size retinal image, the infant perceived the farther-away cube as different and larger. object segregation is the perception of the boundaries between objects. infants treat the independent motion of any object as a signal that they are separate entities. 4-month-olds were presented with a display that could be perceived either as two pieces of a rod moving on each end of a block of wood or as a single rod moving behind the block. adults perceive this as a single rod, and the infants also perceived this as a single rod because of common movement, looking longer at the broken rod because it would be relatively novel. 4-month-olds who saw a stationary rod looked equally long at both possibilities. newborns do not appear to make use of common movement as a cue to object identity. 8-month-olds look longer if a box and tube move together when the tube is on the bottom surface because they're surprised, but they look longer if only the tube moves when pulled when the tube is not on the surface. 4.5-month-olds who have been previously familiarized with the objects also exhibit the adult like interpretation/perception. eye-tracking study found that 7-month-old white infants growing up in the UK were more likely to focus on mouths while East Asian infants growing up in Japan were more likely to focus on eyes. American 2-year-olds pay more attention to objects while Chinese 2-year-olds pay more attention to actions when viewing a dynamic scene. parents in East Asian countries are more likely than parents in the US to label actions -- object knowledge: young infants will reach for objects in the dark (the location they last saw the object). when 6-month-olds sitting in the dark heard the sound of a familiar large object, they reach toward it with both hands, but they reach with only one hand when the sound was that of a familiar small object. violation-of-expectancy procedure studies: infants were habituated to the sight of a solid screen rotating back and forth through a 180-degree arc. then, a box was placed in the screen's path, and the infants saw two test events. in the possible event, the screen rotated upward, occluding the box as it did so, and stopped when it contacted the box. in the impossible event, the screen continued to rotate a full 180 degrees, appearing to pass through the space occupied by the box. infants as young as 3.5 months looked longer at the impossible event. infants who do not yet search for hidden objects nevertheless can represent their continued existence -- depth perception: optical expansion is when the visual image of an object increases in size as it comes toward us, occluding more and more of the background. when the object expands symmetrically, we know it is headed right for us and infants will blink in response to prevent the object from hitting their open eyes. infants as young as 1 month old blink defensively. brain maturation is involved (premature infants show a delayed development of defensive blinking). stereopsis emerges at around 4 months (is complete within a few weeks) and produces perception of depth through the visual cortex computing the degree of disparity between the eyes' differing neural signals. strabismus is a disorder in which the two eyes do not line up in the same direction and children whose strabismus is not treated before age 3 are at risk for lifelong challenges in binocular vision. at 6 or 7 months, infants become sensitive to monocular depth cues/pictorial cues. study had 5- and 7-month-olds wear a patch over one eye while viewing a trapezoidal window with one side considerably longer than the other. only the 7-month-olds reach toward the longer side (perceived it as being nearer, just like adults do) -- picture perception: study did not expose baby to pictures. still, when tested at 18 months, the child readily identified people and objects in photographs and line drawings. infants as young as 5 months can recognize people and objects in photographs and drawings. even newborns can recognize 2-d versions of 3-d objects. 9-month-olds habituated to a 3-d object do not dis habituate when shown a 2-d image of the same object. 9-month-olds do not understand what 2-d means, attempting to treat pictured objects as if they were real and 3-d (eg. try to pick up). more likely to try to grab images that look real than those that don't (photographs vs. line drawings) and more likely to try to grab actual objects. by 19 months of age, American infants no longer manually investigate pictures. a study showed Canadian toddlers and preschoolers having a better ability to match line drawings to their toy objects than rural Indian and Peruvian toddlers and preschoolers. toddlers from rural Tanzania without exposure to pictures had greater difficulty than North American toddlers in generalizing the names of objects in color photographs to the objects themselves. by age 2, toddlers are as good at learning labels for objects via video chat as they are from in-person interactions, probably because both of these sources of information provide contingent interactions. when toddlers are given the same information via non contingent interactions (like watching a TV show), they do not learn as well

learning and memory: observational learning/imitation

-- Meltzoff and Moore found that after newborns watch an adult model slowly and repeatedly stick out their tongue, the newborns often stick out their own tongues. however, there has been a back-and-forth between researchers failing to replicate findings and pointing out flaws -- by the second half of their first year, infants begin to imitate more complex actions. in one study, infants observed an experimenter performing unusual behaviors with objects like touching a box with their head that caused the box to light up. infants as young as 6 to 9 months imitated some of those behaviors even after a delay of 24 hours. 14-month-olds imitated those behaviors a full week after first seeing them -- in choosing to imitate a model, infants seem to analyze the reason for the person's behavior. if a model says she's cold and uses her hands to wrap a shawl around her body as she touches a box with her forehead, infants touch the box with their hand -- research on infants' attention to intention had 18-month-olds observe an adult attempting, but failing, to pull apart a small dumbbell toy. infants pulled the two ends apart -- a group of 18-month-olds watched a mechanical device with pincers grasp the two ends of the dumbbell and try to pull apart the dumbbell. the infants rarely attempted to pull apart the dumbbell themselves -- mirror neurons: neurons in the premotor cortex that fire as though the infant is themself doing an action that they are observing; mu rhythm is characteristic of the mirror neuron system. 7-month-olds whose brains showed greater mu rhythm while observing an experimenter produce a goal-directed action were later more likely to reproduce the action -- infants learn grit (how hard to try at a given task) through observation. a study had 15-month-olds watch as an adult experimenter completed two simple tasks (removing a lid from a container and removing a toy from a keychain). in one condition, the experimenter struggled to complete the tasks, visibly exerting effort while persisting. the other condition had the experimenter quickly and effortlessly complete both goals. the infants were then given a new, difficult task to complete (pushing a hidden button to make a toy play music). the infants who had seen the first condition tried harder and longer to get the toy to play music

learning and memory: rational learning

-- using prior experience to generate expectations about what will happen next; integrating the learner's prior beliefs and biases with what actually occurs in the environment -- Xu and Garcia 2008 demonstrated that 8-month-old infants could make predictions about simple events. infants were shown a box containing 75 ping-pong balls; 70 were red and 5 were white. the infants then observed an experimenter close her eyes and draw 5 balls from the box (either 4 red and 1 white or 4 white and 1 red). the infants looked longer when there were 4 white balls. infants did not show that surprise when it was clear the balls came from the experimenter's pocket or when the red balls were clearly stuck to the box -- 16-month-olds confronted with a toy that doesn't work use prior experience to interpret their failure. if the infants had previously seen other people fail to operate the toy, they chose a new toy to play with. however, if the infants had seen other people succeed in operating the toy, the infants passed the toy to their caregivers

theories of concept development

-- Piaget's theory (physical interactions with objects help them learn about concepts), sociocultural theories (social world influences conceptual development; human spark - tomasello), information-processing empiricist approach (conceptual knowledge develops via basic processing skills and domain-general mechanism), and core-knowledge nativist theories (infants have biological predisposition to form concepts, domain-specific conceptual predispositions, human spark - povinelli). but other primates do have some concepts like an object concept. piaget said children learn concepts through interacting with and acting on their environment (constructivist) - sociocultural theories say you watch how other people interact with surrounds and internalize what they're doing (Vygotsky: external to internal) - Mike Tomasello gets interviewed: a researcher shows a child how to play with a toy. The polar bear puppet plays with it differently and the child tells it that it is playing with it incorrectly and shows it how to play with it correctly. The child is shown the correct and incorrect ways to play with something and tries to get the puppet to play with it correctly. Mainly children wait and trust the adults to show how to do something but sometimes they demonstrate piagetian behavior (figuring out how to do something through interacting with it). After being shown how adults do it, the child will change how they do something to match the adult method. information-processing: increasing memory; have processing skills and you refine your processes over time. core-knowledge: what's built in with regard to predisposition to forming concepts? Some evidence for being hardwired to extract abstract conceptual information (comparing humans and other animals: study by Danny of children and nonhuman primates/chimps. Apollo the chimp gets mad when he doesn't put the light object in the correct tray. Took 800 trials on average (fewest is 400 trials) to figure out how to sort heaviness and lightness (their bodies figure out what to do but they don't realize they could make generalizations). The 3-year-old child used mutual exclusivity to sort heavy and light in less than one trial. Candy the chimp gets to feel which ball is heavier before figuring out which one to roll down the ramp first (fails to figure that out). The child figures it out on the first time (using the heavier one and knowing it was stronger but being unable to articulate why). Humans are hardwired to figure out the differences between stimuli. However, primates do have concepts (like object permanence)

Scientific American Frontiers - Born to Talk video

-- Pinker's study: 3-year-old Peter learns the label "wug" for a stuffed animal creature and makes it plural for two of the same. he also learns to pronounce "toma" and makes it plural for two of the same stuffed animal creatures -- we put together sentences on the fly; don't have them preprogrammed in (grammatical rules in our head that allow us to string words together to convey words in brand new thoughts) -- Erin learns how to apply "ed" to a made-up verb (eg. channed) that is associated with an action applied to Cookie Monster -- when children use a rule when they shouldn't: a story is given to Erin and she repeats it to a stuffed lion with its ears covered by earmuffs (she says bringed instead of brought because she feels like she's under time pressure) -- no language is in the genes but the ability to acquire language might be in the genes

the process of language acquisition: preparation for production

-- at 6 to 8 weeks of age, infants begin to coo, click, smack, blow raspberries, squeal and to engage in dialogues of reciprocal cooing with caregivers -- babbling: begins between 6 and 10 months (on average, at 7 months); consonant-vowel syllable strings; deaf infants regularly exposed to signed languages babble with their hands (repetitive hand movements made up of pieces of full signs); gradually takes on the sounds, rhythm, and intonational patterns of the language infants hear or see daily. adult listeners were unable to tell from the babbles of English-learning and Chinese-learning 12-month-olds which language they were learning -- early interactions: turn-taking is facilitated by parent-infant games (peekaboo and giving and taking objects; infant alternates between active and passive role). babbling provides a signal that the infant is attentive and ready to learn (babbling right before an adult labels an object helps learning the label). intersubjectivity required (mutual understanding and joint attention). by 12 months of age, infants have begun to understand the communication of pointing (many able to also point themselves)

language development: overview and the components of language

-- can't have whole store of languages built in at birth. some components cut across languages (creative, referential - not one-to-one mapping, interpersonal, structured with most of language learning research being about how children learn this structure). creative/generative: you can put combinations of words together and create a meaningful sentence; referential (words refer to categories or more general conceptual representations); interpersonal (detailed notes that no one else can understand don't count as a language); structure (rule-governed order). in every culture, people use language (in vs. on may be an important distinction depending on the language); Kanzi and other non-human primates don't achieve beyond a toddler level of speaking; Alex the parrot; Rocky the sea lion; children learn language better than adults and reach understanding faster; basic knowledge/mechanics/rules for their language is achieved by age 5. children use it as well as adults, are better at learning it than adults (5-year-olds have mastered its basic structure), and humans are the only ones who have achieve a "full-fledged" language so its species-specific. phonological development (knowledge of sound systems), semantic development (knowledge about sound meaning, words and other morphemes, morphology or how words are created to convey meaning), syntactic development (knowledge about how words are put together and permissible rules like grammar), metalinguistic knowledge (understanding of properties and function of language), and pragmatic development (knowledge about how language is used like cultural rules). phonemes are smallest units of sound that distinguishes utterances with meaning (doesn't just map onto letters; 40 phonemes in English so some letters have more than one phoneme ("sh" is a phoneme); "g" and "z" sounds can't go together in English; kids can pick up sound boundaries quickly (what phoneme combinations can go together at the beginning of words and what can go together in the middle of words"; understanding happens before children can produce something themselves (with sound combinations, meaning, etc.); babies can learn signing/gestures before producing language (makes parent-child communication easier, doesn't speed up the process of language production); semantic involves what meanings map onto what sounds; pragmatic is how the language is used in this particular situation (eg. turn-taking, don't talk over each other) -- overview: by 5 years of age, most children have mastered the basic structure of their native language or languages, whether spoken or manually signed. their sentences tend to be as grammatically correct as the ones that adults produce -- requires comprehension (understanding what others say) and production (saying something yourself) -- the components of language: generative system (using a finite set of words and our knowledge of the systematic ways in which those words can be combined, we can generate an infinite number of sentences, expressing an infinite number of ideas) -- speech is composed of units of sound called phonemes (smallest units of meaningful sound). English uses just 45 of the roughly 200 sounds found across the world's languages. smallest units of meaning are called morphemes. syntax refers to the permissible combinations of words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives). pragmatics is the understanding of how language is typically used in a specific cultural context -- more than 200 sign languages; basic linguistic elements are hand shapes and motions rather than sounds

understanding who or what: dividing objects into categories

-- category hierarchies (basic levels like dog with consistent characteristics, superordinate level like animal with less perceptual similarity among members, and subordinate level like beagle that is basic level plus extra characteristics). infants 3-4 months dishabituate when shown multiple exemplars from one basic level category. early categories based on perceptual similarity. categorization needed for concept development. 3- and 5-month-olds can categorize (was tested with habituation and extracted prototype from exemplars meaning they have some form of concept). categorize at both basic and superordinate levels early on (7 month olds: group 1 had the same stuffed animal at habituation, group 2 had different stuffed animals for each trial until habituation, and group 3 had a set of unrelated objects. evidence of prototypes for basic and superordinate). perceptual categorization (grouping by similar appearances like color, size, movement; by 3 months, can even do motion with point light displays; by age 1, function of objects too). 18 months focus on specific parts of objects, not the whole objects like wings to be a bird. around 2 years, infants focus on overall shape and function, integrating multiple types of information. labeling promotes categorization: study with 3- and 4-month-olds used English phrases and tone patterns with the preferential looking technique and habituation. by 3 months, language promotes categorization in a way that tones do not, and it can't be word meaning. the effect is specific to being complex and naturalistic due to study with lemur calls and backwards speech. the link between language and categories emerges as early as 3 months. words interact with concepts (guide infant expectations and invite them to form categories). not merely an association. cannot be attributed to meaning. developmental narrowing (lemur calls drop out at 6 months but native language still facilitates category formation). words are continuing invitations to form categories (2-year-olds are not great at making inferences for atypical category members based only on perception. add a language label to the category and the problem disappears). type of word affects category formed (nouns are interpreted as superordinate while adjectives are interpreted as subordinate). superordinate level is above the basic level (default, privileged level in cognition) in category hierarchies. even infants at 3 months of age can categorize at the superordinate level but it takes more trials to express/show habituation. perceptual grouping: point light displays with morph suits used for testing categorization of motion; 18 month olds have a hard time with atypical members of a group (like emus being birds). at the end of the first year, words are huge for how infants conceptualize a new object (study shows that infants don't extract the category if you don't use the same label and instead use an attention protocol or a changing label; they will dishabituate at the apple and not dishabituate at the cat (show a preference for the apple) if the same label is used. tone sequence set up with the same cadence and tone as the spoken sentences and labeling word during familiarization shows that infants don't dishabituate at the correct moment (don't prefer the fish over the dinosaur) for a sound that is not a word. is it just human speech? Because 3-month-old infants don't have word meaning so they studied backward speech (same amount of complexity but doesn't sound as naturalistic) and Lemur calls (sound naturalistic but don't have familiarity of human speech). At 3 months, they categorize based on lemur calls but not based on backwards human speech (so speech has to be naturalistic instead of complex or familiar). 2-year-olds use words to help with atypical members of a category (this is the concept you should be adding this new object to) -- divide-and-conquer strategy (divide into inanimate objects, people, and other animals). innumerable specific strategies (vehicles, tools, furniture, etc.) that get organized into category hierarchies (set-subset relations) -- categorization of objects in infancy: when 3- and 4-month-olds were shown a series of photographs of cats, they habituated to the general category of cats, looking at novel cat photos for less and less time. however, when they were subsequently shown a picture of another animal, they dishabituated (their looking time increased). study: 6-month-olds habituated after repeatedly being shown pictures of different types of mammals and then dishabituated when they were shown a picture of a bird or fish. prior to this study, few, if any, of the infants would have seen zebras or elephants so the distinction had to be made on the basis of their appearance. infants frequently use perceptual categorization (the grouping together of objects that have somewhat similar appearances; perceptual dimensions include color, size, and movement). their categorization is often based on specific parts of an object than it as a whole. infants younger than 18 months rely heavily on the presence of wheels to categorize objects as vehicles. during their second year, children increasingly categorize objects on the basis of overall shape -- categorization of objects beyond infancy: category hierarchies (superordinate level, then basic level below, then subordinate level below that. basic level is the one children usually learn first, which is not surprising because it has a lot of consistent characteristics that help with discrimination. very young children's basic categories do not always match those of adults; example: young children group cars, motorcycles, and buses as objects with wheels. parents and others use children's basic level categories as a foundation for explaining superordinate (collective for examples infants already know) and subordinate categories (examples of categories infants already know) by using statements that specify relations among categories of objects -- causal understanding and categorization: even in their first months, infants have a rudimentary understanding of causal interactions among objects like gravity, inertia, and support (increase during their first year). at 3 months, infants look longer if a box that is released in midair remains suspended. as long as there is any contact between the box and the support, 3-month-olds do not react when the box remains stationary. by 5 months, infants appreciate the relevance of the type of contact in the support (box has to be released on top). a month later, they recognize the importance of the amount of contact, looking longer when the box stays put with only a small portion of contact. after their 1st birthday, infants also take into account the shape of the object. five-month-olds look longer at an object that travels more slowly as it rolls down a slope than at one that picks up speed as it descends. they also seem to know that an object cannot pass through a grid with openings smaller than the object, though liquids can. toddlers and preschoolers are notorious for their endless questions about causes and reasons. researchers told 4- and 5-year-olds about two categories of imaginary animals: wugs and gillies. some were only given physical descriptions (wugs usually have claws on their feet, spikes on the end of their tails, horns on their heads, and armor on their backs while gillies have wings, big ears, long tails, and long toes). other children were given the same physical descriptions and a simple causal story explaining why wugs and gillies are the way they are (wugs like to fight while gillies like to hide in trees from the wugs). then, the children were shown the pictures and asked to correctly identify the wug and the gillie, and children told the causal reason for the physical characteristics did better at classifying the pictures into the appropriate categories and did better at remembering the categories the next day

understanding why, where, when, and how many: causality`

-- causal understanding ("why" helps children learn categories, make links based on common causality, allows more abstract qualities like function and core properties that go beyond perceptual commonalities). Wugs (fight) and gillies (run away): given a "why" to help with understanding the novel concept -- David Hume: causal connections unite discrete events into coherent wholes by being "the cement of the universe." nativists propose infants possess an innate causal module for extracting causal relations from events they observe. empiricists propose that infants' causal understanding arises from their observations of innumerable events in the environment and the effects of their actions -- causal reasoning in infancy: by 6 months, infants perceive causal connections among physical events. 6- to 10-month-olds were shown video clips in which a moving object collided with a stationary object and the stationary object immediately moved in the expected way, and infants habituated. videos of the stationary object moving slightly before it was struck had infants looking longer at them. when 9- to 11-month-olds are shown causally-related actions, they can usually reproduce the actions but do not reliably reproduce causally unrelated actions until at 20 to 22 months. 19- and 24-month-olds were shown a box called a blicket detector that the experimenter explained played music when a blicket was placed on it. the experimenter placed two objects on the blicket detector and music played. the experimenter then placed only one object and no music played. children were asked to turn on the blicket detector and only 24-month-olds consistently chose the second object. study of 1- and 2-year-olds' tool use: toddlers were shown a toy on a table out of reach. between the child and the toy were six tools varying in length and type of head. the 2-year-olds succeeded more often at obtaining the toy because they used a tool, chose the optimal tool, and generalized what they learned from the first problem -- causal reasoning during the preschool period: when 4-year-olds see a potential cause produce an effect inconsistently, they infer that some variable they cannot see must cause the effect, but when the same effect occurs consistently, they do not infer that a hidden variable was important. most 3- and 4-year-olds fail to see the point of magic tricks, but by age 5, they become fascinated with them (even astonishing events must have causes) -- magical thinking and fantasy: most 4- to 6-year-olds believe they can influence other people by wishing them into doing something, that getting in good with Santa Claus can make their hopes come true, and that monsters might hurt them. experiment: preschoolers were told that a certain box was magical and that if they paced a drawing into it and said magical words, the object would appear. the children were visibly disappointed when this didn't happen. limited belief in magic: experimenter showed preschoolers an empty box, closed it, and then asked them to imagine a pencil inside it. when the experimenter asked if there was a pencil in the box, the children said yes but when an adult entered the room and said she needed a pencil for work, few children opened the box. the more children know about real causes, the less likely they are to explain them in magical terms. study: many 9-year-olds and some adults reverted to magical explanations when confronted with a difficult-to-explain trick. some adults believe in ghosts. 0 of 17 college students were willing to allow someone who was said to be a witch to cast an evil spell on their lives. adults generate supernatural explanations for improbable events more often than children

the process of language acquisition: first words

-- comprehension of words before first year. production of words around age 1. earliest words are names of objects. naming explosion happens at 18-20 months with over 100 words in contrast to 10-20 words at 10-16 months. word learning shows "fast mapping" because infants only need one exposure to an unfamiliar word in contrast with a known word. assumptions: whole object assumption (gavagai means rabbit, not rabbit ear) and mutual exclusivity assumption (each object has only one name). social cues (adult's eye gaze: what the adult is looking at when uttering the name even when children can't see object and intention - whether the adult has seemed to intentionally refer to something - and emotional reaction). perceptual cues (shape bias for solid objects extends the name of a novel count noun to other objects matching in shape while material bias for nonsolid entities extends the name of a novel mass noun to other masses that match in material. linguistic cues (syntactic bootstrapping: learn the word based on the syntax of the sentence in which it is embedded like "this is some pilk" referring to a noun and "this is pilking" referring to a verb). learning verbs (relations dependent on context while object names usually don't. difficulty learning novel verbs unless already know names of all objects involved. verb production rare before appearance of multiword utterances. cross-cultural/cross-linguistic variations based on language characteristics and social interactions). first words by 12 months; naming explosion has multiple words being learned every day even without much experience with those words. whole object assumption (hear a novel word, you think it means the whole object), mutual exclusivity (if they already know what a dog is and you have both a dog and something they don't know, they will associate the word "manatee" with the thing they didn't already have a word for; a 1.5 year old named Andres and a 2 year old know what a duck is so they associate the new word with the other object), adult eye gaze (is the adult looking at thing they are naming? Adult looks into a bucket as they name the object so the child can't see it, but the child still knows what the object is named when it is taken out of the bucket because of the adult gaze), emotional reaction (adult doesn't name the object but says they are looking for it and gets excited when they see it). - perceptual cues: we've got count nouns (eg. a computer) and mass noun (eg. rice, water, paint). If you are talking about a solid object, children in North America map the word onto the shape of the object. If you are talking about a mass noun (non-solid substance), children in North America map the word onto the substance of the object (not the shape). syntactic bootstrapping: mapping meaning based on whether it is a verb, noun, adjective. verbs in English are more challenging to learn so when learning verbs, children's default assumption in the West is that the new word (even if it is a verb) means the unknown object -- early word recognition: when 6-month-olds hear "mommy" or "daddy," they look toward an image of the appropriate person. a study showed infants pairs of pictures of common foods and body parts and tracked their eye gaze when one of the pictures was named. even 6-month-olds looked to the correct picture significantly more often than chance but most parents reported that their babies did not know the words' meanings. parents think that their autistic toddlers understand fewer words than they actually do as measured by sensitive eye-tracking tasks. 15-month-olds waited until they had heard the whole word to look at the target object but 24-month-olds looked at the correct object after hearing only the first part of its label like adults do. toddlers learning a language that has a grammatical gender system can use the gender of the article preceding the noun to speed their recognition of the noun itself -- early word production: first word is any specific utterance consistently used to refer to or express a meaning. early words may differ from their corresponding adult forms (eg. woof for dog). infants produce their first words between 10 and 15 months of age (mispronounced: difficult bits are left out or easier sounds are substituted for hard-to-say ones, sometimes reorder words to put an easier sound at the beginning). often refer to family members, specific people, sound effects, pets, important objects, frequent routines, important modifiers (mine, hot, all gone). first, they produce one-word utterances. then, they overextend (eg. use dog for any four-legged animal). also exhibit under extension (think dog refers only to their own dog) -- word learning: children typically reach a vocabulary of 50 words by 18 months. then, rate of learning seems to accelerate, leading to a vocabulary spurt. adult influences on word learning: the amount and quality of talking by caregivers that children hear predicts how many words they learn (adults use IDS, stress or repeat new words, play naming games asking the child to point to items, choose optimal naming moments). new words that are used in very distinct contexts are produced earlier than words used across a range of contexts. toddlers are better at learning the names for solid substances but do better at learning the names for non-solids when seating in a high chair where they frequently encounter non-solid food. infants learn the names of objects more readily when the objects are presented in predictable locations -- language development and socioeconomic status: study recorded the speech that 42 parents (upper-middle class, working class, on welfare) used with their infants over the course of 2.5 years. the average child whose parents were on welfare received half as much IDS linguistic experience (616 words per hr) than the working-class parents' child and less than 1/3 of the average child in a professional family. after 4 years, upper-middle class children would have heard 45 million words, working-class children would have heard 26 million, and children on welfare would have heard 13 million. more questions and conversations are initiated in the higher-income families. children from higher-SES families have larger vocabularies. children whose mothers talked more to them at 18 months were faster at recognizing words at 24 months than were children whose mothers provided less input. one study of low-income Spanish-speaking families in California: 19-month-olds who heard more speech had larger vocabularies and were faster at processing words 6 months later. one study of low-income toddlers: richness of communicative context (joint engagement, routines and rituals, and fluency) predicted children's language attainment a year later (better predictor than amount of speech heard). children who experienced higher-quality language input (more turn-taking) showed greater activation in brain language areas and increased cortical surface area in left-hemisphere language regions. toddlers have more difficulty learning new words in noisy environments (which is more likely for children living in poverty). when preschool children with low language skills are placed in classrooms with peers who also have low language skills, they show less language growth than do their counterparts who are placed with classmates who have high language skills. one study: children whose preschool teachers used a rich vocabulary showed better reading comprehension in 4th grade than did children whose preschool teachers used a more limited vocabulary. studies: primary care physicians can influence language outcomes by modeling and promoting reading to young children. reach out and read out provides books during pediatrician visits and bookmarks with age-specific reading advice to parents. another intervention: parents increased both the quality and quantity of talk with their children while shopping in the low-SES neighborhood with the signs. other interventions: enhanced parental input and larger child vocabularies from individualized coaching of parents. providence talks and the thirty million words initiative: provide parents with recording devices that track how much they speak to their baby so that they can monitor and increase their amount of speech -- children's contributions to word learning: mutual exclusivity (expect that a given entity will only have one name; study: 2-year-olds saw one familiar and one unfamiliar object. when the experimenter said "show me the blicket," they mapped the label to the unfamiliar object; bilingual and trilingual infants are less likely to do this and are unsurprised when an object has more than one name). whole-object assumption (expect a novel word to refer to a whole object rather than a part of it; Quine's rabbit problem had children mapping "bunny" onto the whole animal). pragmatic cues (example: use an adult's focus of attention as a cue to word meaning; Baldwin 1993: experimenter concealed two new objects in separate containers and peeked while saying "there's a modi in here" to 18-month-olds who picked the right object when asked for it; example: use adult's emotional response; a researcher announced her intention to "find the gazzer" and then gleefully picked up an object that the infant inferred was the gazzer; preschool children will accept the label an adult uses intentionally even if it conflicts with the child's prior label). linguistic context (Roger Brown 1957: showed preschool children a picture of two hands kneading a mass of material and was described as sibbing, a sib, or some sib and infants interpreted sibbing as the action, a sib as the container, and some sib as the mass of material). object shape (children readily extend a novel noun to novel objects of the same shape and recognize familiar words based on shape). repeated correspondence between heard words and observed objects (cross-situational word learning. syntactic bootstrapping (2-year-olds were shown a video of a duck using its left hand to push a rabbit down into a squatting position while both animals waved their right arms in circles. some children heard "the duck is kradding the rabbit" while others heard "the rabbit and duck are kradding." the two groups looked at the event that matched the syntax they heard with the first sentence being associated with pushing down and the second sentence being associated with waving their right arms in circles) -- iBabies (Technology and Language Learning): DeLoache 2010: randomly assigned 12- to 18-month-olds into the video-with-interaction group, video-without-interaction group, parent-teaching group (parents taught the infants 25 words from the video), and control group. parent-teaching group performed the best when tested on the subset of words featured on the DVD while video groups did not learn more than control group. when infants learn from live video interactions like FaceTime, they do better than when learned from recordings of the same interactions. study: parents were asked to teach two new words to their 2-year-olds. during the learning session for one of the words, parents were interrupted by a phone call, and there was better learning for the word taught without phone interruption even though both words were heard the same number of times

theoretical issues in language development: Chomsky and the nativist view

-- deaf children of hearing parents develop home-sign that has syntax and morphology of language. nicaraguan sign language with its cohort 1 vs cohort 2. when you look at home signs of deaf children with hearing parents, there is consistency and structure (syntax or order, morphology is understand what morphemes mean like when the word is plural or in a different tense). nicaraguan sign language: has a higher percentage of congenitally deaf individuals, no school for the deaf so they used home signs, then the government created a school and the older students in cohort 1 negotiated what signs they would use from their individual home signs to create a sign language, cohort 2 came in at a younger age (became the first native users of the sign language that they got exposed to from cohort 1's formulation) and even made fun of cohort 1 for not "signing correctly" -- imitation (input is critical, learn to parrot what is heard). language acquisition device (Chomsky, language is too complex to learn through imitation, built-in system for learning language, Universal Grammar), middle ground. theories of language development: people initially thought it was only about input (parents saying things, children imitating, and parents correcting). Chomsky disagreed with Skinner: language acquisition device (infants have to be bringing something to language learning apart from just imitating what they hear; the child is a more active processor and creator of language). nature and nurture: study showed that children of deaf parents are driven to create language with home-signs; we are wired as humans; built-in rules with predictable orders for subject, verb, object -- modern study of language development emerged from a theoretical debate: in the 1950s, Skinner proposed a behaviorist theory (learning through reinforcement and punishment of behavior) and Chomsky countered Skinner, saying language is generative (we understand and produce sentences we have never heard before; children produce incorrect versions of words they have never heard before that are based on the structure of their language). Chomsky proposed a hard-wired Universal Grammar for humans (nativist account) -- gestures: blind people gesture as they speak just as much as sighted individuals even when they know their listener is also blind. many baby signs are invented by infants themselves and produced before they speak recognizable words. study: one infant signed alligator while another signaled flower by sniffing. infants who gesture more have larger vocabularies. Goldin-Meadow studied congenitally deaf children who created home signs to communicate with their hearing parents and the children's gesture vocabulary quickly outstripped their parents. the children spontaneously imposed a rudimentary grammar on their gestures. the children used a grammatical structure that occurs in some languages but not those of their parents. Nicaraguan Sign Language: has been evolving over the past 40 years. in 1979, a program brought hundreds of deaf children to two schools in Managua. the children built on one another's existing home signs and constructed a relatively makeshift, limited sign language. as younger students entered the schools, they rapidly mastered the rudimentary system used by the older students and gradually transformed it into a complex, fully consistent language with its own grammar. Negev desert of Israel: the newly invented (75 years ago) Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language is acquired from birth because the deaf children typically have at least one deaf adult in their extended family. the grammatical structure of ABSL does not resemble those of the local spoken languages (Arabic and Hebrew)

learning and memory: classical conditioning

-- discovered by Ivan Pavlov in research with dogs (bell and food association lead to salivation for the bell alone) -- young babies' mealtimes occur frequently and with a predictable structure. infant's sucking motions begin to occur at mere sight of the bottle or breast -- eye-blink conditioning: a tone is paired with a puff of fair to the eye. infants begin to blink in response to the tone alone, and even sleeping newborns learn this response

understanding why, where, when, and how many: time

-- even infants in their first half-year have a rudimentary sense of time including perception of the order and duration of events -- experiencing time: knowledge of temporal order is known by infants as early as the capability can be measured. study: 3-month-olds were given a series of interesting photos, first on their left, then their right, then their left, etc. in 20 seconds, they began to look to the side where each new photo was to appear before it was presented so they detected the repetitive order of events and formed expectations of where the next photo would appear. 4-month-olds who were habituated to three objects falling in a constant order dishabituated when the order changed. sense of duration of events in infants. study: 4-month-olds saw periods of light and darkness alternate every 5 seconds for eight cycles at which point the pattern was broken by the light's failing to appear. within half a second of the break, infants' heart rates decelerated (increased attention). 6-month-olds discriminate between two durations when their ratio is 2:1 but not when the ratio is 1.5:1. 10-month-olds discriminate when the ration of the durations is 1.5:1. 4-year-olds know what a specific event that happened a week before the experiment (Valentine's Day) happened more recently than Christmas. when children who had been presented a distinctive classroom experience were asked 3 months later to recall the month in which the experience occurred, correct recall increased from 20% among 5-year-olds to 46% among 7-year-olds to 64% among 9-year-olds. preschoolers often confuse past and future: 5-year-olds predict a week after Valentine's that the next Valentine's will come sooner than the next Halloween and that their next lunch is the same amount of time away in the future regardless of whether they are tested just before lunch or just after. 6-year-olds predict correctly in both cases. when 8-year-olds' attention is focused on the passage of time, they perceive the duration as longer than the same interval when they are not anticipating a prize. when they have little to do, they perceive the duration as shorter -- reasoning about time: 5-year-olds can infer that if two events started at the same time but one event ended later, then the event that ended later lasted longer for dolls waking from sleeping but think a train that stopped farther along the track traveled for longer regardless of where it started

do babies learn from baby media?

-- examined how many new words 12- to 18-month-olds learned from viewing a popular DVD several times a week for 4 weeks at home -- most important result: children who viewed the DVD did not learn any more words from their monthlong exposure to it than did a control group; highest level of learning occurred in a no-video condition in which parents tried to teach their children the same target words during everyday activities -- parents who liked the DVD tended to overestimate how much their children had learned from it -- 40% of mothers of young children believe that their children learn from television -- a parent reported that her 18-month-old had very few words until she started watching one of the company's videos at which point her vocabulary suddenly blossomed. however, word spurt happens during the second year of life in typical language development -- 9-month-olds from English-speaking families watched several presentations of an adult speaking Mandarin, and a month later, were tested on whether this exposure had prolonged their sensitivity to Mandarin speech sounds. only children whose Mandarin exposure had occurred in live interactions showed any impact of that experience -- lab studies: 12- to 30-month-olds are able to reproduce a modest number of observed actions, but imitation is substantially better when children experience the same demonstrations live; large-scale parent survey reported that for every hour of baby media infants between 8 and 16 months of age watched on their own, they knew 6 to 8 fewer words; children under 22 months of age learned few object names presented on a clip from a Teletubbies television episode; parents reported that 12- to 15-month-old participants learned relatively few of the words featured on a DVD and performed no better than those who had no exposure -- conducted in the children's own homes, conditions mimicked everyday situations in which young children view videos, a best-selling video was used, the children received extensive exposure to the video, they were tested for their understanding of the specific words featured on the video, and the tester was blind to the condition to which each child had been randomly assigned -- method: 72 infants between 12 and 18 months of age recruited from a large metropolitan area and a small city (predominantly white and middle-class); had no prior exposure to the DVD; 18 children (approximately equal numbers of males and females) were randomly assigned to each of four conditions -- materials: 39-min DVD was designed and marketed for infants from 12 months of age and up; depicts a house and yard with a voice labeling common household objects, naming each three time, and a sign being produced for each object during the first and last labeling -- conditions: three home visits to each family. during the first, experimenter gave detailed oral and written instructions to the parents. experimental conditions: video with interaction (child and parent watched the DVD together for at least five times a week; 10 or more hours of viewing total) and video with no interaction (child watched the video alone but had the same exposure). parents completed a daily log. on the second and third home visits, the experimenter checked to make sure the parents had been following the protocol. parent-teaching condition (no video exposure; parents were given a list of the 25 words featured on the video and instructed to try to teach your children as many of these words as you can in whatever way seems natural to you). control condition (no intervention) -- testing: during the first home visit, each child was tested on 13 of the 25 words featured on the video to establish an individualized set of target words for each child. on each of 13 trials, the child was shown a pair of objects (a target from the video and a distractor not from the video) and asked to point to the named target object. failed identification became target words (number of them ranged from 5 to 12). on the final visit, children were tested using the same method but the test was conducted twice (the words were presented in both orders). parents in the video condition completed a questionnaire -- results: only the performance of the parent-teaching group was above chance. children paid a lot of attention to the video even though they didn't learn from it. children whose parents thought they had learned a lot from the DVD performed no better than did children of parents who didn't think they had learned from it. the more a parent liked the DVD, the more they believed the child had learned from it -- discussion: results should be generalizable to young children's everyday experience because the video-viewing conditions were made to be as natural as possible. very young children often fail to use information communicated to them via symbolic media (pictures, models, and video) and fail to understand the relation between what they see on a screen and the real world. 2-year-olds who watch a live video of an adult hiding a toy in the room next-door fail to find the toy when encouraged to search for it immediately afterward. much of the enthusiasm expressed in parent testimonials about baby video products is misplaced (tend to misattribute normal developmental change to the video)

perception: auditory

-- fairly well-developed at birth, sensitive to speech (any language, motherese or infant-directed speech), supports other competencies -- Lemur calls (non-human methods of communication) are something infants are also sensitive to. Infant-directed speech involves high pitch and exaggerated intonation that babies prefer (not baby talk). -- fetuses can hear sufficiently well to learn basic features of their auditory environment (their mother's heartbeat, the rhythmic patterns of her native language). at birth, the human auditory system is well developed relative to the visual system. over the course of infancy, sound conduction from the outer and middle ear to the inner ear improves. over the first year, auditory pathways in the brain mature significantly. auditory localization is the perception of the spatial location of a sound source. when newborns hear a sound, they tend to turn toward it. more difficulty with auditory localization for young infants because their heads are small and the differences in timing and loudness of stimuli are smaller for infants. infants are adept at perceiving patterns in the streams of sound they hear. they are really good at detecting subtle differences in speech sounds -- music perception: caregivers sing to infants slower and with a higher pitch. infants enjoy listening to infant-directed singing more than infant-directed speech, possibly because mothers smile more while singing than speaking. infants prefer consonant intervals over dissonant intervals in studies (because they pay more attention to it; even 2-day-old infants do this) where researchers draw infants' attention toward an audio speaker by using a visually interesting stimulus and then play music through the speaker. the length of time infants spend looking at the speaker is the measure of their preference for the music. a study on hearing infants with deaf mothers showed that infant preference for consonant music does not require musical experience. melodic perception has infants making perceptual discriminations adults cannot. only infants noticed changes in a melody that stayed within the key of the melody. adults and 6-month-olds were tested on their ability to detect meter-disrupting changes in simple rhythms versus complex rhythms. only the North American infants and balkan adults detected changes in the complex rhythms. after 2 weeks of exposure to balkan rhythms, North American 12-month-olds could detect changes in complex rhythms while North American adults still failed. with experience, there is perceptual narrowing. 9-month-olds given additional musical experience were better able to process and detect altered patterns in both music and speech

perception: intermodal

-- from the start? one exposure -- If you put a smooth pacifier in their mouth, infants are drawn to the smooth ball. If you put the bumpy pacifier in their mouth, infants are drawn to the bumpy ball (both conditions happen in the first trial). They can also integrate visual and auditory perception (newborns can't do this but in a couple months they can: they will look at the person whose lip movements match the sound or longer phrases they're hearing. They will also look at the person whose sex matches the pitch of the voice. Infants were listening to the sound through headphones so there's no sound localization happening). -- intermodal perception is the combining of information from two or more sensory systems. studies with newborns and 1-month-olds showed that infants sucked on a pacifier that they were prevented from seeing. the infants looked longer at a picture of the pacifier they had sucked on. other studies have infants simultaneously view two different videos side by side while listening to a soundtrack that is synchronized with one of the videos by not the other. if an infant looks more to the video that matches the soundtrack, this suggests that the infant detects the common structure in the auditory and visual information. 4-month-olds watched a video of a person playing peekaboo and another video of a hand beating a drumstick against a block. when they heard "peekaboo," they looked more at the person, but when they heard a beating sound, they looked longer at the hand. 4-month-olds viewing a pair of videos of a hopping toy animal looked more at a video in which the sounds of impact coincided with the animal landing on a surface. 3- to 4-month-olds look longer at visual displays in which dimensions in each modality are congruent (eg. a ball rising and falling at the same rate as a whistle rising and falling in pitch). a study asked whether Chinese infants associate own- and other-race faces with emotional cues present in music. young infants (3- and 6-month-olds) did not show a preference for a specific face when paired with happy versus sad music. 9-month-olds looked longer at own-race faces paired with happy music than at own-race faces paired with sad music. McGurk effect: the auditory syllable ba is dubbed onto a video of a person speaking the syllable ga. someone watching will hear da. 4.5-month-olds treat the da sound as familiar after familiarization with the McGurk stimulus. young infants can detect correspondences between speech sounds and facial movements for speech sounds not present in their native language while older infants cannot. young infants can detect the correspondence between monkey facial movements and monkey vocalizations while older infants cannot. one study wanted to see whether newly sighted adults in India could match an object they felt with an object they saw, but they couldn't immediately after. after 5 days of visual experience, the adults successfully matched the objects

perception: touch

-- fundamental to earliest interaction, well-developed at birth, pain, pleasurable touch increases environmental responsiveness -- Prenatal and postnatal sense of touch (best developed at birth), baby massage helps cognitive development and promotes social bonding. -- oral exploration dominates for the first few months as infants mouth and suck on their own fingers and toes and any object they come into contact with. from the age of 4 months, infants increase manual exploration, which gradually takes precedence over oral exploration. their actions become increasingly specific to the properties of the objects. they develop mental maps of their own bodies. the brains of 7-month-olds process the locations at which other people are touched using the corresponding areas of their own somatosensory cortex

conceptual development: overview

-- general ideas or understandings that mentally group together objects, beings, events, qualities, and abstractions that are similar in some way; allow us to use what we already know to make sense of our world. help us to act in the world in a meaningful way and help us to interpret the world. concepts are our knowledge about the world and units of semantic memory (you know what a tomato is likely to look and taste like, where you are likely to find it, what is likely to happen if you drop it from above); learning involves taking your existing concepts and apply them to new input and stimuli; using an incorrect concept (may not be acting in the world in the most meaningful way; for example, using an iPad as a cutting board). evidence that certain types of concepts are special (fusiform face area, primarily for processing faces, more attention to animates than inanimate, when multiple concepts are possible, have a primacy for noun). fusiform face area in the right hemisphere: fine-grained distinctions with differences in one type of input; perceptual bias of infants for animates; nouns are the cognitive default in identifying differences. types of concepts (physical and mental people, other living things, natural and artifact inanimates, abstract ideas, actions, events). concepts (internal mental representations that you can't directly observe) vs categories (things or instances in the world that you group together and apply concepts to; looking time as a measure because distinction between habituation and dishabituation phases means the infant recognizes that it is a new category; can observe categorization behavior through sorting and looking time; observable measures of concepts) -- concepts: general ideas that organize objects, events, qualities, or relations on the basis of some similarity (infinite); allow us to generalize from prior experience; tell us how to react emotionally to new experiences -- nativists believe infants are born with some sense of fundamental concepts (time, space, number, causality, the human mind) or with specialized learning mechanism that allow them to acquire rudimentary understanding of these changes unusually quickly and easily -- empiricists argue that nature endows infants with only general learning mechanisms (ability to perceive, attend, associate, generalize, and remember). rapid and universal formation of fundamental concepts like time, space, number, causality, and mind arises from infants' massive exposure to experiences that are relevant to these concepts -- one group of fundamental concepts is used to categorize the kinds of things that exist in the world: human beings, living things in general, and inanimate objects and their properties -- the other group involves dimensions used to represent our experiences: space, time, number of times the experience occurred, and causality (why it occurred) -- conceptual development before 5 years of age is the period in which children acquire a basic understanding of the most crucial concepts

the process of language acquisition: word segmentation

-- infants begin word segmentation (discover where words begin and end in fluent speech) during the second half of the first year. 7-month-old infants listened to passages in which a particular word recurred and were tested using a head-turn preferential looking procedure to see whether they recognized the repeated words. when infants turn to look at the flashing lights on either side of them, sounds are played from that side (looking time measures how much the infant is attracted to that sound). infants listened longer to repeated words -- stress patterning: the first syllable of English two-syllable words is much more likely to be stressed, and by 8 months, English-learning infants expect stressed syllables to begin words -- statistical learning experiments: infants listened to a 2-minute recording of four different three-syllable "words" repeated in random order with no pauses between them and then were presented with the words they had heard or non-word sequences. infants discriminated between the words and the non-word sequences starting at just days after birth -- infants as young as 4.5 months will listen longer to repetitions of their own name than to those of a different name. a few weeks later, they can pick their own name out of background conversations, which helps them find new words in the speech stream

learning and memory: instrumental/operant conditioning

-- learning the relationship between a behavior and its consequences. a contingency relation exists between the behavior and the positive reinforcement -- Carolyn Rovee-Collier 1997 attached a ribbon to the baby's ankle and connected it to a mobile hanging above the infant's crib. by naturally kicking their legs, infants as young as 2 months quickly learn the relation between their leg movements and the jiggling mobile and increase their rate of kicking. 3-month-olds remember the kicking response for about 1 week while 6-month-olds remember it for 2 weeks. infants younger than 6 months remember the kicking response only when the test mobile is identical to the training mobile while older infants remember it with new mobiles. a brief reminder in the form of simply observing the moving mobile increases the duration of infants' retention of the kicking response -- infants work hard at learning to predict and control their experience and display positive emotions during peaks in performance. infants of depressed mothers tend to smile less than infants whose mothers are not depressed possibly partly because their smiles are not consistently rewarded by their parent

learning and memory: memory

-- methods used to study memory in older children like repeating back sequences of digits are not feasible with infants -- Rovee-Collier's use of operant conditioning with mobiles investigates infants' long-term memory -- change-detection task: relies on the same logic as the preferential-looking studies. infants view displays on two screens simultaneously. one of the displays repeats the same image while the other display introduces a change in the image between repetitions. by manipulating the type of change and the amount of time between repetitions, it is possible for researchers to assess what infants encode about the displays. 6-month-olds detect changes in only a single item's color or location while 12-month-olds can maintain up to four items in working memory -- 10- and 12-month-olds watched as an experimenter placed different numbers of crackers into two different buckets. the infants were then permitted to crawl to the bucket of their choice and retrieve the crackers. when one bucket held one cracker and the other held two, infants chose the bucket holding the larger number of crackers (infants failed to do this as numbers reached four and higher). when crackers were of different sizes, infants made their selections based on the difference in cracker volume. infants retained the contents of the containers in working memory

understanding why, where, when, and how many: number

-- nativists argue a core concept of number with special mechanisms for representing and learning about the relative numbers of objects in sets, counting, and approximate addition and subtraction (specific brain areas, particularly the intraparietal sulcus, are heavily involved in representing numerical magnitudes and specific neurons respond most strongly when particular numbers of objects are displayed (like 5). empiricists argue experiences' effects and learning mechanisms for concepts (large differences in numerical understanding among children from different cultures) -- numerical equality: is the idea that all sets of N objects have N in common. newborns have numerical equality in a nonlinguistic or non symbolic sense: after repeatedly hearing sets of four identical syllables with adjacent sets separated by pauses, they look more at four objects than 12 but after hearing sets of 12 identical syllables with the same pattern, they look more at the 12 objects. infants' discriminations between numerical sets depend on the ration of the number of entities in them. study: newborns showed the same tendency to discriminate between 6 and 18 syllables and objects but not with 4 and 8. by 6 months, infants discriminate between sets with 2:1 ratios but they still can't discriminate between sets with ratios of 3:2, which is achieved at 9 months. exception: discrimination between very small sets is more accurate, faster, and less variable (infants discriminate two objects from one and three objects from two before they can discriminate larger sets with the same ratio). two mechanisms for processing numbers: one used to process small sets and is based on specific numbers and the other based on rations and is applicable to all numbers of them -- infants' arithmetic: 4- to 5-month-olds dishabituate when it seems through trickery that adding one or two objects to an initial set of one or two objects has produced more or fewer than the correct number. also dishabituate when shown unexpected subtractive outcomes. older infants dishabituate to these with sets of 5 to 10. method: 5-month-old sees a doll on a stage. a screen comes up, hiding the doll. the infant sees a hand place a second doll behind the screen and sees the hand leave without the doll. the screen drops and reveals either one doll or two. infants look longer when there is only one doll -- counting: begin to count verbally at 2 years. after counting flawlessly from 1 to 10, many 2-year-olds have no idea whether 3 is bigger than 5 or 5 is bigger than 3. toddlers associate the word one with 1 object. a month or two later, they associate two with 2 objects. another month or two later, they associate three with 3 objects. then they associate number words and their quantities more quickly. five principles: one-one correspondence (each object must be labeled by a single number word), stable order (numbers must be recited in the same order), cardinality (number of objects in the set corresponds to the last number stated), order irrelevance (objects can be counted left to right, right to left, or in any other order), and abstraction (any set of discrete things can be counted). observations of incorrect counts and unusual but correct counts: when 4- or 5-year-olds see a puppet counting in a way that violated the one-one correspondence principle, they say the counting is incorrect. when they see the puppet count in unusual ways that do not violate any principle, many say the counting is correct but that they wouldn't count that way themselves. most 5-year-olds in China can count to 100 or more while most 5-year-olds in the US can't count that high (greater regularity of Chinese number system, particularly with teens) while 3-year-olds in both countries are comparable in reciting 1 through 10. Chinese culture emphasizes mathematical skill more as well

understanding why, where, when, and how many: space

-- nativists argue that children possess an innate module specialized for representing and learning about space that processes spatial information separately. empiricists argue that children acquire spatial representations through the same types of learning mechanisms and experiences that produce general cognitive growth, that children adaptively combine numerous types of spatial and non spatial information to reach their goals, and that experience with locomotion, language, and cultural tools shapes spatial development. nativists and empiricists agree that children understand above, below, left of, and right of early in infancy; that self-produced movement around the environment stimulates processing of spatial information; that certain parts of the brain (hippocampus produces improvements in place learning) are specialized for coding particular types of spatial information; and that geometric information is important -- representing space relative to oneself: when young infants are presented with two objects, they tend to reach for the closer one. 7-month-olds reach to the correct location for objects hidden 2 seconds earlier under one of 2 identical covers but not for objects hidden 4 seconds earlier. 12-month-olds do this for objects hidden 10 seconds earlier (reflects brain maturation, particularly of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and learning). Piaget said infants can form only egocentric spatial representations (locations of objects are coded relative to the infants' position at the time of coding: if infants repeatedly found a toy on their right, they would keep looking to their right even after being repositioned so the object is on their left). however, if toys are hidden adjacent to a distinctive landmark, infants usually find the toy despite changes in their own position. self-locomotion (eg. crawling) helps infants acquire a sense of space independent of their own location. infants who have moved across rooms on their own show an earlier understanding of depth and drop-offs on the surfaces they travel. study: kindergarteners tested in their home kitchens. some were asked to stand in place and imagine themselves from from their seat in the classroom to the teacher's chair and then turning around to face the class. they were asked to point from that imagined position to the locations of various objects within the classroom, and 5-year-olds' pointing was inaccurate. other kindergarteners were told to actually walk as they imagined walking in the classroom, and their pointing was more accurate. children who played with puzzles more often between ages 1 and 4 were more successful as 4.5-year-olds with constructing shapes from a pair of shapes -- development of spatial concepts in blind and visually impaired people: even in infancy, spatial representations can be based on non-vision senses. when 3-month-olds are brought into a totally dark room, they use sounds emitted by nearby objects to reach for them. even with 9 to 21 years of post surgical visual experience, people born with cataracts could not use visual information to represent space as well as most people. young adults with central eye cataracts preventing vision until they were removed at 4 months showed reduced brain activity in areas involved in face processing and reduced connectivity among neurons in these areas. children born blind can represent space well, performing as well as blindfolded sighted children at drawing the third side of a triangle by themselves after drawing the first two sides with guidance and at exploring unfamiliar rooms -- representing spatial relations in the external environment: for 6-month-olds to use a landmark to code location of hidden objects, it must be the only obvious landmark and located right next to the hidden object. when 12-month-olds are presented a yellow cushion, a green cushion, and many blue cushions, they have trouble finding an object hidden under the yellow or green cushion. at 22 months, but not at 16 months, a landmark improve's children's ability to locate an object not hidden immediately next to the landmark but fairly close to it. by age 5, children can represent an object's position in relation to multiple landmarks like when it is midway between two. children have difficulty forming a spatial representation when they move around in an environment without distinctive landmarks or when the only landmarks are far from the target location. study: 1- and 2-year-olds first saw a small toy hidden in a long, rectangular sandbox and then saw a curtain descend around the sandbox, hiding the toy. the toddlers then walked to a different location where they were asked to find the toy. the toddler's kept track of the location well enough to show accuracy in their searches. 6- to 8-year-olds are not very good at precisely coding locations in the absence of straightforward landmarks (12-year-olds are better). when adults are asked to walk around the perimeter of an unfamiliar college campus and then walk straight back to the starting point, many choose incorrect routes. study compared spatial abilities of semi nomadic aboriginal children in the Australian desert with those of white children in Australian cities: aboriginal children are superior to city-dwelling children in memory for spatial location because spatial ability is essential for their culture

motor development: overview and reflexes

-- newborn's movements are jerky and relatively uncoordinated (because of physical and neurological immaturity and because the baby is experiencing the full effects of gravity for the first time). the infant must acquire motor skills during a time of rapid bodily changes -- grasping reflex: newborns close their fingers around anything that presses against the palm of their hand -- rooting reflex: when stroked on the cheek, infants turn their head in the direction of the touch and open their mouth (more likely to occur when an infant is hungry) -- sucking reflex and swallowing reflex: oral response when the roof of the mouth is stimulated -- tonic neck: when the head turns or is positioned to one side, the arm on that side of the body extends while the arm and knee on the other side flex -- moro (startle): throwing back the head and extending the arms, then rapidly drawing them in, in response to a loud sound, or sudden movement -- stepping: stepping or dancing with the feet when being held upright with feet touching a solid surface -- coughing, sneezing, blinking, and withdrawing from pain remain throughout life

language development: what is required for language?

-- phoneme is the smallest sound unit that makes a meaningful difference like ba vs. pa. constraints on how they can be combined. knowledge of what combinations signal other linguistic information (can say tl in motley but no words in English start with tl or wkw, though you can say awkward). step 1 is learning sounds and combinations of particular language; step 2 is learning to produce sounds (comprehension precedes production). categorical perception of phonemes (infants can hear all categories from all languages). infants can hear all categories (English learning infants at 6-8, 8-10, and 10-12 months were tested on Hindi and Nthlakapmx speech sounds using a conditioned head turn procedure and could discriminate until 10-12 months. interaction necessary (not passive reception of sounds. 9-month-old American infants played with Mandarin-speaking adults for 5 hours and had Mandarin phonetic discrimination like natives and this doesn't work with video). earliest sounds (0-2 months is comfort sounds or vowels, 2-3 months is going or precursor to consonants, 4-6 months is a variety of new sounds like trills, squals, growls, whispers, and 7-10 months is canonical babbling, which is reduplicated consonant-vowel sequences. cross-cultural, babble same sounds in same order. frequency of sounds depends on native language. babbling has rhythmic properties of adult language (French adults listened to French, Cantonese, and Arabic infants babbling). deaf infants babble with their home signs (infants prime own development). phonemes are smallest units of sound that distinguishes utterances with meaning (doesn't just map onto letters; 40 phonemes in English so some letters have more than one phoneme ("sh" is a phoneme); "g" and "z" sounds can't go together in English; kids can pick up sound boundaries quickly (what phoneme combinations can go together at the beginning of words and what can go together in the middle of words"; understanding happens before children can produce something themselves (with sound combinations, meaning, etc.); babies can learn signing/gestures before producing language (makes parent-child communication easier, doesn't speed up the process of language production); semantic involves what meanings map onto what sounds; pragmatic is how the language is used in this particular situation (eg. turn-taking, don't talk over each other). even before they have language, children are using sounds in a way that sounds like language (turn-taking between infants, question and answer intonation, infant gaze is important for figuring out who their utterances are directed at). categorical perception of phonemes (ba and pa have the same mouth shape, but different times that you expel air; ba and pa is a category boundary for phoneme difference in English); mandarin is a tonal language (there are 5 ah's that are different phonemes; people speaking tonal languages are more likely to have perfect pitch). Janet Werker: head-turn procedure for infants to turn their head when they noticed a change so they can be given a reward. perceptual narrowing for category boundaries of phonemes starts at 9 months (native Japanese speaker would not hear er and el, a boundary in English); if there's another child with them while they watch the video, they can discriminate between phonemes taught in the video. sounds more language like over development (clicking is an example of a new sound at 4-6 months); frequency of sound being babbled depends on the native language. babbling has rhythmic pattern of adult language; French-speaking adults could identify which babbling infants were from French-speaking households; deaf infants will babble with signing (same gesture signed over and over again). self-produced sound is important for priming human neural mechanisms (not just important for Gilbert Gottlieb's ducklings) -- a human brain: language is species-specific and species-universal for humans. Washoe, a chimpanzee, and Koko, a gorilla, were able to communicate with their human trainers and caretakers using manual signs (simple utterances lacked syntactic structure). Kanzi, a great ape, had a lexigram vocabulary of more than 350 words. Rico, a border collie, knew more than 200 words and could learn and remember new words using some of the same kinds of processes that toddlers use. Alex, an African-gray parrot, learned to produce and understand basic English utterances at a toddler level. human children learn language with little explicit teaching. brain-language lateralization (for the 90% of people who are right-handed, language is primarily represented and controlled by the left hemisphere. lifelong signers process sign languages in left-lateralized language centers in the brain whereas non-signers do not, experience-dependent plasticity). sensitive period for language development (ends between age 5 and puberty; Genie, discovered in appalling conditions in LA in 1970, was not spoken to throughout her parents' abuse from 18 months to age 13. her language ability never developed much beyond the level of a toddler's; adults are more likely to suffer permanent language impairment from brain damage than are children because other areas of the young brain are able to take over language functions; adults who learned a second language after puberty use different neural mechanisms than those who learned from infancy or were not exposed to their first language until after puberty (typically deaf individuals); Johnson and Newport 1989: comprehension of key aspects of English grammar was related to the age at which Chinese and Korean immigrants to the US began learning English but not to the length of their language exposure. most proficient began learning before age 7. study: 700,000 adult English learners dropped off in grammar proficiency with increasing age from adolescence. individuals who acquired ASL when they were children developed a better understanding of the grammar than individuals who acquired it in their teens or as adults. a hypothesis: poorer working memory capacity facilitates extracting and storing small morphemes -- bilingualism: can begin in the womb (newborns with mothers who spoke two languages prefer both equally); attention to speech cues may be heightened and usage of purely visual information to discriminate between unfamiliar languages is better; appear to build two separate linguistic systems (language mixing: study of bilingual families in Canada found that more than 90% of parents mixed their languages in speech to their infants); just as fast as monolingual children at recognizing familiar words; perform better on measures of cognitive control; outperform monolingual infants on word-learning tasks in new languages; more successful in learning both of their languages when the school environment provides support for both languages -- a human environment: children must be exposed to other people using language; when given the choice, newborns prefer listening to speech rather than to artificial sounds. newborns also prefer nonhuman primate vocalizations to other non speech sounds (no preference for speech over the primate sounds until 3 months of age). infant-directed speech: greater pitch variability, slower, shorter utterances, more word repetition, more questions, enhanced clarity, sound adjustment, exaggerated facial expressions; infant-directed speech is used by caregivers to share important information even when infants don't know the words' meanings (sharply falling pitch communicates disapproval while cooed warm sound indicates approval), and infants exhibit appropriate facial emotion when listening to these pitch patterns. a study of over 2000 babies in 67 labs worldwide confirmed infants prefer infant-directed over adult-directed speech (possibly because it is "happy speech"); not universal: Solomon Island Kwara'ae, Micronesian Ifaluk, and Papua New Guinean Kaluli (caregivers don't speak to them); Bolivian Tsimane adults address infants less than 1 minute per daylight hour

nonlinguistic symbols and development: using symbols as information

-- primary function: provides useful information -- dual representation (artifact must be represented mentally as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself). young children have a lot of difficulty with this -- demonstration uses scale models to symbolize full-size rooms: three-year-olds use their knowledge of the miniature toy in the model to figure out where the large toy is in the adjacent room while most 2.5 year olds fail to find the large toy (they don't dual represent the model) -- an experimenter showed each 2.5 year old child a shrinking machine and explained the machine. the children watched as a troll doll was hidden in a movable tent like room. the shrinking machine was turned on. the child left and returned and saw a small-scale model of the tent like room in place of the original. the children succeeded at finding the troll because the model is the room (no need for dual representation) -- investigators use anatomically detailed dolls to interview young children in cases of suspected sexual abuse. children younger than 5 years fail to make any connection between themselves and the doll (young children have particular difficulty with self-symbols) -- school-age children realize that the red line on a road map does not mean that the real road would be red (affected by children's experiences) -- cross-cultural studies: younger children are more likely to understand that pictures can serve a symbolic function in cultures that expose them to pictures constantly. North American infants as young as 13 months understand that properties of objects presented in pictures can be extended to real objects. infants are able to detect links between images of objects and actual objects. by age 4, children interpret images of scenes using the same geometric abilities that guide their navigation in the real world. with experience, comes the ability to engage in the kinds of abstractions necessary to understand dual representations. increased understanding of dual representation may also help children to avoid the types of action errors like trying to sit on a tiny chair

the process of language acquisition: speech perception

-- prosody as the basis for fetuses preferring mother's voice and languages: characteristic rhythmic and intonation patterns -- categorical perception of speech sounds: adults and infants perceive speech sounds as belonging to categories. listeners hear a speech sound gradually change from one phoneme into a related one and the two phonemes are only different because of the length of time (voice onset time) between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating; adults and young infants draw sharp distinctions between speech sounds. 1- and 4-month-olds sucked on a pacifier hooked up to a computer. the harder they sucked, the more often they heard repetitions of a single syllable (sucked less enthusiastically when habituated; sucked faster when they discriminated the new syllable. r and l make a difference in English but not Japanese; k in keep and cool make a difference in Arabic but not English (infants make these distinctions regardless of native language and with speech sounds they have never heard before) -- developmental changes in speech perception: by 12 months of age, infants become less sensitive to non-native speech sound distinctions (Werker tested English-speaking infants on their ability to discriminate speech sounds important in Hindi and Nthlakapmx and were able to at 6 to 8 months of age but unable to at 10 to 12 months of age; conditioning protocol: infants learned that if they turned their head toward the sound source when they heard a change in the sounds they were listening to, they would be rewarded by an interesting visual display). discrimination of vowels happens slightly earlier -- infants learned more about the phonemes of Mandarin from a live interaction with a Mandarin speaker than from watching a video of one. infants learners were more successful at learning Mandarin phonemes from the screen when they did so along another 9-month-old than when they did alone

motor development: motor milestones

-- range for sitting milestone for North American infants is 5 to 7 months of age. 0% of 5-month-olds in Italy could sit independently. 92% could in Cameroon. 17% could in the US. infants who tend to sit independently earlier due to the country they live in also tend to be placed in locations that offer less postural support like the ground in Kenya and on adult furniture in Cameroon while in Italy and the US, infants spend more time in child furniture or being held -- in urban China, infants are often restricted from crawling due to hygienic concerns. among the Aché, a nomadic people who live in the rain forest of Paraguay, infants spend almost all of their first 3 years of life being carried or kept very close to caregivers because of safety concerns. exercises like massage, limb manipulation, and other forms of motor stimulation are a widespread parenting practice in many cultures in sub-saharan Africa, including the Kipsigis, Kung San, Gusii, Wolof, and Bambora communities. these activities are often accompanied by singing, rhythmic bouncing, and high positive affect from the caregiver, and they are chosen intentionally to promote the infants' motor development. infants who undergo massage and exercise regimes are more advanced in their motor-skill development than those who don't undergo these regimes. infants whose movements are restricted may be less advanced. example: some families in Northern China use sandbags instead of cloth diapers due to water scarcity. their infants spend more than 16 hours per day lying inside a bag filled with fine sand with only their arms unrestricted and show significant delays in sitting and walking. a group of NYC infants was tested both naked and diapered and exhibited more mature walking behavior when tested naked

motor development: the expanding world of the infant

-- reaching: initially, infants are limited to pre-reaching movements (clumsy swiping in the general vicinity of objects). at 3 to 4 months of age, they start successfully reaching for objects (although their movements are initially somewhat jerky and poorly controlled) and their grabs fail more often than not. studies gave velcro-patched mittens and velcro-patched toys to pre-reaching infants, and the manual exploration made possible increased the infants' interest and caused the earlier emergence of an ability to reach independently for them. months later, the infants showed more sophisticated patterns of object exploration. the achievement of stable sitting and smooth reaching happens at 7 months, gives infants more experience manipulating objects and grabbing objects previously out of reach, and helps them become better at the process of 3-d object completion. self-directed visual experience through object manipulation increases infants' vocabularies. infants in a completely dark room can successfully grab an invisible object that is making a sound. 8-month-olds are more likely to reach toward a distant object when an adult is present than when they are alone -- self-locomotion: at 8 months of age, infants become capable of self-locomotion (moving around in the environment on their own). babies who are lying down or sitting can easily seek out their caregiver's face but crawling babies can't see a standing caregiver's face. advances in self-locomotion may help explain why younger infants spend more time looking at faces than older infants. many infants begin by belly crawling or the inchworm belly flop style and then shift to hands-and-knees crawling which is less effortful and faster. other styles of drawing are bear crawls, crab crawls, spider crawls, commando crawls, and bum shuffles. at 11 or 12 months, they begin walking independently, keeping their feet relatively wide apart, flexing slightly at the hip and knee, keeping their hands in the air to facilitate balance, and having both feet on the ground 60% of the time. a study found that a sample of 12- to 19-month-olds in NYC averaged 2368 steps (about the length of eight American football fields) and 17 falls per hour. another study found that infants adjust their mode of locomotion according to their perception of the properties of the surface they want to traverse -- Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk: used a visual cliff made with plexiglass (half of the plexiglass is checked to make it look solid and the ground below the other half is also checked with smaller squares). 6- to 14-month-olds would readily cross the the shallow, solid side but would not cross the deep side. another study by Karen Adolph had infants of about 8.5 months of age in their first weeks of crawling unhesitatingly and competently went down shallow slopes but thought they could also crawl down too steep slopes (eventually, enough crawling practice taught them how to judge impossible steepness). when they started walking, they again misjudged steepness. social referencing is when a child uses another person's emotional response to a situation to decide how to behave. infants use it in uncertain situations but ignore adult input when the situation is clearly extremely risky or extremely safe -- mismatch between perception and action: scale errors: young children try to do something to a miniature replica that is far too small for the action to be possible. grasp errors: the child tries to pick up an object from a 2-d representation media errors: a child using interactive technology tries to pass or receive an object through a screen

the process of language acquisition: later development

-- sensitive period of language acquisition (time during which language develops readily. after this period, which is sometime between 5 years old and puberty - 7 years old for first langue - language acquisition in semantics vs. syntax is much more difficult and ultimately less successful. Genie lived in severe sensory and social deprivation from 18 months to 13 years, being locking a room strapped to a potty-chair, not being taught to speak, denied normal human interaction, and getting beaten for making noise. she could understand a few words but produced only stop it and no more. with extensive language training, she made some progress but did not reach normal language ability. 2nd language learning with 46 Chinese and Korean speakers learning ESL (greater than 5 years of English exposure and in US for 3 consecutive years) getting tested and scoring higher when they had started acquiring English at earlier age. after age 6, the ability to learn a second language begins to decrease. plasticity and lateralization and the less is more hypothesis with a beneficial smaller working memory creates the sensitive period. if children haven't gotten some language input by age 7, they're unlikely to attain native language fluency. you may have problems with specific syntax and rules that seem arbitrary when learning a language at an older age (Broaders' friend from Serbia couldn't understand when and how to use English articles even though she had decades of experience with English); older you get, the harder it can be to produce the sounds required from a nonnative language. hemispheric lateralization and brain specialization: language first is not only in the left hemisphere for children under the age of 4. native language that got so much input so early won't shift from the brain space it is taking up -- the ability to sustain a conversation improves into adulthood. school-age children reflect upon and analyze language (resulting in an increasing appreciation of the multiple meanings of words and their emergence in puns, riddles, and jokes) and master more complex grammatical structures (like passive constructions in English). can learn new words by hearing them define. average 6-year-old knows 10,000 words while 5th graders know 40,000 words. the average college student knows 150,000 words

perception: taste and smell

-- sensitive to taste from birth (show likes and dislikes), innate odor preferences (similar to adults, turn head, survival value) -- Infants prefer sweet things and what their mother ate when she was pregnant. Bitterness is a hardwired dislike (wrinkled nose and tongue protrusion, try to spit it out); most poisonous things are bitter. Infants love the smell of vanilla and hate the smell of sulfur (rotten eggs): evolutionary value because things that end up being toxic tend to smell bad to the human nose. -- exposure to bitter flavors before the age of 6 months increases the likelihood of a later preference for those flavors. prenatal exposure to garlic increased children's intake of garlic-flavored foods at 8-9 years but did not when exposure happened through breast milk postnatally. newborns prefer the smell of breast milk. 2-day-old infants spent almost twice as long oriented to the pad infused with their mother's unique scent from her wearing it next to her armpit. toddlers' degree of reactivity to food odors, but not food tastes, predicted their degree of food neophobia

learning and memory: habituation

-- simplest form of learning is to recognize that something has been experienced before -- babies tend to respond relatively less to stimuli they have previously experienced and relatively more to novel stimuli -- habituation: a decrease in response after repeated stimulation; reveals learning has taken place; infant has formed a memory representation of the stimulus; highly adaptive -- speed is believed to reflect the general efficiency of the infant's processing. duration of looking and degree of novelty preference (and other measures of attention) also indicate speed and efficiency of processing. infants who habituate relatively rapidly, who take relatively short looks at visual stimuli, and/or who show a greater preference for novelty tend to have higher IQs when tested as many as 18 years later

the process of language acquisition: putting words together

-- single word utterances, then single word + gesture, then telegraphic speech (two-word speech with nonessential elements committed like cat sleep? daddy fail that occurs across all languages and is in the correct word order), then sentences (mean length of utterance in morphemes increases rapidly). start with single word utterances (when saying two words, they use them as one word), then add an extra meaning piece through gesture, then telegraphic speech (based on expensive telegrams stripped down to most important material; children extracting the most important two words to convey meaning; children tend to put them in the correct grammatical order). syntax (learning the rules for how words/morphemes are strung together). children gradually extract the rules. adults learn new languages more holistically. over regularization-rule and memory model. parents correct content (incorrect details, lying, meanness, foul language) and rarely correct grammar but even when they do, it doesn't usually work. every language has rules for how the pieces of language should go together children perform overregularization (use "ed" to indicate past tense for words that don't use "ed" for past tense), which shows how they extract the rule (even adults will throw in the overregularized version for atypical words when under time pressure); go through a U-shaped development where they go from correct production to incorrect production and that indicates that they're learning the rules and then go back to correct production when they use the rules and have memorized the exceptions even when parents explicitly correct children, which is not the default, (parents tend to correct for content rather than for syntax), if they are not in the zone of proximal development, it will not stick for the child (can't just be behaviorist or input specific; children have to be bringing something to language learning from their nature) -- children's ability to combine words into sentences most distinguishes their emerging language abilities from that of nonhuman animals -- first sentences: begin to form simple sentences by the end of their second year but comprehension precedes production (understand word combinations much earlier than when they can produce them; study: 17-month-olds viewed a video of Cookie Monster tickling Big Bird and another of Big Bird tickling Cookie Monster. when they heard "where is Cookie Monster tickling big bird?" they looked at the correct scene. telegraphic speech (two-word utterances with nonessential elements left out -- grammar (a tool for building new words and sentences): research focuses on morphemes added to nouns and verbs (in English, nouns are made plural by adding s and verbs are put into the past tense by adding ed). Jean Berko 1958: preschoolers were shown "a wug" and then two wugs and the children as young as 4 called them wugs (made the word plural). children initially say men for man and went for go, then they make occasional overregularization errors (mans and goed). parents frequently fill in missing parts of their child's incomplete utterances. parents generally ignore ungrammatical mistakes (more likely to correct factual errors). using artificial grammars, infants as young as 8 months can learn new grammatical patterns, generalizing beyond the specific items they have heard

theoretical issues in language development: ongoing debates in language development

-- social interaction essential (importance of making shared meaning. auditory statistical info is supplemented by perceptual info that conveys meaning and reference through pointing, looking, talking about the present, and infant-directed speech). you can't just sit a child in front of a TV show to learn a language; social interaction needed for mapping speech sounds with meaning; infant-directed speech has an emphasis on nouns, describing the child's actions back to them, higher pitch. -- theorists have countered Chomsky's argument about the universality of language structure with regard to nature vs. nurture by pointing out there are also universals in children's environments (parents globally need to talk about the same things with their children) -- focus on social interaction (children learn by paying close attention to the multitude of clues available in the language they hear, the social context in which language is used, and the intentions of the speaker). both the sounds infants make when babbling and the rate at which they produce them can be influenced by parental reinforcement like smiling and touching -- according to nativists, the cognitive abilities that support language development are highly specific to language. alternatively, while learning abilities might be innate, their evolutionary development was not restricted to language learning (the distributional learning mechanisms also help infants track sequences of musical notes, visual shapes, and human actions while the mechanisms for rapid word learning are also used by toddlers to learn facts about objects -- developmental language disorders: range from delays that disappear by school age to lifelong challenges. in 2012, 10% of US children between ages 3 and 8 had received services for speech or language problems in the prior year. of this group, many are considered late talkers (vocal development is lagging at or below the 10th percentile). late-talking toddlers with better word recognition skills are the most likely to catch up. 7% of school-age children in the US are diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) and exhibit challenges in speech perception, word segmentation, sentence comprehension, working memory, sequence learning, and processing speed. children diagnosed with Down syndrome, fragile-X-syndrome, and autism tend to be delayed across all aspects of language development (challenges in social communication is one of the diagnostic criteria for autism). 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. many deaf infants and children are able to learn spoken language with the help of cochlear implants (but their speech perceptions are less accurate and their word recognition is slower) -- computational modeling: manipulates innate structure and environmental input to determine what is crucial when simulating children's language acquisition. connectionism (emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units through simulated cognitive development aspects; the model learns from experience, gradually strengthening certain connections among units; successful at modeling children's acquisition of the past tense in English and the development of the shape bias for word learning)

understanding who or what: knowledge of living things

-- study of the first 50 words used by children: the two terms other than mama and dada used by the greatest number of children were dog and cat. by age 4 or 5, children know about growth, inheritance, illness, and healing. immature beliefs: fail to understand the differences between artifacts and living things as shown by 6- to 10-year-olds saying that the first monkey came to exist to satisfy human purposes; incorrect beliefs about which things are living and which are not (5-year-olds believe plants are not alive while other believe the moon and mountains are alive; children have a shallow understanding of living things until age 7 or 10. by age 5, children are confused on a few points but understand the essential characteristics, according to some researchers. third view: young children simultaneously possess mature and immature biological understanding -- distinguish living from nonliving things: 9-month-olds pay more attention to rabbits than inanimate objects but smile less at rabbits than people. children can't comprehend and answer questions about the categories of living things and animals until age 3 or 4. knowledge of living things is not just visible properties but also biological processes like digestion and heredity. at least through age 5 or 6, children deny that people are animals. most preschoolers know that plants grow, heal themselves, and die but don't realize that plants are alive until age 7 to 9 because children often equate being alive with being able to move in ways that promote survival. letting 5-year-olds know that plants bend toward sunlight and their roots grow toward water leads children to conclude that they are living. children growing up in rural areas realize plants are living at younger ages than city or suburban children -- understanding biological processes: while 3- and 4-year-olds recognize that desires influence what people do, they also recognize that some biological processes are independent of one's desires. 5-year-olds recognize that the green color of plants is crucial for them to make food while the green color of emeralds has no function. inheritance (3- and 4-year-olds know that physical characteristics tend to be passed on from parent to offspring. 5-year-olds realize that an animal of one species raised by parents of another species will become an adult of its own species. preschoolers believe mothers' desires play a role in their child's inheritance of physical qualities. preschoolers also believe adopted children are at least as likely to look like their adoptive parents as like their birth parents. preschoolers tend to believe the difference between male and female play preferences are due solely to heredity. essentialism is the view that living things have an essence inside them that makes them what they are. the essence is viewed as being inherited from one's parents and being maintained throughout the organism's life. growth, illness, and healing (preschoolers recognize that plants and animals become bigger and more complex over time because of something going on inside them. 3- and 4-year-olds recognize that the growth proceeds in only one direction at least until old age for living things. 3-year-olds have heard of germs and know how they operate. preschoolers know that plants and animals have internal processes that often allow them to regain prior states and attributes through growing back or healing but understand that illness and old age can cause death, from which recuperation is not possible -- how do children acquire biological knowledge?: nativists propose humans are born with a biology module (fusing earlier periods of our evolution, we needed to learn quickly about animals and plants for survival; children throughout the world organize information and plants and animals in the same ways of growth, reproduction, inheritance, illness, and healing). empiricists say biological understanding comes from personal observations and information received from parents, teachers, and general culture (mothers reading to 1- and 2-year-olds about animals; 3- to 5-year-olds ask more questions about the functions of manmade objects and more questions about biological properties of animals and plants. 5-year-olds in Japan are more likely than those in US and Israel to believe that nonliving things are able to feel physical sensations because of Buddhist tradition

understanding who or what: understanding oneself and other people

-- theory of mind is the basic understanding of how the mind works and influences behavior; forms between 2-5 years. understand that other people's minds are different than our own. a child's theory of mind includes knowledge of perceptions, psychological states (desires, beliefs), actions, need to have decreased egocentrism. false-belief problems used to measure it. understanding connections between others' desires and actions. 3-year-olds have some understanding of how beliefs and desires affect behaviors but the understanding is limited (false-belief problems test understanding that other people will act in accordance with their own beliefs, must be choose the false belief even if the they know the belief is incorrect). interactions with people/experience (older children do better with false-belief tasks). growth of general information-processing skills essential to understanding other people's minds. theory of mind module (brain mechanisms devoted to understanding others, matures over first 5 years, theory that autism is related to biologically-impaired theory of mind module). piaget thought theory of mind didn't come in by age 7 but we have contradicting evidence. study of theory of mind in children: false belief task (Sally and Anne were playing together with a block and put it in a basket when they were done. Sally left and Anne moved the block to behind the couch. When Sally comes back, where will Sally look for the block?). children don't know when they've acquired new knowledge: after they learn, they think they've always known that piece of information (a child thought he knew there were ribbons or "ropes" in the juice box before being shown that but he actually thought there was juice in it beforehand). Child doesn't deceive the mean monkey toy in order to get the sticker they actually want. Children with siblings tend to succeed on false belief tasks (like lying) earlier -- naïve psychology: commonsense level of understanding of other people and oneself. adult chimpanzees are qual to human 2.5-year-olds on many tasks requiring physical reasoning but fall short on tasks requiring social reasoning. three key concepts applied almost every time we think about why someone did something: desires, beliefs, and actions. three properties: many concepts refer to invisible mental states, psychological concepts are linked to one another in cause-effect relations, and they develop surprisingly early in life -- naïve psychology in infancy: nativists argue that early understanding is only possible because children are born with a basic understanding of human psychology. empiricists argue that experiences with other people and general information-processing capacities are the key sources of the early understanding. the emergence of self-consciousness (rudimentary understanding that they are separate from other people and can act in ways that accomplish their goals; if another person touches an infant's cheek, the infant turns in the direction of the touch but won't turn if infants touch their own cheek. by 4 months, infants reach for small objects within their grasp by not for larger or more distant objects. by 18 to 24 months, they try to swipe smudges off their faces when they see them in mirrors and make efforts to look good to other people. understanding other people (infants prefer to watch the movements of cartoons of human bodies over cartoons showing the same parts arranged haphazardly but with equal movement. infants learn quite early that other people's behaviors have purpose and are goal-directed. 6-month-olds saw a hand repeatedly reach toward one of two objects sitting side by side in a display. then, the position of the two objects was reversed and the hand reached again. infants expressed surprise and looked longer when the hand went to the object they had not previously reached for; infants even move their eyes to the perceived goal object before the hand gets there; infants only do this for human hands; they don't do this for mechanical claws. study showed 10-month-olds a video showing a ball, cube, and pyramid with google eyes. the ball was trying to get up a hill: the pyramid helped it while the cube pushed it down. infants looked longer when the ball later approached the cube so infants associate intention with inanimate objects in cartoons that are given human-like qualities). understanding differences between people (10-month-olds are more likely to choose a food offered by or toy held by a speaker of their language than by a speaker of another language. by 12 months, most infants accept one cracker from a puppet whom they observed acting nicely than two crackers from a mean puppet but when the mean puppet had eight crackers and the nice puppet only one, most babies took the eight) -- naïve psychology beyond the first year: in the second year emerges a sense of self (explicitly realize they are distinct from other people), joint attention, intersubjectivity (mutual understanding people share during communication). 1-year-olds fairly often offer both physical comfort and comforting comments to unhappy playmates -- theory of mind: comes from the development of understanding differences and similarities between their own and other people's thinking. the growth of a theory of mind (theory of mind is an organized understanding of how mental processes like intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behavior. preschoolers often understand that beliefs often originate in perception, desires can originate from physiological or psychological states, and differences in beliefs lead to differences in actions. 12-month-olds saw an experimenter look at one of two stuffed kittens and react joyfully. a screen descended and when it lifted 2 seconds later, the experiment was holding either kitten, and the infants looked longer when the experimenter was holding the non-joy-provoking kitten so by the end of their first year, infants understand the connection between other people's desires and their actions. 8-month-olds looked for similar amounts of time in that study. 10-month-olds can use a person's earlier desires to predict that person's later desires but only if the earlier and later circumstances are identical. the understanding that desires lead to actions is established by 2 years, and children of this age predict that characters will act in accordance with their own desires. by age 3, children show some understanding of the relation between beliefs and actions and how beliefs originate and why they differ. limitations of 3-year-olds' understanding of the relation between people's beliefs and actions: false-belief problems where another person believes something to be true that the child knows is false and which belief the child thinks the person will act in accordance with. study: preschoolers shown a box with a picture of Smarties candies and they say the box has Smarties, but then the experimenter shows that the box actually has pencils. 5-year-olds will say that another child would answer Smarties if asked without being shown the contents while 3-year-olds will say another child would believe it contains pencils. cross-cultural study: performance on false-belief problems improved greatly between ages 3 and 5 across Canada, India, Peru, Thailand, and Samoa. however, if an experimenter tells a 3-year-old that the two of them are going to play a trick on another child and enlists the child's help in filling the box with pencil, the child will correctly predict another child's false belief about the box's contents. 14-year-olds who acted in plays during a school year showed greater understanding of other people's thinking at the end of the year. explaining the development of theory of mind (nativists propose the theory of mind module, a hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings that matures over the first 5 years and is based on citations of brain-imaging studies and studies of autistic children. empiricists emphasize the role of learning from experiences with physical situations and other people; although many infants follow the gaze of adults wearing blindfolds, experience with wearing the blindfolds themselves reduces 12-month-olds' frequency of following the gaze of blindfolded adults. on false-belief tasks, preschools who have siblings outperform peers who do not, especially when the siblings are older or of the opposite sex. repeated exposure to other people acting on false beliefs has been found to produce substantial improvements among 3-year-olds who had relatively advanced understanding before the experiences. emphasize the growth of general information-processing skills; understanding of false-belief problems needs an ability to reason about counterfactual statements and to inhibit behavioral propensities, and children younger than 4 years lack those information-processing skills. almost all children achieve a basic, but useful, theory of mind by age 5 -- autistic children's theory of mind development: autistic children continue to struggle with false-belief problems after age 5. autistic children often engage in solitary, repetitive behaviors. they tend to have trouble establishing joint attention. fewer than half of autistic 6- to 14-year-olds solve false-belief problems that are easy for typical 4- and 5-year-olds. early start Denver model treatment: 15 hours per week of therapy during which therapists and children practiced everyday activities and used operant conditioning techniques. parents used the approach for 16 hours per week. after 2 years, children who received the ESDM treatment showed greater gains in IQ score, language, and daily living skills. ESDM may be even more effective during infancy than during toddlerhood based on results with 7- to 15-month-olds -- the growth of play: play is activities pursued for their own sake with no motivation other than the enjoyment they bring. the earliest play occurs in the first year and includes behaviors like banging spoons on high-chair trays and throwing food on the floor. between 12 and 18 months, pretend play emerges (object substitution). early pretend play emerges in interactions between infants and parents (parents' convey the pretending through strong eye contact, oddly timed movements, and smiles just after a completed action). toddlers begin sociodramatic play (more sophisticated when playing with a parent or older sibling who can scaffold). by elementary school years, play becomes more complex and social (eg. sports, board games with conventional rules and frequent quarrels over them). survey of college students: majority had performed pretend play weekly at 10 or 11 years and monthly at 12 or 13 years (more frequent for boys and only children). children who pretend play more tend to show greater understanding of other people's thinking and emotions (especially when the pretend play is social); third variable: parents who promote both. preschoolers also learn from watching others' pretend play. -- imaginary companions: 63% of children interviewed at age 3 or 4 and again at age 7 or 8 had imaginary companions at one or both times. another study: as many 6- and 7-year-olds as 3- and 4-year-olds said they had imaginary companions. most imaginary companions were invisible, ordinary children. a study of 36 preschoolers with imaginary companions: only one child had no complaints while the other 35 complained that their imaginary companions argued with them, refused to share, failed to come when invited, and failed to leave when no longer welcome. however, children who invent imaginary companions are no different in personality, intelligence, and creativity than those who don't: even children who had imaginary children in middle school, end up being as well-adjusted as their peers by the end of high school. children who invented imaginary companions were more likely to be firstborn or only children, to watch relatively little television, to be verbally skilled, and to have advanced theories of mind. children also create imaginary companions to deflect blame, vent anger, and convey information the child is reluctant to state directly

integration of perception and action for infants

-- they're not SO brilliant, perceptual development and understanding of images/models, motor development and cognition (adolph's examples: sitting doesn't generalize to crawling which doesn't generalize to walking) -- However, if you show pictures of toys to babies, they can perceive that it's a 2-dimensional object but they will still try to grab the toys out of the pictures. For scale errors, kids play with a full-size version of the toy (slide, chair, or car) and then come back into the lab and see a small version of the toy and try to play with the small version in the same way that they did with the full-size version. Sitting is the first posture but what they learn from sitting doesn't translate to crawling and what they learn from crawling doesn't translate to walking (the children experienced in sitting forget about the risk of a cliff when they start crawling; experienced crawlers forget about the risk of a steep ramp when they start walking).

nonlinguistic symbols and development: drawing and writing

-- when young children first start making marks on paper, their focus is almost exclusively on the activity with no attempt to produce recognizable images -- at 3 or 4 years of age, most children begin trying to draw pictures of something (try to produce representational art) -- exposure to representational symbols affects the age at which children begin to produce them -- cross-cultural study: found that children from homes filled with pictorial images (rural Canadian sample) produce such images earlier and more often than children from homes with few such images (rural Indian and Peruvian samples) -- children's artistic impulses outstrip their motor and planning capabilities. the 2.5 year old was narrating as he drew a scribble (meant to draw a sailboat) -- young children simplify their drawings as they are first beginning to draw but still must plan the drawing and spatially coordinate the individual elements -- drawing strategies: well-practiced formula for representing concepts and categories (eg. a house) and coordinating the placement of each house with respect to the road -- scribbles reflect emerging understanding of writing (before age 3, children produce different types of scribbles when writing versus drawing; also true for preschoolers learning to write Chinese characters; by age 4, children understand that written words correspond to specific spoken words while a drawing can correspond to many different words; initially depend perceptual similarity between the symbol and what it represents like longer words being represented with longer scribbles)

the process of language acquisition: conservational skills

-- young children's speech is often directed to themselves rather than to another person. when young children talk to other children, their conversations tend to be egocentric (Piaget called it collective monologues). three-year-olds' conversations include occasional brief references to past events, if any. 5-year-olds produce narratives, story-like descriptions of past events. parents scaffold their children's narratives. pragmatic development allows listeners to understand rhetorical questions, sarcasm, irony, hyperbole, and understatement. over the preschool years, children learn to take the perspective of their conversational partner. kindergarten-age listeners can use a conversational partner's perspective to figure out what they mean and provide a relevant response. older preschoolers can exploit the vocal affect of an ambiguous statement to figure out a speaker's intention (4-year-olds looked at the intact doll when "look at the doll" was said with positive affect and the broken doll when it was said with negative affect; 4-year-olds were able to make use of the adults' perspectives to adjust their strategies in the game when their emotional responses were supposed to conflict with the adults'). conversational perspective-taking ability is related to children's level of executive function. monolingual infants and young children perform worse than those who are bilingual and also worse than monolingual individuals who live in multilingual environments. bilingual children are better at adapting to the needs of their communication partner than monolingual children

research with infants (lecture)

-- young infants can't talk yet: however, at birth, infants have control over how hard they suck and how quickly they suck and are born with a sucking reflex. They also have a rooting reflex (if you touch their cheek, they'll turn their head and open their mouth. They don't root to their own fist if they accidentally touch their own cheek so they're differentiating between double-touch and single-touch). Within four hours of being born, infants are capable of imitating adult facial expressions (there's some kind of mapping going on for that). a 3-day-old baby will look at things. Even when legally blind, infants will look at things and look away at things. Head-to-tail and center-out is how physical development occurs. Conditioned head-turn procedures and sucking time tests are used for perception. A couple hours after birth, they can track a human face. Use innate preferences to figure out what infants can perceive in a given situation (prefer looking at things when there's more going on in those things, captured by new things immediately even if they then go back to their familiarity preference). If an infant can perceive stripes, they should look longer at the stripes than the solid block (the longer looking time means the baby can perceive the stripes instead of just seeing a lighter shade). Clever Hans phenomenon is that there was a horse who could supposedly do addition by stomping his hoof (but when the horse couldn't see the person asking the question, the horse couldn't add. The horse was reading human behavioral changes to figure out the correct answer). If the infants can perceive a change, they should dishabituate after habituating -- sucking response, rooting response, imitation, looking time -- methods: touch tests (10 hrs old - rooting response), taste and smell tests (2-week-olds orient toward smell of mother's milk), auditory tests (preferential sucking to make sounds last), visual tests, preferential looking (developed by Fantz in 1958 who said infants will look the same length of time to objects that are similar and that infants will look longer at one object if they prefer it and can perceive a difference between the two, infants have innate preferences for looking at complex things, high contrast, things that move, novel things, objects that are closer, human voices, and voices in the female range, conducted between or within subjects), habituation (based on preferences and the assumptions that infants prefer novelty, will get bored of the same thing presented again and again, will show renewed interest if the infants can perceive a change; usually assess looking time and sucking time; most common research method today

which of the following is an example of sociodramatic play?

Laila is pretending that she is in school and her friend Tosha is the teacher

which category level do children tend to form first?

basic

Chomsky's proposition that humans are born with an understanding of the basic principles and rules that govern all language is known as ______

Universal Grammar

Seven-month-old Trevor has learned that small round objects can be rolled across a flat surface. Trevor's discovery is an example of which developmental learning process?

affordances

which of the following statements describes the counting principle of abstraction?

any set of discrete objects or events can be counted

Kamar is happily counting all of his holiday candy, reciting a number as he touches each piece: "One,two,three,four,five,six,seven,eight,nine," He holds up the final piece and states, "I have seven pieces of candy!" Kamar's counting skills suggests he lacks an understanding of _______________.

cardinality

in Kraseum and Andrews' experiments, young children were better able to classify wugs and gillies after being told stories explaining each creature's unique appearance. their findings support the importance of

causal relationships

Preschoolers Ahmed and Max are talking together. Ahmed says that his father is old. Max says that he likes cars. Ahmed says that his father is probably more than 10 years old. Max says that he likes blue cars the best. According to Piaget, Ahmed and Max are engaging in ______.

collective monologues

which of the following is an example of perceptual narrowing?

compared to older children and adults, infants are better able to distinguish between different individual monkeys

language _______ refers to the understanding of what others say; language _________ refers to the process of speaking

comprehension; production

_______ a computational modeling approach that has been applied to language development, emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units

connectionism

The tendency of specific sounds to frequently recur in a language is known as

distributional properties

which of the following represents the most typical organization of superordinate, subordinate, and basic category levels that young children tend to form?

dogs/animals/poodles

according to Piaget, children's coding of locations of objects relative to their own bodies is referred to as

egocentric spatial representations

Ted believes that the reason his dog barks, wags her tail, and likes to go outside is because the dog has an inner "dogness." Ted's belief is an example of

essentialism

which of the following statements is not true of infant-directed speech?

evidence suggests that IDS is a universal practice across all cultures

Research by Gelman and Kalish (2006) suggests that infants tend to divide objects into three general categories. Which of the following is not one of the general categories as identified by their research?

food

five-month-old Kenji is lying in his crib. his mother hides out of view, then pops out above him and yells, "boo!" Kenji squeals with delight but after his mother repeats her actions a few times, his excitement dissipates and his attention wanders to the mobile hanging overhead. Kenji's response is an example of

habituation

How does the element of surprise aid in the process of active learning in infants?

infants are more likely to search for explanations to unexpected events

the violation-of-expectancy procedure provides evidence of what basic assumption about infants' understanding of their world?

infants will look longer at a seemingly impossible event than at a possible event

researchers design an experiment in which 8- to 10-month-old infants are placed in a highchair with a string attached to one of their arms. when they lift their arms, the string tips a small cup that spills cereal onto the table in front of them. a few weeks later, these same infants are placed in a different chair but outfitted with a similar string and cup mechanism. the fact that these infants will remember that lifting their arms will result in cereal being dispensed is an example of

instrumental conditioning

The tendency of an infant to look longer at a smiling face that is paired with a happy voice is an indication of that infant's

intermodal perception

what is the significance of the false-belief problem?

it illustrates that very young children do not understand that other people act on their own beliefs even when those beliefs are false

a researcher present an infant with two objects. to determine whether the infant is able to discriminate between the objects and favors one over the other, the researcher measures the amount of time the infant spends looking at each object. which experimental technique is this researcher using?

preferential-looking technique

the smallest units of meaning in a language, such as the English words dog or mom, are called _______

morphemes

Emily is given two pictures: one shows a flower, a word she already knows, and the other shows a unicorn, which is new to her. When asked to point to the "unicorn," Emily points to the unknown image, which is of a unicorn. Which assumption is Emily making in order to learn this new word?

mutual exclusivity

the belief that infants are born with some sense of fundamental concepts such as time, space, and number, is a basic component of

nativism

the proposed existence of a theory of mind module, which is the brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings, is most closely associated with advocates of which position?

nativism

in front of Sue are three balls, three teddy bears, three pencils, and three apples. Sue studies the groups of objects and realizes that they share the property of "threeness." Sue is demonstrating an understanding of what concept?

numerical equality

the understanding that two objects are separate even when they are touching is referred to as

object segregation

Thirteen-month-old Christian calls all men "Dad." This is an example of ______.

overextension

One-month-old Bella is shown a small cube that is close to her. Next she is shown a larger cube that is farther away from her. Because the two cubes are at different distances from Bella, they appear to be the same size. Bella's actions indicate that she recognizes that the second cube is larger, signifying that she has

perceptual constancy

Six- to 8-month-old infants are better able to distinguish between phonemes spoken in a non-native language than are infants who are just a few years older. This phenomenon is explained by

perceptual narrowing

the understanding of the cultural contexts of language-- including shifts in tone and body language, which allow two strangers who speak the same language to successfully communicate--is known as _________ knowledge

pragmatic

Two-year-old Ravi goes to the zoo with his mother. Even though he has never heard of a giraffe or seen one before, when his mother points to an animal and calls it a "giraffe," Ravi then calls that animal a giraffe. This exchange demonstrates Ravi's use of _______.

pragmatic cues

Jane is a 2 month old infant. She wants to get her hands on the rattle that is lying next to her; however, all she can do is make very clumsy swiping movements in the general vicinity of the toy. Jane's movements are known as ________

pre-reaching motions

Five-week-old Johnny is touched on the cheek and promptly turns his head to the side that was touched. Johnny is displaying

rooting reflex

Two-year-old Jayden attempts to put her foot inside of a toy car that is clearly too small for her. She is making which type of error?

scale error

an infant's ability to follow the path of a moving object is a demonstration of

smooth pursuit eye movement

Using the structure of a sentence to derive the meaning of a novel word is known as

syntactic bootstrapping

Nativists and empiricists have intense debates about the development of spatial thinking, but on which of the following points do these two groups tend to agree?

the development of the hippocampus is related to improvements in spatial learning

a mother magically produces a coin from behind her 6-year-old son's ear. which of the following scenarios describes the response of a typical 6-year-old?

the son searches his mother's hands, up her sleeves, and behind his ear to try to make sense of the event

Between 6 and 12 months of age, infants typically experience a linguistic perceptual narrowing. What effect does this change have on their language development?

they become increasingly less sensitive to non-native speech sounds

dual representation refers to one's ability to _______

understand a symbolic artifact as both a real object and as a symbol for something else

which of the following is a possible explanation for why young infants tend to have more trouble with auditory localization than older infants and children do?

young infants have smaller heads, which makes it more difficult for them to perceive whether a sound is closer to one ear or other