psyc 335 quiz 5: ch. 10, 11, 12

Important Milestones in Language Development

study table 11.7

The Telegraphic Period: From Holophrases to Simple Sentences general

-18-24 months -telegraphic speech: early sentences that consist of content words and omit the less meaningful parts of speech, such as articles, prepositions, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs. -> like telegraphs, only contain critical content words -why do this? they encode these words in others' speech -> respond more appropriately to fully grammatical sentences -> omit words bc of own processing and production constraints -telegraphic speech not that universal: -> Russian and Turkish children, for example, produce short but reasonably grammatical sentences from the very beginning -> Because their languages put more stress on small grammatical markers and have less rigid rules about word order than other languages do -whatever is most noticeable about the structure of a language is what children acquire first -if content words and word order rules are most heavily stressed (as in English), then young children will include this information and omit the lightly stressed articles, prepositions, and grammatical markers to produce what appear to be "telegraphic" utterances

Sternberg and Lubart's Investment Theory (of Creativity): A Test of Investment Theory

-If investment theory is sound, then people who have more creative resources at their disposal should generate more creative solutions to problems -results supported investment theory in that all five sets of creativity resources were moderately to highly correlated with the creativity ratings participants received, and participants whose solutions were rated most creative were those who had higher scores across all five kinds of creative resources.

Language Learning during the Preschool Period general

-In the short period from age to 5, children learn to produce sentences that are remarkably complex and adultlike. -mastering basic morphology and syntax -> a child of 35 to 38 months is now inserting articles, auxiliary verbs, and grammatical markers (e.g., ed, ing) that were previously omitted, as well as negating propositions and occasionally asking a well-formed question -preschool children are also beginning to understand much more about the pragmatics of language and communication.

Preschool Period: Semantic Development

-2- to 5-year-olds are beginning to understand and express relational contrasts such as big/little, tall/short, in/on, before/after, here/there, and I/you -Big and little first spatial adjectives to appear -> By age 2 to , for example, children can use big and little to draw proper normative conclusions (a 10 cm egg, viewed by itself, is "big" relative to other eggs the child remembers seeing) and perceptual inferences (a 10 cm egg placed next to an even bigger egg is "little") -> By age 3, children are even capable of using these terms to make appropriate functional judgments, such as deciding that an oversized article of doll clothing, which is little relative to what the child wears, is nonetheless too "big" to fit the doll in question preschoolers' incomplete knowledge of syntax means make some interesting semantic errors: 1) girl hit the boy 2) the boy was hit by the girl -> children younger than 4 or 5 understand sentence 1: active version, but misinterpret sentence 2: passive version (think boy hits girl) -> assume that the first noun is the agent of the verb and that the second is the object; consequently, they interpret the passive construction as if it were an active sentence, esp difficult when have mental state verbs like like or know -Why, then, do preschoolers often misinterpret passives and rarely produce them? Probably because people speaking to them rarely use passives or ask questions that would encourage their use -> Inuktitut and Zulu children, who hear many passive constructions in speech directed at them, come to understand and to produce passive sentences much earlier than Western children do

Recognizing and Interpreting Emotions: later milestones in emotional understanding

-3.5 on, get better at recognizing and interpreting others' emotional displays -4-5: can tell if someone is happy, angry, or sad from expressive body movements -. By late childhood (age 8-11), children's ability to recognize facial expressions, particularly sadness, increases -> , boys show particularly increased recognition of sadness between these ages, although girls continue to show high levels of sadness recognition. -> hildren aged 6 to 7 years who exhibited an insecure/disorganized-fearful attachment style were also less able to identify adults' emotional expressions -as age, increasingly understand that negative emotions may stem from thinking about past events -> gradually begin to rely more on personal, situational, and historical information to interpret emotions -> By age 8, they recognize that many situations (such as the approach of a big dog) will elicit different emotional reactions (such as fear versus joy) from different individuals -> Six- to 9-year-olds are also beginning to understand that a person can experience more than one emotion (e.g., excitement and wariness) at the same time -latter advances in emotional understanding emerge at about the same age that children can integrate more than one piece of information (e.g., height and width of a column of liquid) in Piagetian conservation tasks that we discussed in Chapter 8, and they may depend, in part, on the same underlying cognitive developments. Nevertheless, social experiences are also important.

psychometric views of intelligence: general

-> standardized intelligence tests -psychometric approach: a theoretical perspective that portrays intelligence as a trait (or set of traits) on which individuals differ; psychometric theorists are responsible for the development of standardized intelligence tests. -theorists goals to identify traits associated with intelligence and to measure them so that intellectual differences among individuals could be described

Resistant Attachment

-About 10 percent of 1-year-olds show this type of "insecure" attachment. -Resistant: an insecure infant-caregiver bond, characterized by strong separation protest and a tendency of the child to remain near but resist contact initiated by the caregiver, particularly after a separation.

factors that influence IQ scores: the evidence for heredity: ADOPTION STUDIES

-Adopted children's IQs are more highly correlated with the IQs of their biological parents than with those of their adoptive parents. -> scarr and mcartney's gene-environment transactions: people seek out environments that are compatible with their genetic predispositions, so that identical twins (who share identical genes) select and experience more similar environments than fraternal twins or nontwin siblings do. -> identical twins resemble each other intellectually throughout life, whereas the intellectual resemblances between fraternal twins or nontwin siblings become progressively smaller over time -but also, a barren environment stiffles high IQ, and if stimulating environment, low intellectual baseline can obtain average or higher IQ

The Holophrastic Period: Attaching Meaning to Words -Strategies for Inferring Word Meanings

-Akhtar: 2-year-olds are already especially sensitive to social and contextual cues that help them to determine what novel aspects of a companion's speech might mean -> had 2-year-olds and two adults play with three unnamed objects that were unfamiliar to the children. Then one adult left the room and a fourth unnamed object was added to the mix. Later, when the absent adult returned, she exclaimed, "Look, I see a gasser! A gasser!" without pointing at or displaying any other clue to indicate which of the four objects she was referring to. Even though gasser could have referred to any of the four unnamed objects, a substantial percentage of these 2-year-olds correctly inferred the speaker's referential intent, picking the novel object -infants as young as 12 months old use contextual cues to compute the statistical likelihood of words presented in multiple contexts to infer the referent of the word: e.g. hear cookie in multiple contexts which provides info for possible referent -2 year olds have other strategies that help narrow it down: processing constraints: cognitive biases or tendencies that lead infants and toddlers to favour certain interpretations of the meaning of new words over other interpretations. -see table 11.2 for the rest: (4) -object scope constraint: the notion that young children assume that a new word applied to an object refers to the whole object rather than to parts of the object or to object attributes. (e.g., its colour). -mutual exclusivity: the notion that young children assume that each object has only one label and that different words refer to separate and not overlapping categories. -> this isnt very helpful when adults use more than one word to refer to the same object; for example, "Oh, there is a doggie—a cocker spaniel" -> Under these circumstances, 2-year-olds who already know the word doggie often apply the lexical contrast constraint: the notion that young children make inferences about word meanings by contrasting new words with words they already know. -> this tendency to contrast novel with familiar words may explain how children form hierarchical linguistic categories

Language: Evaluating The Learning (or Empiricist) Perspective

-Imitation and reinforcement clearly play some part in early language development. -Instead of unidirectional imitation, bidirectional imitation of mothers and their infants' vocalizations has been observed -cant account for development of syntax: -> If parents really "shaped" grammar (i.e., morphology and syntax), as Skinner claimed, then they ought to reliably praise or otherwise reinforce the child's grammatical utterances. -> but a mother's approval or disapproval depends far more on the truth value (semantics) of what a child says than on the statement's grammatical correctness -also not much evidence that children acquire grammatical rules by imitating adult speech. Many of a child's earliest sentences are highly creative statements such as "Allgone cookie" or "It broked" that do not appear in adult speech

Displaying Emotions: The Development (and Control) of Emotional Expressions: Sequencing of Discrete Emotions

-At birth, babies show interest, distress, disgust, and contentment. -by 3 months: social smiles -basic emotions: the set of emotions, present at birth or emerging early in the first year, that some theorists believe to be biologically programmed. -> anger, sadness, joy, surprise, and fear -> emerge between 2-7 months -some learning/development necessary for babies to express emotions - e.g. experience surprise or joy when kick feet to make mobile move -> disconfirmation of these experiences -> anger 2-4 months, sadness 4-6 months -complex emotions: self-conscious or self-evaluative emotions that emerge in the second year and depend, in part, on cognitive development. -> embarrassment, shame, guilt, envy, and pride. -> These feelings are sometimes called self-conscious emotions because each involves some damage to or enhancement of our sense of self. -embarrassment requires self-recognition -Self-evaluative emotions such as shame, guilt, and pride may require both self-recognition (i.e., the child can recognize herself in a mirror or photograph) and an understanding of rules or standards for evaluating one's conduct. -By 3: pride, shame -preschool age: evaluative embarrassment -later developing emotions complex: --> uilt implies that we have in some way failed to live up to our obligations to other people; a child who feels guilty is likely to focus on the interpersonal consequences of his wrongdoing and may try to approach others to make reparations for his harmful acts --> uilt implies that we have in some way failed to live up to our obligations to other people; a child who feels guilty is likely to focus on the interpersonal consequences of his wrongdoing and may try to approach others to make reparations for his harmful acts -Parents influence experience and expression of many emotions -> parental meta-emotion philosophy (PMEP): an organized set of feelings and thoughts that parents have about their own emotions and those of their children -> contributes to emotional coaching through emotional scaffolding, praising, validation, and self-disclosure -study: clear relationship between the children's signs of pride over their successes, shame over their failures, and the mothers' reactions to these outcomes.

psychometric views of intelligence: Alfred Binet's Singular Component Approach

-Binet and Simon, 1904, commissioned by French government to construct test that would identify less intelligence children who needed remedial instruction - included attention, perception, memory, numerical reasoning, verbal comprehension -1908 Binet-Simon test revised and age-graded the items, for ages 3-12, made it more precise -> e.g. child who passed all items at the 5-year-old level but none at the 6-year-old level was said to have a mental age (MA) of 5 years -successfully enabled them to identify slow learners and estimate levels of intellectual development of all children -> helpful to build school curricula

Attachments as Reciprocal Relationships general

-Bowlby (1969) stressed that parent-infant attachments are reciprocal relationships: infants become attached to parents and parents become attached to infants. -attachments build slowly over first several months - but just as likely to develop secure attachments in adoptive, surrogacy families

How Do Infants Become Attached?: Why do infants fear strangers and separations? The Ethological Viewpoint

-Bowlby (1973) claimed that many situations infants face qualify as natural clues to danger: they have been so frequently associated with danger throughout human evolutionary history that a fear or avoidance response has become "biologically programmed." These dangers can include strange faces (which, in earlier eras, may have been predatory animals), strange settings, and the "strange circumstance" of being separated from familiar companions. -> e.g. infants show stronger reactions to strangers and separations in an unfamiliar laboratory than at home. -explains cross-cultural difference: : infants from many nonindustrial societies, who sleep with their mothers and are nearly always in close contact with them, begin to protest separations about 2 to 3 months earlier than Western infants do. Why? Because those infants are so rarely apart from their caregivers that almost any separation is a very "strange" and fear-provoking event for them -also explains decline in second year: nce infants begin to walk and can use their attachment objects as secure bases for exploration, they actively initiate separations, becoming much more tolerant of them and less wary of other novel stimuli (including friendly strangers) that had previously been a source of concern

Why Might Attachment Quality Forecast Later Outcomes?: Attachments as Working Models of Self and Others

-Bowlby and Bretherton (ethologists) : believe that as infants interact with primary caregivers, they develop internal working models: cognitive representations of self, others, and relationships that infants construct from their interactions with caregivers. -> Sensitive, responsive caregiving may lead the child to conclude that people are dependable (positive working model of others), whereas insensitive, neglectful, or abusive caregiving may lead to insecurity and a lack of trust (negative working model of others). -> infants also develop a working model of the self based largely on their ability to elicit attention and comfort when they need it -updated version: figure 12.4: infants who construct positive working models of themselves and their caregivers are the ones who should (1) form secure primary attachments, (2) have the self-confidence to approach and to master new challenges, and (3) be inclined to establish secure, mutual-trust relationships with friends and spouses later in life -A positive model of self, coupled with a negative model of others (as might result when infants can successfully attract the attention of an insensitive, overintrusive caregiver), is thought to predispose the infant to form avoidant attachments and to "dismiss" the importance of close emotional attachment -A negative model of self and a positive model of others (as might result when infants sometimes can but often cannot attract the attention they need) should be associated with resistant attachments and a preoccupation with establishing secure emotional ties. -negative working model of both the self and others is thought to underlie disorganized/disoriented attachments and an emerging fear of being hurt (either physically or emotionally) in intimate relationships

prelinguistic period: What Do Prelinguistic Infants Know about Language and Communication?- Gestures and Nonverbal Responses

-By 8 to 10 months of age, preverbal infants begin to use gestures and other nonverbal responses (e.g., facial expressions) to communicate with their companions: -> declarative gestures, in which the infant directs others' attention to an object by pointing at or touching it, -> imperative gestures, in which the infant tries to convince others to grant his requests through such actions as pointing at candy he wants or tugging at a caregiver's pantleg when he hopes to be picked up. -> eventually representational and function like words, e.g. holding arms out like an airplane -gestures so often accompany vocal communications at all ages that we might rename the spoken language system as the speech-gesture system -> Children's use of gestures has been found to predict their comprehension (receptive) vocabulary size

Preschool Period: Grammatical development: Mastering Transformational Rules - Producing Complex Sentences

-By age 3, most children have begun to produce complex sentences -first: Relative clauses that modify nouns (e.g., "That's the box that they put it in") and conjunctions to join simple sentences ("He was stuck and I got him out") -second: embedded sentences (e.g., "The man who fixed the fence went home") and more intricate forms of questions as well (e.g., "Matthew will come, won't he?" "Where did you say you put my doll?") -third: by 5 or 6: children are using most of the grammatical rules of their language and speaking much like adults do, even though they have never had a formal lesson in grammar.

Home environment and IQ -Assessing the Character of the Home Environment

-Caldwell and Bradley: HOME inventory: a measure of the amount and type of intellectual stimulation provided by a child's home environment. -> interviewer visits an infant, preschooler, or school-age child at home and determine how intellectually stimulating (or impoverished) that home environment is -infant version: 45 statements, answer yes or no, to gather info: (1) asks the child's parent (usually the mother) to describe her daily routine and child-rearing practices, (2) carefully observes the parent as she interacts with her child, and (3) notes the kinds of play materials that the parent makes available to the child. -> the 45 bits of information collected are then grouped into the six subscales in Table 10.5. The home then receives a score on each subscale. The higher the scores across all six subscales, the more intellectually stimulating the home environment. 6 subscales: 1) Emotional and verbal responsivity of parent 2) Avoidance of restriction and punishment 3) Organization of physical and temporal environment 4) Provision of appropriate play materials 5) Parental involvement with child 6) Opportunities for variety in daily stimulation

Language Learning during Middle Childhood: Later Syntactic Development

-During middle childhood, children correct many of their previous syntactical errors and begin to use a number of complex grammatical forms that did not appear in their earlier speech. -5- to 8-year-olds are beginning to iron out the kinks in their use of personal pronouns, so that sentences such as "Him and her went" become much less frequent -y age 7 to 9, children understand and may occasionally even produce such complex passive sentences as "Goofy was liked by Donald" and conditional sentences such as "If Goofy had come, Donald would have been delighted" -middle childhood is a period of syntactical refinement. -this process of syntactic elaboration occurs very gradually, often continuing well into adolescence or young adulthood

prelinguistic period: What Do Prelinguistic Infants Know about Language and Communication? general

-During the first 6 months, babies often coo or babble while their caregivers are speaking -But by 7 to 8 months of age, infants are typically silent while a companion speaks and wait to respond with a vocalization when their partner stops talking - learned their first rule in the pragmatics of language -> Vocal turn-taking may come about because parents typically say something to the baby; wait for the baby to smile, cough, burp, coo, or babble; and address the baby again, thereby inviting another response -> may also learn from other reciprocal exchanges, like nose touching -By 4 months, infants begin to respond more positively to organized than disorganized social games -By 9 months of age, infants clearly understand the alternation rules of many games, and if such activities are interrupted by the adult's failure to take her turn, the infant is likely to vocalize, urge the adult to resume by offering her a toy, or wait for a second or two and take the adult's turn before looking once again at the adult -> the ways caregivers structure interactions with an infant may indeed help the child to recognize that many forms of social discourse, including "talking," are patterned activities that follow a definite set of rules.

Sternberg and Lubart's Investment Theory (of Creativity): Promoting Creativity in the Classroom

-Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has been used as a framework for promoting the growth of intelligences that are not heavily stressed in school. These programs enrich the experiences of all pupils to foster abilities in the arts such as spatial intelligence (through sculpting or painting), kinesthetic-body intelligence (through dance or athletics), and musical intelligence (in school music classes) -> successful at identifying special talents of children who are not at all exceptional in traditional academic subjects -allow students more freedom to design their own art projects or science experiments and to explore any unusual interests in depth -Less emphasis on memorizing facts and obtaining correct answers (convergent thinking) and more emphasis on discussing complex problems that have many possible answers may also help students to develop divergent thinking skills, tolerance for ambiguity, and a global analytic style that fosters creative solutions -parents and educators might try to be a bit more enthusiastic when youngsters display an unusual passion for an offbeat or otherwise nontraditional interest

Cultural Variations in Attachment Classifications

-Germany, more encouragement to be independent -> why more German than American babies show reunion behaviours characteristic of the avoidant attachment pattern -intense separation and stranger anxieties, which characterize resistant attachments, are much more common in cultures such as Japan, where caregivers rarely leave their infants with substitute caregivers. -what qualifies as a secure (or an insecure) attachment varies from culture to culture: -> Japanese mothers have much more close contact with their infants, and strive to anticipate and satisfy all of their babies' needs, rather than react to their needy babies' cries. Japanese mothers also emphasize social routines and accommodative behaviours more and exploration less than Western mothers do -> seek to promote the infant's amae (pronounced "ah-MY-ay")—a state of total dependence on the mother and a presumption of mother love and indulgence. Given these child-rearing practices, Japanese babies are upset by separations and will cling to their mother on reunion. - not insecure in Japanese context, sets stage for communal orientation -> learn to become interdependent

Preschool Period: Development of Grammatical Morphemes general

-Grammatical morphemes: prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs that modify the meaning of words and sentences. -appear during 3rd year -> n begin to pluralize nouns by adding -s, to signify location with the prepositional morphemes in and on, to indicate verb tense with the present progressive -ing or the past tense -ed, and to describe possessive relations with the inflection -'s. -Brown: records on children as acquired 14 grammatical morphemes: He found that these three children varied considerably with respect to (1) the age at which they began to use grammatical markers and (2) the amount of time it took them to master all 14 rules. However, all three children in this longitudinal study learned the 14 grammatical morphemes in the exact order in which they appear in Table 11.5, a finding confirmed in a cross-sectional study of 21 additional children -> this is bc the morphemes acquired early are less semantically and syntactically complex than those acquired later. For example, the present progressive -ing, which describes an ongoing action, appears before the past regular -ed, which describes both action and a sense of "earlier in time." -> ed, which conveys two semantic features, is acquired earlier than the uncontractible forms of the verb to be (is, are, was, were), all of which are more syntactically complex and specify three semantic relations: number (singular or plural), tense (present or past), and action (ongoing process) -once acquire new morpheme, apply to new and familiar contexts

Displaying Emotions: The Development (and Control) of Emotional Expressions general

-Izard -> different adult raters observing the same expressions reliably see the same emotion in a baby's face -adults can usually tell which positive emotion a baby is experiencing (e.g., interest versus joy) from facial expressions but that negative emotions (such as fear versus anger) are much more difficult to discriminate on the basis of facial cues alone

Why Do Groups Differ in Intellectual Performance? - the genetic hypothesis

-Jensen - genetic hypothesis: the notion that group differences in IQ are hereditary. -he says: two broad classes of intellectual abilities that are equally heritable among different racial and ethnic groups: -> Level I abilities - Jensen's term for lower-level intellectual abilities (such as attention and short-term memory) that are important for simple association learning. -> Level II abilities - Jensen's term for higher-level cognitive skills that are involved in abstract reasoning and problem solving.

Factors That Influence Attachment Security: infant characteristics - Does Temperament Explain Attachment Security?

-Kagan's hypothesis too extreme -many infants are securely attached to one close companion and insecurely attached to another. This is a pattern we would not expect to see if attachment classifications were merely reflections of the child's relatively stable temperamental characteristics -when mothers of temperamentally difficult infants are trained to be more sensitive, the vast majority of their babies establish secure rather than insecure attachments, suggesting a causal relationship between sensitive caregiving and attachment quality -when mothers of temperamentally difficult infants are trained to be more sensitive, the vast majority of their babies establish secure rather than insecure attachments, suggesting a causal relationship between sensitive caregiving and attachment quality -genetic contributions to children's attachments (including the contribution of genetically influenced components of temperament) are modest, and that shared environmental influences (for instance, interacting with the same sensitive or insensitive caregiver) contribute substantially to the resemblances in attachments twin siblings displayed.

How is intelligence measured?: Newer Approaches to Intelligence Testing

-Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC): individual intelligence test for children; grounded heavily in information-processing theory - content nonverbal, primarily fluid intelligence -dynamic assessment: an approach to assessing intelligence that evaluates how well individuals learn new material when an examiner provides them with competent instruction. -> linked tp Vygotsky's zone of proximal development -Feuerstein and his colleagues: ven though intelligence is often defined as a potential to learn from experience, IQ tests typically assess what has already been learned, not what can be learned -> the traditional psychometric approach may be biased against children from culturally diverse or economically disadvantaged backgrounds, who lack opportunities to learn what the tests measure -> Feuerstein's Learning Potential Assessment Device asks children to learn new things with the guidance of an adult who provides increasingly helpful hints. -This test interprets intelligence as the ability to learn quickly with minimal guidance.

Sternberg and Lubart's Investment Theory (of Creativity): Intellectual resources: Knowledge, Cognitive Style, Personality, Motivation, Supportive environment

-Knowledge: must be familiar with the current state of the art in her chosen area if she is ever to advance or transform it -Cognitive Style: legislative cognitive style—that is, a preference for thinking in novel and divergent ways of one's own choosing—is important to creativity. -also helps to think in broad, global terms—which will help in deciding which of your ideas are truly novel and worth pursuing. -Personality: Previous research indicates that the personality variables most closely associated with high creativity are : -willingness to take sensible risks -to persevere in the face of uncertainty or ambiguity -the self-confidence to defy the crowd and pursue ideas that will eventually win recognition -Motivation: have a passion for what they are trying to accomplish and focus on the work itself rather than its potential rewards -A Supportive Environment: Several studies of children with special talents in such domains as chess, music, or mathematics reveal that these child "prodigies" are blessed with an environment that nurtured their talents and motivations and rewarded their accomplishments -some societies value creativity more than others do and devote many financial and human resources to nurturing creative potential

Improving Cognitive Performance through Compensatory Education -Long-Term Follow-Ups

-Lazar and Darlington reported on the long-term effects of 11 high-quality, university-based early intervention programs initiated during the 1960s: longitudinal studies suggest that program participants score higher in IQ than nonparticipants for two to three years after the interventions are over but that their IQ scores eventually decline. -> but program didnt fail: -Children who participated in the interventions were much more likely to meet their school's basic requirements than nonparticipants were -less likely to be assigned to special education classes or to be retained in a grade -ore likely than nonparticipants to complete high school -more positive attitudes about school and (later) about job-related successes than nonparticipants did -mothers were more satisfied with their academic performances and held higher occupational aspirations for them as well -> Many believe that we can if compensatory education begins earlier in life and lasts longer, and ways are found to help parents become more involved in their children's learning activities -> Aboriginal Head Start program, for example, is explicit in its inclusion of parents, extended family and the community in providing education for children, as well as advocates for programs that are culturally sensitive and appropriate

psychometric views of intelligence: early mulitcomponent theories of intelligence

-Spearman one of first to use factor analysis on intelligence -> found that a child's scores across a variety of cognitive tests were moderately correlated and thus inferred that there must be a general mental factor, which he called g, that affects one's performance on most cognitive tasks -> but also, intellectual performance inconsistent, sometimes did will in most tasks but poorly in another: ----> intellectual performance has two aspects: g, or general ability, and s, or special abilities, each of which is measured by a particular test -Thurstone: also used factor analysis -> found seven factors that he called primary mental abilities: -> said make up Spearman's g 1) spatial ability 2) perceptual speed (quick processing of visual information) 3) numerical reasoning 4) verbal meaning (defining words) 5) word fluency (speed of recognizing words) 6) memory 7) inductive reasoning (forming a rule that describes a set of observations)

language: Support for the Nativist Perspective -The Sensitive-Period Hypothesis

-Lenneberg: Nativist who proposed that languages should be most easily acquired between birth and puberty, the period when the lateralized human brain is becoming increasingly specialized for linguistic functions -> sensitive-period hypothesis: the notion that human beings are most proficient at language learning before they reach puberty -> this is bc the right hemisphere of a child's relatively unspecialized brain can assume any linguistic functions lost when the left hemisphere is damaged. -By contrast, the brain of a person who is past puberty is already fully specialized for language and other neurological duties. -So aphasia may persist in adolescents and adults because the right hemisphere is no longer available to assume linguistic skills lost from a traumatic injury to the left side of the brain -case studies: -Genie: locked away until 14 -Chelsea: deaf and isolated, wasnt exposed to formal language until 32 -> Extensive efforts were undertaken to teach these women language, and each made remarkable progress, learning the meaning of many words and even producing lengthy sentences that were rich in semantic content. Yet neither woman mastered the rules of syntax that virtually all children acquire without formal instruction -Foreign languages: -Johnson and Newport: immigrants who began to learn English between 3 and 7 years of age were as proficient in English as native speakers are. By contrast, immigrants who arrived after puberty (particularly after age 15) performed rather poorly. -research on international adoptees: the optimal age of linguistic exposure to attain native proficiency may be earlier than 3 years of age -differences in organization of brain: Specifically, speaking either of their two languages activates the same area of the brain in bilinguals who acquired their second language in early childhood, whereas speaking two languages activates different areas of the brain in bilinguals who acquired their second language after puberty, increase in the density of grey matter in the left parietal area of the brain can be seen in early bilinguals who acquired their second language before 5 years old

Fathers as Caregivers - attachment

-Many infants form secure attachments to their fathers during the latter half of the first year, particularly if the father has a positive attitude about parenting, spends considerable time with them, and is a sensitive caregiver -cross-culturally, Mothers are more likely than fathers to hold their infants, to soothe and talk to them, to play traditional games such as peekaboo, and to care for their physical needs -> fathers are more likely than mothers to provide playful physical stimulation and to initiate unusual or unpredictable games that infants often enjoy. Although most infants prefer their mothers' company when upset or afraid, fathers are often preferred as playmates

The Holophrastic Period: When a Word Is More than a Word

-Many psycholinguists characterize an infant's one-word utterances as holophrases because they often seem less like labels and more like attempts to convey an entire sentence's worth of meaning -serve different communication functions depending on how said and context -e.g. asking (through pointing), naming, or requesting (said while tugged as eating and whined) -Of course, there are limits to the amount of meaning that can be packed into a single word, but infants in the holophrastic phase of language development do seem to display such basic language functions as naming, questioning, requesting, and demanding—functions that will later serve to produce different kinds of sentences -> also learning an important pragmatic lesson: that their one-word messages are often ambiguous and may require an accompanying gesture or intonational cue if they are to be understood

How is intelligence measured?: Assessing Infant Intelligence - general

-None of the standard intelligence tests can be used with children much younger than because the test items require verbal skills and attention spans, which infants do not have -at which babies achieve important developmental milestones. Perhaps the best known and most widely used of the infant tests is the Bayley Scales of Infant Development -> 3 parts, for infants (2-30 months): (1) the motor scale, which assesses such motor capabilities as grasping a cube, throwing a ball, or drinking from a cup; (2) the mental scale, which includes adaptive behaviours such as categorizing objects, searching for a hidden toy, and following directions; and (3) the Infant Behavior Record, a rating of the child's behaviour on dimensions such as goal directedness, fearfulness, and social responsivity (see Table 10.2). -given a score for motor and mental scores -> DQ, or developmental quotient: a numerical measure of an infant's performance on a developmental schedule, relative to the performance of other infants of the same age., not an IQ -Infant scales are very useful for charting babies' developmental progress and for diagnosing neurological disorders and other signs of intellectual disability

Why Do Groups Differ in Intellectual Performance? - Motivational Factors -> Impacts of Negative Stereotypes

-Ogbu - negative stereotypes about their intellectual abilities may cause some minority youngsters to feel that their life outcomes will be restricted by prejudice and discrimination. Consequently, they may come to reject certain behaviours sanctioned by the majority culture, such as excelling in school or on tests, as less relevant to them or as "acting white." -stereotype threat: a situation in which there is a negative stereotype about a persons' group, and he or she is concerned about being judged or treated negatively on the basis of this stereotype, this impacts performance on tests

factors that influence IQ scores: the evidence for environment: A Secular Trend: The Flynn Effect

-On average, IQs in all countries studied increased about 3 points per decade since 1940, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect -why? -> improvements in education -> 1) helping people to become more testwise, 2) more knowledgeable in general, and 3) more likely to rely on sophisticated problem-solving strategies -> but not just this, bc Flynn effect most clearly on fluid intelligence, and would expect differences in crystallized intelligence here -> -Improvements in nutrition and health care are two other potent environmental factors that many believe to have contributed to improved intellectual performance by helping to optimize the development of growing brains and nervous systems -BUT - recent studies have shown secular IQ losses. These studies suggest that changes in IQ are a result of complex factors and simply viewing changes in diet, education, and other single factors may not be enough to fully explain patterns of change in IQ

psychometric views of intelligence: later multicomponent theories of intelligence (Guilforn and Cattel and Horn)

-Spearman's and Thurstone's early work suggested that there must be a relatively small number of basic mental abilities that make up what we call "intelligence." -> Guilford -> here may be as many as 180 basic mental abilities. -> first classified cognitive tasks into 3 dimensions: (1) content (what must the person think about) -> 5 types of this, (2) operations (what kind of thinking is the person asked to perform)-> 6 types of this, and (3) products (what kind of answer is required)-> 6 kinds of this -> structure-of-intellect model: Guilford's factor analytic model of intelligence, allows for 180 primary mental abilities by mulitiplying 5 x 6 x 6 -Cattel and Horn: Spearman's g and Thurstone's primary mental abilities can be reduced to two major dimensions of intellect: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. ->Fluid intelligence: the ability to perceive relationships and solve relational problems of the type that are not taught and are relatively free of cultural influences. -> crystallized intelligence: the ability to understand relations or solve problems that depend on knowledge acquired from schooling and other cultural influences.

The Prelinguistic Period: Early Reactions to Speech - The Importance of Intonational Cues and Sequences of Syllables

-Rising intonations (e.g., "Look at ") are used to recapture the attention of a baby who looks away, whereas falling intonations such as "!" are often used to comfort or to elicit positive affect (smiles, bright eyes) from a sombre baby. -intonational prompts are often successful at affecting a baby's mood or behaviour -> 2- to 6-month-old infants frequently produce a vocalization in return that matches the intonation of what they have just heard -During the second half of the first year, infants become increasingly attuned to the "rhythm" of a language, which helps them to segment what they hear, first into phrases and eventually into words -by 6 months of age, infants can use the "rhythm" of a language to keep track of how frequently each sound occurs in their speech input (this is called the distributional frequencies of sound) -By 7 months of age, infants can detect phrase units and clearly prefer to listen to speech that contains natural breaks and pauses to that in which pauses are inserted at unnatural places, such as the middle of a phrase -By age 8 months, they can keep track of the transitional probabilities of co-occurring syllables, that is, how often each syllable (e.g., /ba/) co-occurs with the next syllable (e.g., /by/) that comprises the word "baby" -By age 9 months, infants are becoming sensitive to smaller speech units. They now prefer to listen to speech samples that match the syllabic stress patterns and phonemic combinations of the language their caregivers -> by the last quarter of the first year, infants' increasing familiarity with the phonological aspects of their native tongue provides important clues about which patterns in an ongoing stream of speech represent individual words

Home environment and IQ - general - 10 risk factors

-Sameroff et al -> 10 environmental factors that place children at risk of displaying low IQ scores, nine of which were characteristics of children's homes and families - measured at age 4 and again at 13: -> Each of these "risk factors" was related to IQ at age 4, and most of them also predicted IQ at age 13. -the greater the number of these risk factors affecting a child, the lower his or her IQ; which particular risk factors a child experienced were less important than how many he or she experienced. -many of the factors listed likely interact, resulting in complex effects. 10 risk factors: -child is member of minority group -head of household is unemployed or low-skilled worker -mother didnt complete high school -family has 4 or more children -father is absent from family -family experienced many stressful life events -parents have rigid child-rearing values -mother is highly anxious or distressed -mother has poor mental health or diagnosed disorder -mother shows little positive affect towards child

How Do Infants Become Attached?: The growth of primary attachments

-Schaffer and Emerson: infants pass through phases as develop close ties with caregivers: 1) The asocial phase (0 to 6 weeks). Many kinds of social or nonsocial stimuli produce a favourable reaction and few produce any kind of protest. By the end of this period, infants are beginning to show a preference for social stimuli such as a smiling face. 2) The phase of indiscriminate attachments (6 weeks to 6 to 7 months). Now infants smile more at people than at such other lifelike objects as talking puppets (Ellsworth, Muir, & Hains, 1993) and are likely to fuss whenever any adult puts them down. They seem to enjoy the attention they receive from just about anyone (including strangers). 3) The specific attachment phase (about 7 to 9 months). Infants begin to protest only when separated from one particular individual, usually the mother. They also become somewhat wary of strangers. According to Schaffer and Emerson (1964), these babies have established their first genuine attachments. The formation of a secure attachment has an important consequence: it promotes the development of exploratory behaviour. Mary Ainsworth (1979) emphasizes that an attachment figure serves as a secure base for exploration: a point of safety from which an infant can feel free to venture away. That is, infants apparently need to rely on another person to feel confident about acting independently. 4) The phase of multiple attachments (about 9 to 18 months). Within weeks after forming their initial attachments, about half the infants in Schaffer and Emerson's study were becoming attached to other people (e.g., fathers). By 18 months of age, very few infants were attached to only one person.

An Effective Compensatory Intervention for Families

-Seitz and Apfel's family intervention was a 30-month program targeting poverty-stricken mothers who had recently delivered healthy firstborn children -> provided pediatric care, developmental evaluations, and monthly home visits by a psychologist, nurse, or social worker who gave mothers social support, information about child rearing and other family matters, and assistance in obtaining education or vocational training needed to get a job (or a better-paying job) -10 years later follow up: children who had received the intervention were doing well -> diffusion effect. Specifically, the younger siblings of the "intervention" and "control" participants displayed precisely the same differences in scholastic outcomes that the older children did, even though these younger brothers and sisters of children who participated in the intervention had not been born until the intervention was over -this family intervention had made disadvantaged mothers who participated more involved in their children's lives and more confident and effective in their parenting—a change that not only benefited their firstborn child, who received stimulating daycare, but all of their subsequent children as well.

Semantics

-Semantics: the expressed meaning of words and sentences. -morphemes: smallest meaningful language units. -> two types: 1) Free morphemes: morphemes that can stand alone as a word (e.g., cat, go, yellow). 2) bound morphemes: morphemes that cannot stand alone but that modify the meaning of free morphemes (e.g., the -ed attached to English verbs to indicate past tense). -children must recognize that words and bound grammatical morphemes convey meaning—that they symbolize particular objects, actions, and relations and can be combined to form larger and more complex meanings (sentences)—before they can comprehend the speech of others or be understood when they speak

How Do Infants Become Attached?: Attachment-related fears of intimacy: Separation Anxiety

-Separation anxiety: a wary or fretful reaction that infants and toddlers often display when separated from the person(s) to whom they are attached. -normally appears at 6 to 8 months of age, peaks at 14 to 18 months, and gradually becomes less frequent and less intense throughout infancy and the preschool period -Elementary school children and even adolescents may still show signs of anxiety and depression when separated for long periods from their loved ones

Language Learning during Middle Childhood general

-many important strides in linguistic competence are made from ages 6 to 14—the elementary and early high school years. -Schoolchildren not only use bigger words and produce longer and more complex utterances, but also begin to think about and manipulate language in ways that were previously impossible

How is intelligence measured?: group tests of mental performance general

-Stanford-Binet and the Wechsler scales must be administered individually by a professionally trained examiner and can take more than an hour to assess each person's IQ, psychometricians soon saw the need for more cost-effective, paper-and-pencil measures that could be group-administered to quickly assess the intellectual performance of large numbers of people, including students in a city's public schools -mong the more widely used of these tests are the Canadian Cognitive Abilities Test, the Canadian Achievement Test-4, and the Lorge-Thorndike Test, which are designed for elementary and high school students. -> These instruments are sometimes called "achievement" tests because they call for specific information that the examinee has learned at school (i.e., crystallized intelligence) and are designed to predict future academic achievement.

The Modern Information-Processing Viewpoint of Intelligence: the componential (or info-processing) component

-Sternberg's major criticism of psychometric theorists is that they estimate a test taker's intelligence from the quality (or correctness) of her answers while completely ignoring how she produces intelligent responses -must focus on the componential aspects of intelligent behaviour—that is, the cognitive processes by which we size up the requirements of problems, formulate strategies to solve them, and then monitor our cognitive activities until we have accomplished our goals. -some people process information faster and more efficiently than others and that our cognitive tests could be improved considerably by measuring these differences and treating them as important aspects of intelligence (

How is intelligence measured?: the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale

-Terman of Stanford translated and published revised Binet scale to use with American kids ->Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: modern descendant of the first successful intelligence test; measures general intelligence and four factors: verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, spatial reasoning, and short-term memory. -original version of the Stanford-Binet consisted of age-graded tasks designed to measure the average intellectual performance of children aged 3 through 13 -gave test to 1,000 schoolchildren to get norms -> unlike Binet, who classified children according to mental age, Terman used a ratio measure of intelligence, developed by Stern (1912), that came to be known as an intelligence quotient, or IQ: a numerical measure of a person's performance on an intelligence test relative to the performance of other examinees: iQ=MA/CA (chronological age) x 100 -IQ of 100 indicates average intelligence; it means that a child's mental age is exactly equal to her chronological age. -revised version still in use, test norms based on representative samples of people (6-year-olds through adults) from many social class and ethnic backgrounds -> still measures verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial reasoning, and short-term memory. -BUT mental age is no longer used to calculate IQ on the Stanford-Binet or any other modern intelligence test. Instead, individuals receive deviation IQ scores that reflect how well or poorly they do compared with others of the same age

What do intelligence tests predict? IQ as a Predictor of Health, Adjustment, and Life Satisfaction - high iQ

-Terman's study of gifted californian schoolchildren: general health better than averate, better adjusted emotionally, more morally mature, took charge in leadership -> in adulthood, much less likely to be maladjusted, have problems like alcoholism and delinquent behaviour - occupational success too -> well-adjusted people living happy, healthy, and highly productive lives. Nevertheless, approximately 15 percent of the sample were not particularly happy or successful as middle-aged adults -> the most well-adjusted and successful participants had highly educated parents who offered them lots of love and intellectual stimulation; the least successful of the group were likely to have experienced disruption of family ties due to their parents' divorce and less social support and encouragement

the prelinguistic period: Producing Sounds: The Infant's Prelinguistic Vocalizations

-The first vocal milestone other than crying occurs by 2 months of age as babies make repeated vowel-like noises called cooing -> are likely to be heard after a feeding when the baby is awake, alert, dry, and otherwise content -. By 6 to 9 months of age, infants have added consonant sounds to their vocal repertoires and are now canonical babbling—that is, repeating vowel-consonant combinations such as "mamama" or "papapa" that may sound like words but convey no meaning -> deaf infants whose parents are deaf and communicate in sign language will themselves babble manually, experimenting with gestures in much the same way that hearing infants experiment with sounds -first 6 months, infants all over sound very similar, suggests that early babbling is heavily influenced by maturation of the brain and the muscles controlling verbal articulation -> Deaf infants, who hear no speech, begin to fall far behind hearing infants in their ability to produce well-formed, vocal, language-like phonemes -10- to 12-month-olds often reserve certain sounds for particular situations. For example, one infant began to use the m sound ("mmmm") when making requests and various vowel sounds ("aaaach") when manipulating objects -> ready to talk

Assessing Attachment Security

-The most widely used technique for measuring the quality of attachments that 1- to 2-year-olds have established with their parents or other caregivers is Mary Ainsworth's strange situation -8 episodes (see table 12.1)that attempt to simulate (1) naturalistic caregiver-infant interactions in the presence of toys (to see if the infant uses the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore); (2) brief separations from the caregiver and encounters with strangers (which will often stress the infant); and (3) reunion episodes (to determine whether a stressed infant derives any comfort and reassurance from the caregiver and can once again become involved with toys). -record and analyze responses to strangers and separations -> characterize attachment in 4 ways -debate about it attachment is categorical or continuum -Attachment Q-set (AQS): alternative method of assessing attachment security that is based on observations of the child's attachment-related behaviours at home; can be used with infants, toddlers, and preschool children. -used with 1-5 year olds -observers sort set of 90 descriptors of attachment-related behaviours -> nto categories ranging from "most like" to "least like" the child's behaviour at home. The resulting profile represents a continuous way to measure how secure the child is with his or her caregiver -BUT , trained observers' Q-set assessments for infants and toddlers are usually the same as strange situation attachment classifications for the children -Attachment Q-set security scores are relatively stable from age 2 to 5. The ability to classify the attachment security of older preschool children in their natural environments makes the AQS a versatile alternative to the strange situation.

Why Might Attachment Quality Forecast Later Outcomes?: Parents' working models and attachment

-There are several methods to measure adults' working models, based either on a detailed analysis of their memories of childhood attachment experiences or on their current view of themselves, other people, and the character of interpersonal relationships -> can classify into same classifications as children - Fonagy, Steele, and Steele (1991), for example, found that English mothers' working models of attachment relationships, measured before their babies were born, accurately predicted about 75 percent of the time whether their infants would establish secure or insecure attachments with them -Mothers with more positive working models are more likely to provide the kind of sensitive, responsive, and nonintrusive caregiving that fosters secure infant attachment - result of own parents' caregiving -Another contributor is that mothers with secure attachment representations derive more joy and pleasure from interacting with their infants than do those whose attachment representations are insecure -> Bowlby (1988) proposed that once formed early in life, working models may stabilize, becoming an aspect of personality that continues to influence the character of one's close emotional ties throughout life.

Avoidant Attachment

-These infants (about 20 percent of 1-year-olds) also display an "insecure" attachment, showing little distress when separated from the mother, and may turn away or continue to ignore them when their mothers try to get their attention -Avoidant: an insecure infant-caregiver bond, characterized by little separation protest and a tendency of the child to avoid or ignore the caregiver.

Early Temperamental Profiles and Later Development: child rearing and temperament

-Thomas and Chess found that early temperamental characteristics sometimes do and sometimes do not carry over into later life -whether or not it changes depends on goodness-of-fit: Thomas and Chess's notion that development is likely to be optimized when parents' child-rearing practices are sensitively adapted to the child's temperamental characteristics. -> e.g. difficult infants more adaptable if parents remain calm, engage in emotional discourse with children, have restraint, and allow to respond to new routines in a leisurely way -> may not be difficult temperament anymore -if become irritable, impatient, and punitive -> poor fit, become more difficult -a child's low positivity and high negativity may depend on parents' well-being -goodness of fit can also be involved in later childhood behaviour problems: e.g. high maternal and child novelty seeking -> child attention problems -high paternal harm avoidance and child harm avoidance -> greater internalization

Early Temperamental Profiles and Later Development - general

-Thomas and Chess- 3 temperamental profiles: 1) Easy temperament: (40 percent of the sample): Easygoing children are even-tempered, typically in a positive mood, and quite open and adaptable to new experiences. Their habits are regular and predictable. 2) Difficult temperament: (10 percent of the sample): Difficult children are active, irritable, and irregular in their habits. They often react very vigorously to changes in routine and are very slow to adapt to new persons or situations. 3) Slow-to-warm-up temperament: (15 percent of the sample): These children are quite inactive, somewhat moody, and can be slow to adapt to new persons and situations. But, unlike difficult children, they typically respond to novelty in mildly (rather than intensely) negative ways. For example, they may resist cuddling by looking away rather than by kicking or screaming. -remaining 35% children showed own profiles that didnt fit

on the "invention" of language by children

-Transforming Pidgins to True Languages - when adults from different cultures migrate to same areas, begin to communicate in pidgins: structurally simple communication systems that arise when people who share no common language come into constant contact. -> e.g immigrants in late 1800s who migrated to Hawaii to work sugar plantations -> turned into a creole: languages that develop when pidgins are transformed into grammatically complex "true" languages. - formal syntactic rules -how does this happen? Bickerton: the children of pidgin=speaking parents dont continue to speak it, spontaneously invent syntactical rules that creolize the pidgin to make it a true language that future generations may use. -> whenever pidgins arise, they are quickly transformed into creoles, usually within a single generation -> creole syntax closely resembles the (often grammatically inappropriate) sentences that young children construct when acquiring virtually any language - e.g. double negatives -Creating a Sign Language -Nicaragua, schools for deaf children who had never met another deaf person and who had relied on idiosyncratic gestures to communicate with hearing members of their families -these pupils began to pool their individual gestures into a system, similar to a spoken pidgin, that allowed them to communicate. -> Yet, the more remarkable observation is that the second generation of deaf pupils transformed this "pidgin sign" into a full-blown language, Nicaraguan Sign Language, complete with grammatical signs and rules that enable its users to express the same range of ideas and messages that are possible in spoken languages

prelinguistic period: What Do Prelinguistic Infants Know about Language and Communication?- Do Preverbal Infants Understand the Meaning of Words?

-Well-controlled tests of word comprehension suggest that preverbal infants understand the meaning of some common daily words: -> 6- and 9-month-olds were told by their mothers to look at an object related to food (such as an apple) and body part (such as a hand). Mothers were blindfolded and could not use gestures or other nonverbal cues to direct the infants' attention. Clearly, the 6- and 9-month-olds did understand the meaning of the word that named this object, because they gazed intently at its referent when told to and they looked very little at other distractor stimuli -By 10 months of age, infants understand an average of between 11 and 154 words -Oviatt: found that 12- to 17-month-olds understand the meaning of many nouns and verbs long before they use them in their own speech. So infants seem to know much more about language than they can possibly say -Apparently, receptive language (comprehension) is ahead of productive language (expression) from the 12th or 13th month of life and possibly sooner.

How Do Infants Become Attached?:Theories of attachment: Cognitive-Developmental Theory: To Love You, I Must Know You Will Always Be There

-ability to form attachments depends on infant's cognitive development -to do so, need to discriminate familiar people from strangers: recognize that familiar people have permanence, wont cease to exist when leave -> Thus, attachments first emerge at age 7 to 9 months—precisely the time when infants are entering Piaget's fourth sensorimotor substage, when they first begin to search for and find objects that they've seen someone hide from them (object permanence) -contributed by showing that the timing of emotional attachments is related to the infant's level of cognitive development

language: the interactionist perspective: Biological and Cognitive Contributors

-according to the interactionist viewpoint, young children the world over talk alike and display other linguistic universals because they are all members of the same species who share many common experiences -> what is inborn isnt specialized structures but rather a sophisticated brain that matures very slowly and predisposes children to develop similar ideas at about the same age -> e.g. infants' first words centre heavily on objects they have manipulated or on actions they have performed -> e.g. words like gone and uh oh emerge during the second year, about the same time infants are mastering object permanence and are beginning to appraise the success or failure of their problem-solving activities -interactionists believe that children are biologically prepared to acquire a language: but not through LAD and LMC but through powerful brain -but not just biological: -> Bates: grammatical speech arises out of social necessity; as children's vocabularies increase beyond 100 to 200 words, they must find ways of organizing all this linguistic knowledge to produce utterances that others will understand -> strong relationship between the number of words young children have acquired and the grammatical complexity of their utterances

How is intelligence measured?: IQ Distribution

-all modern IQ tests: scores normally distributed: a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the variability of certain characteristics within a population; most people fall at or near the average score, with relatively few at the extremes of the distribution. - 100 is middle -IQ of 130 equals or exceeds the IQs of 97 percent of the population; it is a very high IQ indeed. -> Similarly, fewer than 3 percent of all test takers obtain IQs below 70, a cutoff that is commonly used today to define intellectual disability.

What Is Creativity?

-almost everyone agrees that creativity represents an ability to generate novel ideas and innovative solutions—products that are not merely new and unusual but are also appropriate in context and valued by others -important to individuals, who must solve challenging problems on the job and in daily life, as well as to society when it underlies new inventions, new scientific discoveries, and innovations in social programs or the humanities that enrich our lives

language: the interactionist perspective: Environmental Supports for Language Development - Lessons from Joint Activities

-as adults converse with young children, they create a supportive learning environment (zone of proximal development) that helps the children grasp the regularities of language -e.g. For example, parents may go through their children's favourite picture books at bedtime asking, "What's this?" or "What does the kitty say?" This gives their children repeated opportunities to learn that conversing involves taking turns, that things have names, and that there are proper ways to pose questions and give answers.

attachment and development: general (definition and Bowlby)

-attachment: a close emotional relationship between two persons, characterized by mutual affection and a desire to maintain proximity. -Bowlby (1969) uses the term to describe the strong affectional ties that we feel with the special people in our lives -Bowlby (1969) uses the term to describe the strong affectional ties that we feel with the special people in our lives

Why Do Groups Differ in Intellectual Performance? - The Cultural/Test Bias Hypothesis -> Does Test Bias Explain Group Differences in IQ

-attempts to construct culture-fair tests: intelligence tests constructed to minimize any irrelevant cultural biases in test content that could influence test performance. -e.g. the Raven Progressive Matrices Test requires the examinee to scan a series of abstract designs, each of which has a missing section, equally familiar to all ethnic groups and social classes -> but some of these nonverbal tasks benefit from exposure to visual puzzles, which might be influenced by group membership. Therefore, middle-class white children continue to outperform their lower-income and/or ethnically or culturally diverse age-mates on these "culture-fair" measures of intelligence -> t group differences in IQ scores are not solely attributable to biases in the content of our tests or the dialect in which they are administered, but another possibility remains.

Factors That Influence Attachment Security: Infant characteristics- general

-babies also influence quality of parent-infant emotional ties -Kagan: strange situation really measures individual differences in infants' temperaments rather than the quality of their attachments -> his observation that the percentage of 1-year-olds who have established secure, resistant, and avoidant attachments corresponds closely to the percentage of babies who fall into Thomas and Chess's easy, difficult, and slow-to-warm-up temperamental profiles -e.g. slow to warm more likely to be perceived as detached

The Prelinguistic Period: Early Reactions to Speech - general

-babies can discriminate speech from other sound patterns and they pay particularly close attention to speech from the very beginning -Within the first few days after birth, babies begin to discriminate different stress patterns, or rhythms, in two- and three-syllable words, already prefer the sound pattern of the language their mother speaks to that of a foreign tongue -very young infants are actually able to discriminate a wider variety of phonemes than adults can, but adults lose the ability to make phonemic distinctions that are not important in their native language ->the abilities to discriminate speech from nonspeech and to differentiate a variety of speechlike sounds are either (1) innate or (2) acquired in the first few days and weeks of life

emotions and early social development

-baby's display of emotion serves communicative function - emotional expression of infancy help infants and caregivers get to know each other -An infant's emerging ability to recognize and interpret others' emotions is an important achievement that enables him to infer how he should be feeling or behaving in a variety of situations: way to acquire knowledge -developmentalists believe that achieving emotional competence is crucial to children's social competence; that is, their ability to achieve personal goals in social interactions while continuing to maintain positive relationships with others -> emotional competence related to emotional intelligence -> Children who have difficulties in one area of EQ—emotion management—or appropriately regulating their emotions (particularly anger) are often rejected by peers and face adjustment problems

Creativity: The Psychometric Perspective

-began being measured in 1960s and 70s -Guilford: creativity represents divergent not convergent thinking: -Convergent thinking: thinking that requires an individual to come up with a single correct answer to a problem; what IQ tests measure. -divergent thinking: thinking that requires a variety of ideas or solutions to a problem when there is no one correct answer. -> can be measured figuratively or verbally -> divergent thinking is only modestly correlated with IQ, more influenced by home environment than genes -divergent thinking is a cognitive skill that is distinct from general intelligence and can be nurtured -but - many researchers became disenchanted with the psychometric approach to creativity once it became rather obvious that the scores people make on tests of divergent thinking during childhood and adolescence are, at best, only modestly related to their creative accomplishments later in life, doesnt fully measure what it means to be creative

What is intelligence?

-behavioural scientists agree about some attributes, disagree about others - no clear consensus about what it is -Piaget: adaptive thinking or action -In one survey, 24 experts provided somewhat different one-sentence definitions of what intelligence meant to them, but virtually all these definitions centred in some way on the ability to think abstractly or to solve problems effectively -so many different definitions bc different theorists have different ideas about which (and how many) attributes are core aspects of this construct they call intelligence

Bilingualism: Learning More than One Language

-bilingual: fluent in two languages -21% of canadian pop allophones: primary language not english or french, 20% speak english and french, many bilingual canadians speak other languages and english and/or french -worldwide more children grow up bilingual or multilingual (speaking more than two languages) than monolingual (speaking only one language) -used to think that learning more than one language at a time would put their cognitive and intellectual development at risk (but from studies that conflated many factors) -started studying simultaneous bilinguals: learn to speak 2 languages from birth or before age 2 - have little difficulty -bilingual children use both languages in the same conversations or utterances, which is called code-switching, follows linguistic rules -learning second language after the first one: 1) learners who are early sequential bilinguals (who learn their second language in early elementary school) -> able to pronounce like native speaker 2) late sequential bilinguals (who learn their second language after approximately age 10 or older) -> sequential bilinguals have poorer vocabulary - but if combine vocabulary in both languages, similar to peers -cognitive consequences -> actual cognitive advantages -> better language proficiency, Piagetian conservation problems, executive function, and nonverbal intelligence, as well as on tasks that involve rapidly naming symbols -> Piagetian conservation problems, executive function, and nonverbal intelligence, as well as on tasks that involve rapidly naming symbols -> better than monolinguists at nonlinguistic tasks that require selective attention to overcome distractions -> why perform better? -nonlinguistic tasks that require selective attention to overcome distractions -two most common language instructional approaches in canada: -core language: involves explicit instruction in a second language, usually through a specific language course (such as French class); occasionally the explicit instruction is embedded within a particular curriculum area -.immersion: involves instruction in a second language where all or most of the curriculum is provided in the second language. - more exposure needed to do well on expressive vocabulary than receptive vocabulary -immersion programs result in higher proficiency than core programs, immersion programs do not negatively affect the development of the mother tongue, and total and early immersion leads to greater gains than partial or late immersion -for the many immigrant children who arrive in Canada not speaking either English or French, all of their instruction is immersion based, as they are provided instruction in one of the two official languages. -> language development in the first language is related to acquisition of the second or subsequent languages, with strong skills in one language suggesting strong general language acquisition skills -> in some cases, strong phonological awareness in one language predicts better phonological awareness in acquiring the second language -> morphological awareness can also help reading in multiple languages -. When children were educated in their heritage language, there was an associated increase in individual and collective self-esteem

Home environment and IQ - A Hidden Genetic Effect?

-brighter parents are likely to provide more intellectually stimulating home environments -is some support for this idea in that correlations between HOME scores and IQ scores are higher for biological children, who share genes with their parents, than for adopted children, who are genetically unrelated to other members of their family -but quality of home environment does impact intellectual development outside of genes: 1) adopted children's IQ scores rise considerably when they are moved from less stimulating to more stimulating homes 2) t the relationship between HOME scores and children's IQs does decline somewhat during the elementary school years, probably because older children are away from home more often and are exposed (or expose themselves) to other people

Recognizing and Interpreting Emotions: social referencing

-can recognize and interpret emotional expressions better between 7-10 months -> monitor parents' emotional reactions to uncertain situations -social referencing: the use of others' emotional expressions to infer the meaning of otherwise ambiguous situations. -> people other than parents -e.g. approach objects if stranger is smiling, dont if stranger looks fearful -> even socially reference from tv -emotional signals that interpret from mom more like simple commands than active info seeking? -> 18 months watched experimenter be angry or neutral -> less inclined to imitate the actor's behaviour in the presence of the experimenter who had become angry, as if they were using the experimenter's angry emotions as a cue that "pulling the toy apart is a forbidden act that I should not perform" -but in older toddlers, social referencing more easily interpreted as active info seeking -e.g. look at companions in new situation after have made a choice, looking to assess accuracy of actions

Factors That Influence Attachment Security: Quality of caregiving

-caregiving hypothesis: Ainsworth's notion that the type of attachment that an infant develops with a particular caregiver depends primarily on the kind of caregiving he or she has received from that person. -mothers of securely attached infants are thought to be sensitive, responsive caregivers from the very beginning -table 12.2: aspects that promote secure attachments: include sensitivity, positive attitude, synchrony, mutuality -Babies who show a resistant rather than secure pattern of attachment often have parents who are inconsistent in their caregiving—reacting enthusiastically or indifferently depending on their moods and being unresponsive a good deal of the time -avoidant attachments: two types of caregiving: 1) impatient with their babies and unresponsive to their signals, are likely to express negative feelings about their infants, and seem to derive little pleasure from close contact with them 2) overzealous parents who chatter endlessly and provide high levels of stimulation, cant handle it -infants who develop disorganized/disoriented attachments are often drawn to but also fearful of caregivers because of past episodes in which they were neglected or physically abused

psychometric views of intelligence: factor analysis and the multicomponent view of intelligence

-challenged notion that single score, e.g. mental age, could represent human intellectual performance -intelligence tests require a variety of tasks, why wouldnt those subtests be measuring distinct mental abilities -> can determine whether intelligence 1 or multiple attributes by asking participants to perform a lot of mental tasks, and analyze performance using: factor analysis: a statistical procedure for identifying clusters of tests or test items (called factors) that are highly correlated with one another and unrelated to other test items. -> each factor represents distinct mental ability

language: the interactionist perspective: Environmental Supports for Language Development -Lessons from Child-Directed Speech

-child-directed speech, or motherese: the short, simple, high-pitched (and often repetitive) sentences that adults use when talking with young children. -> slowly spoken in high pitch, often repeated, emphasize key words -> From the earliest days of life, infants pay more attention to the high-pitched sounds and varied intonational patterns of motherese than to the "flatter" speech that adults use when communicating with each other -parents gradually increase both the length and the complexity of their simplified child-directed speech as their children's language becomes more elaborate -at any given point in time, a parent's sentences are slightly longer and slightly more complex than the child's -the child is constantly exposed to new semantic relations and grammatical rules that appear in simple utterances she will probably understand, particularly if older companions frequently repeat or paraphrase the ideas they are trying to communicate -parents speak in motherese for one main reason—to communicate effectively with their children

language: the interactionist perspective: Environmental Supports for Language Development - The Importance of Conversation

-children must be actively involved in using language in a socially contingent manner where back-and-forth interactions between themselves and their parents (and others) are present -> e.g. hearing children of profoundly deaf parents often show an approximately normal pattern of language development as long as they spend 5 to 10 hours a week in the company of a hearing/speaking adult who converses with them -role of social interaction in early language learning influencing brain development

Telegraphic Speech: The Pragmatics of Early Speech

-children supplement words with gestures and intonational cues so that ambiguous messages are understood -gestures are an important communication tool that can facilitate the listeners' comprehension and conceptualization of the message being given , many deaf children learn and use a rather sophisticated language that is based entirely on nonverbal signs and gestures -toddlers sensitive to social and situational determinants of effective communication: vocal turn-taking, look up when done talking, know that have to stand close to listener or raise voice if far away, consider hat a partner knows (or doesn't know) when choosing a conversational topic or making a request -requests for assistance in obtaining a toy that is out of reach are much more elaborate and more likely to include a gesture when they know that their partners are unaware of the toy's whereabouts -> 2 1/2 -year-olds can even monitor others' verbal responses to their messages and clarify many utterances that an adult has misunderstood -also learn certain sociolinguistic prescriptions, such as the need to be polite when making requests, and they begin to understand what is polite and what isn't in other people's speech -> parents do instruct children in etiquette -> most 2- to -year-olds have learned many pragmatic lessons about language and communication and are usually able to get their meaning across to conversational partners. But even though toddlers can converse with adults and older children, their communication skills pale in comparison with those of a 5-year-old, a 4-year-old, or even many 3-year-olds

cultural influences on temperament

-children who are shy and reserved are at a social disadvantage. They run the risk of being neglected or even rejected by peers, which can lead to low self-esteem, depression, and a number of other adjustment problems. -> in North America -, many Asian cultures value what North Americans would call a shy and somewhat inhibited demeanour. In China, for example, children who are more reserved are perceived as socially mature by their teachers, more likely to be popular than active, assertive children -However, as China has become more capitalistic, research has now found that shy Chinese children are now less likely than their more assertive and outgoing peers to be popular and, like Western children from earlier studies, are currently at some risk of being rejected by peers - culture change can be important -differences within western cultures: Sweden views shyness more positively than in the US - but gender differences, shy girls less likely to be encouraged to continue education than shy boys in Sweden -cross-cultural study: children aged 3 months to 13 years of age showed that girls exhibited higher levels of effortful control, whereas boys exhibited higher levels of surgency (i.e., activity, high-intensity pleasure) -hard to measure construct of temperament across cultures - one inventory is Inventory of Children's Individual Differences, a 144-item measure closely aligned with the "Big Five" adult personality measures scales that index the personality traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion -> modest cross-cultural success

Language Learning during Middle Childhood: Further Development of Communication Skills: What Role Do Siblings Play in the Growth of Communication Skills?

-children with siblings spend a fair amount of time conversing with them or listening as a sibling converses with a parent -> promotes effective communication through opportunities to converse with relatively immature linguistic partners -because older children are less likely than parents to adjust their speech to a younger sibling's ability to understand, the comprehension errors that a younger sibling displays may make older brothers and sisters more aware of listeners' needs and more inclined to monitor and repair their own ambiguous messages -because older siblings are also less likely than parents to correctly interpret a younger sibling's uninformative messages and grant her wishes, the younger sibling may learn from her failures to communicate and be prompted to speak in ways that are more widely understood -research: having the opportunity to hear older siblings interact with caregivers, as well as having the older sibling talking to the younger sibling, promotes more advanced use of some aspects of language, such as the use of pronouns and increase conversational turns.

Improving Cognitive Performance through Compensatory Education general Head Start

-compensatory interventions: special educational programs designed to further the cognitive growth and scholastic achievements of disadvantaged children. -> e.g. Project Head Start, Aboriginal Head Start and the First Nations/Inuit Child Care Initiative in Canada -> culturally appropriate and holistic early childhood education programming for Indigenous children -Head Start: a large-scale preschool educational program designed to provide children from low-income families with a variety of social and intellectual experiences that might better prepare them for school. -> to provide with experiences middle and upper-class children getting at home and in preschool -> successful at first - gained 10 points on IQ tests, but after a couple years in elementary school, gains had disappeared -> but developmentalists havent given up, ultimate goal of compensatory education is not so much to boost IQ as to improve children's academic performance

Factors That Influence Attachment Security: the combined influences of caregiving temperament

-complicated relationship - not Ainsworth over Kagan -Kochanska: dual contributions of caregiving and child temperament in a study that tested an integrative theory of infant-caregiver attachments—one specifying that (1) quality of caregiving is most important in determining whether an infant's emerging attachments are secure or insecure, but (2) infant temperament is the better predictor of the type of insecurity infants display if their attachments are insecure. -> measured the quality of caregiving that mothers provided when their babies were 8 to 10 months and 13 to 15 months old, as well as infant fearfulness, where children show strong distress in new and uncertain situations, similar to Kagan's notion of behavioural inhibition. -> Quality of caregiving (but not infant temperament) clearly predicted whether infants established secure or insecure attachments with their mothers -> , infant temperament predicted the type of insecure attachment children displayed. Fearful insecurely attached children were prone to display resistant attachments, whereas fearless insecurely attached children were more likely to display avoidant attachments.

Sternberg and Lubart's Investment Theory (of Creativity)

-creative people are willing to "buy low and sell high" in the realm of ideas. - "Buying low" means that they invest themselves in ideas or projects that are novel or out of favour and may initially encounter resistance. -But by persisting in the face of such skepticism, a creative individual generates a product that is highly valued, and can now "sell high" and move on to the next novel or unpopular idea that has growth potential. - investment theory of creativity: theory specifying that the ability to invest in innovative projects and to generate creative solutions depends on a convergence of creative resources; namely, background knowledge, intellectual abilities, personality characteristics, motivation, and environmental support and encouragement.

The Modern Information-Processing Viewpoint of Intelligence: general (and sternberg overview)

-criticism that psychometric models very narrow, , focusing primarily on intellectual content, or what the child knows, rather than on the processes by which this knowledge is acquired, retained, and used to solve problems. -> , traditional intelligence tests do not measure other attributes that people commonly think of as indications of intelligence, such as common sense, social and interpersonal skills, and the talents that underlie creative accomplishments in music, drama, and athletics -Sternberg's triarchic theory: a recent information-processing theory of intelligence that emphasizes three aspects of intelligent behaviour not normally tapped by IQ tests: the context of the action; the person's experience with the task (or situation); and the information-processing strategies the person applies to the task (or situation).: context, experience, and information-processing skills -> (1) the context in which they are performing (i.e., the culture and historical period in which they live, and their ages), (2) their experience with the tasks and whether their behaviour qualifies as responses to novelty or automatized processes, and (3) the information-processing skills that reflect how each person is approaching these tasks.

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

-criticizes the psychometricians for trying to describe a person's intelligence with a single score. -theory of multiple intelligences: Gardner's theory that humans display as many as nine distinct kinds of intelligence, several of which are not measured by IQ tests. -Linguistic, spatial, logical-mathematical, musical, body-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, naturalist, existential -makes the case that each ability is distinct and that individuals can show relative strengths and weaknesses across intelligences. As support for these ideas, Gardner points out that injury to a particular area of the brain usually influences only one ability (linguistic or spatial, for example), leaving others unaffected. -some individuals truly exceptional in one ability but poor in others -> savant syndrome—in people with intellectual disabilities who also have an extraordinary talent, do poorly on intelligence tests -different intelligences develop at different times. Many of the great composers and athletes, for example, began to display their immense talents in childhood (e.g., Mozart and Gretzky), whereas logical-mathematical intelligence often shows up much later in life. -> critics argue even though such talents as musical or athletic prowess are important human characteristics, they are not the same kind of mentalistic activities as those most people view as the core of intelligence -> current intelligence tests do tap Gardner's logical, spatial, and mathematical intelligences, which are moderately correlated rather than highly distinct -Klein critiques, suggests 1) that although individuals with learning disabilities show patterns of strengths and weaknesses, these patterns do not match perfectly with a specific intelligence. 2) many activities associated with a given multiple intelligence are, in fact, likely associated with more than one intelligence (e.g., dance is associated with musical intelligence and body-kinesthetic intelligence). 3) argues that the instructional implications that are suggested by Gardner (1999) do not require multiple intelligence theory.

Why Do Groups Differ in Intellectual Performance? - The Cultural/Test Bias Hypothesis

-cultural/test bias hypothesis: the notion that IQ tests and testing procedures have a built-in middle-class bias that explains the substandard performance of children from lower-class and minority subcultures. -IQ tests currently in use were designed to measure cognitive skills (e.g., assembling puzzles) and general information that white, middle-class children are more likely to have acquired -subtests measuring vocabulary and word usage may be harder for immigrant children and other cultural and minority groups -> white parents more likely to ask knowledge-training questions, whereas African American parents are more inclined to ask real questions (e.g., "Why didn't you come right home after school?") that the parents may not know the answer to - questions that often require elaborate, story-type responses that are quite unlike those called for at school or when taking an IQ test

Displaying Emotions: The Development (and Control) of Emotional Expressions: socialization of emotions and emotional self-regulation - acquiring emotional display rules

-culture's emotional display rules often dictate that we not only suppress whatever unacceptable emotions we may be experiencing, but also replace them (outwardly, at least) with whatever feeling the display rule calls for in that situation (such as acting happy rather than sad on receiving a disappointing gift). - by 3: show limited ability to disguise true feelings, and get better over time - still not that good at age 5 -learn more how to act in social situations throughout elementary school- Perhaps because parents place stronger pressure on girls to act nice in social situations, girls are both more motivated and more skilled at complying with display rules -mothers who emphasize positive emotions in their parent-child interactions tend to have children who are better able to mask disappointment and other negative feelings -> but some take a long time to master, 7-9 year olds, esp boys, have a hard time acting thrilled about a gift they dont like -Compliance with culturally specified rules for displaying emotions occurs earlier and is especially strong among communal peoples, such as the Japanese or the Chhetri and Brahmin of Nepal, who stress social harmony and place the needs of the social order over those of the individual

language: Support for the Nativist Perspective - Brain Specialization and Language

-damage to language areas -> aphasia—a loss of one or more language functions. The symptoms an aphasic displays depend on the site and the extent of the injury -Broca's area: structure located in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex that controls language production. - damage here typically affects speech PRODUCTION -Wernicke's area: structure located in the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex that is responsible for interpreting speech. - damage here typically affects speech COMPREHENSION, may speak fluently but it doesnt make sense -the left hemisphere is sensitive to some aspects of language from birth: In the first day of life, speech sounds already elicit more electrical activity from the left side of an infant's brain, while music and other nonspeech sounds produce greater activity from the right cerebral hemisphere

Learning a Gestural Language

-deaf children have hard time learning oral language - dont learn much from lip reading -may be delayed in their language development unless they are exposed early to a gestural system such as American Sign Language (ASL) -ASL very flexible: Some signs represent entire words; others stand for grammatical morphemes such as the progressive ending -ing, the past tense -ed, and auxiliaries. Each sign is constructed from a limited set of gestural components in much the same way that the spoken word is constructed from a finite number of distinctive sounds (phonemes) -syntactical rules to specify how signs combined -> permits plays on words, metaphorical statements, poetry -if exposed earl to ASL, acquire like hearing children acquire an oral language -> deaf mothers support sign learning by signing to their infants in "motherese"—that is, signing slowly with exaggerated movements that are repeated often to ensure comprehension -deaf child usually begins by "babbling" in sign, forming rough approximations of signs that parents use, before proceeding to one-word, or "holophrastic," phrases, in which a single sign is used to convey a number of different messages. - the language areas of the brain develop much the same in deaf children exposed early to sign language as in hearing children -> reliance on areas of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex to process sentences was just as strong among participants who acquired ASL early in life as among hearing individuals who acquired English early in life. -> However, early learners of ASL also used their right hemisphere in responding to sentences, perhaps because spatial skills controlled by the right hemisphere come into play in interpreting the gestures of someone who is signing. -> language learning depends on biological processes -do linguistic milestones and abilities that deaf and hearing children share reflect (1) the operation of an inborn specialized linguistic knowledge (or LAD) that enables children to acquire any and all languages (nativist position), or (2) the gradual development of a highly plastic (i.e., changeable) human brain and achievement of cognitive understandings that children are then motivated to express in language-like ways to communicate more effectively with their companions (interactionist position). ??

Language Learning during Middle Childhood: Semantics and Metalinguistic Awareness

-develop very advanced vocabulary -> Six-year-olds already understand approximately 10 000 words and continue to expand their receptive vocabularies at the rate of about 20 words a day until they comprehend some 40 000 words by age 10 -morphological knowledge: knowledge of the meaning of morphemes that make up words. -. gain this so can analyze the structure of such unfamiliar words as sourer, custom-made, or hopelessness and to quickly figure out what they mean -more proficient at semantic integrations—that is, at drawing linguistic inferences that enable them to understand more than is actually said. -> e.g. , if 6- to 8-year-olds hear, "Sophie did not see the rock; the rock was in the path; Sophie fell," they are able to infer that Sophie must have tripped over the rock. Interestingly, however, 6- to 8-year-olds often assume that the story explicitly described Sophie tripping and are not consciously aware that they have drawn an inference -> , if 6- to 8-year-olds hear, "Sophie did not see the rock; the rock was in the path; Sophie fell," they are able to infer that Sophie must have tripped over the rock. Interestingly, however, 6- to 8-year-olds often assume that the story explicitly described Sophie tripping and are not consciously aware that they have drawn an inference -once children begin to integrate different kinds of linguistic information, they are able to detect hidden meanings that are not immediately obvious from the content of an utterance. -> For example, if a noisy 6-year-old hears her teacher quip, "My, but you're quiet today," the child will probably note the contradiction between the literal meaning of the sentence and its satirical intonation or its context and thereby detect the sarcasm in her teacher's remark -metalinguistic awareness: a knowledge of language and its properties; an understanding that language can be used for purposes other than communication. -> develop in middle childhood -> present in 3-5 year olds - beginning to display much more phonological awareness (e.g., if you take the s sound out of scream, what's left?) and grammatical awareness (e.g., is "I be sick" the right or wrong way to say it?) than younger children do -> but metalinguistic competencies that 5-year-olds display are limited compared with those of a 9-year-old, a 7-year-old, or even a 6-year-old -begin to become more aware that language arbitrary and rule-bound -> educational implications: phonemic awareness helps to learn to read quicker -> one of the strongest arguments in favour of the phonics method of reading instruction is that it promotes the very phonological skills that seem so necessary for young children to learn in order to read well. -home literacy experiences as shared storybook reading with parents does not promote children's phonological skills to any great extent -> but - > shared storybook reading experiences do promote such aspects of emergent literacy as vocabulary growth and letter recognition, as well as receptive language development, which also predict children's success at learning to read

How Do Infants Become Attached?:Theories of attachment: Attachment in Humans

-dont imprint on mothers, but do maintain contact with others and to elicit caregiving -Many of their inborn, reflexive responses have an endearing quality about them -From 3 to 6 months of age, infants become more likely to emit raised cheek, open-mouth (or big) smiles in response to a smiling caregiver, as if they are signalling their willingness to share positive affect with her -> interpret their baby's grins, laughs, and babbles as an indication that the child is contented and that they are effective caregivers -Although Bowlby claimed that secure attachments develop gradually as parents become more proficient at reading and reacting appropriately to the baby's signals and as the baby learns what their parents are like and how they might regulate their behaviour, the process can easily go wrong, resulting in insecure attachments. For example, an infant's preprogrammed signals (crying and cooing for attention) eventually stop if they fail to produce favourable reactions from an unresponsive companion, such as a depressed mother or father -While Bowlby believed that human beings are biologically prepared to form close attachments, he also stressed that secure emotional attachments will not develop unless each participant responds appropriately to the behaviour of the other.

The Modern Information-Processing Viewpoint of Intelligence: PASS theory

-draws upon information processing and also neuropsychology -name PASS reflects the cognitive functions that underlie intelligence: planning, attention-arousal, simultaneous processing, and successive processing. -incorporates observations that the brain appears to function in a modularized way; that is, although parts of the brain interact and are interdependent, they also function separately. -allows for modularity and independence in some cognitive functions, unlike theories that assume a common factor such as g as the underpinning for intelligence -was developed to address practical problems such as understanding the nature of individual differences, conceptualizing assessments, and informing remediation

How is intelligence measured?: Assessing Infant Intelligence - Do DQs predict later IQs

-infant scales generally fail to predict a child's later IQ or scholastic achievements, DQ measured early in infancy may not even predict the child's DQ later in infancy. -> Why? - infant scales measure e sensory, motor, language, and social skills, whereas standardized IQ tests such as the WISC and the Stanford-Binet emphasize more abstract abilities such as verbal reasoning, concept formation, and problem solving. -may be some correspondence between the two measures (a measuring tape indicates height, which is correlated with weight; DQ indicates developmental progress, which is related to IQ), but the relationship is not very great.

Displaying Emotions: The Development (and Control) of Emotional Expressions: socialization of emotions and emotional self-regulation - general

-emotional display rules: culturally defined rules specifying which emotions should or should not be expressed under which circumstances. -these emotional codes of conduct are similar to the pragmatic rules of language: children must acquire and use them to get along with other people and maintain their approval. -learning of these codes happens early: mothers playing with 7 month old infants serve as models only for positive emotions, bc restrict displays of negative emotions -also attend less to babies' negative emotions -socially acceptable emotions culturally dependent - North American babies learn that intense emotion is okay as long as it's positive, whereas Gusii and Aka babies learn to restrain both positive and negative emotions.(better to be calm)

Why Do Groups Differ in Intellectual Performance?-the Environmental Hypothesis

-environmental hypothesis: the notion that groups differ in IQ because the environments in which they are raised are not equally conducive to intellectual growth -low income can influence intelligence through: undernourishment, which inhibits brain growth, psychological distress impacted by money, poorer parents less educated, might not have resources to enrich development -> . Scores on the HOME inventory are consistently lower in low-income than in middle-class homes, and children who have always lived in poverty and whose parents have the fewest financial resources are the ones who experience the least stimulating home environments -transracial adoption: into white, intelligent, highly educated families -> genetic differences do not account for a major portion of the IQ performance difference between racial groups, and (b) African American and interracial children reared in the [middle-class] culture of the tests and the schools perform as well as other children in similar families (hmm other complexities here -> but trying to say that discrepancies more about socioeconomic status)

The Modern Information-Processing Viewpoint of Intelligence: the experiential component

-experience with a task helps determine whether performance qualifies as intelligence behaviour -responses to novel challenges are an indication of the person's ability to generate good ideas or fresh insights: novel tasks require active and conscious information processing and are the best measures of a person's reasoning abilities, as long as these tasks are not so foreign that the person is unable to apply what he may know -automatization: increasing efficiency of information processing with practice. According to Sternberg, it is a sign of intelligence when we develop automatized routines, or "programs of the mind," for performing everyday tasks accurately and efficiently so that we don't have to waste much time thinking about how to accomplish them -experiential components has most implications for intelligence testing - important to know how familiar specific test items are to examinees -> avoid cultural bias

How Do Infants Become Attached?:Theories of attachment: Learning Theory: I Love You because You Reward Me

-feeding thought to be important bc: 1) elicits positive responses from a contented infant (smiles, coos) that increase a caregiver's affection for the baby 2) feeding is an occasion when mothers provide an infant with many comforts—food; warmth; tender touches; soft, reassuring vocalizations; changes in scenery—all in one sitting. -learning theorists - infants associate mother with pleasant sensations -> mother a commodity -> becomes a secondary reinforcer: an initially neutral stimulus that acquires reinforcement value by virtue of its repeated association with other reinforcing stimuli. -> infant now attached -Harlow's monkey study: even if their food had come from the "wire mother," infants spent time with "her" only while feeding, and then they ran directly to the "cloth mother" whenever they were upset or afraid. So all infants became attached to the cloth mother, thereby implying that contact comfort is a more powerful contributor to attachment in monkeys than feeding or the reduction of hunger

The Holophrastic Period: One Word at a Time - general

-first stage of meaningful speech -holophrastic period: the period when the child's speech consists of one-word utterances, some of which are thought to be holophrases. -> a single-word utterance that represents an entire sentence's worth of meaning. -at first, productive vocabulary constrained by sounds can pronounce, so first words intelligible only to close companions -> Sounds that begin with consonants and end with vowels are easiest for infants, whose longer words are often repetitions of the syllables they can pronounce -phonological development rapid: -> By the middle of the second year, infants' cute and creative pronunciations are already guided by rules, or strategies, that enable them to produce simplified but more intelligible versions of adult words, often delete the unstressed syllable of a multisyllable word (saying "ghetti" for "spaghetti") or replace an ending consonant syllable with a vowel (saying "appo" for "apple") -> stem from immature vocal tract, so see this across languages -but not all toddlers sound alike, even if have been exposed to same language: bc -> articulating phonemes and combining them into words is a vocal-motor skill that reflects the unique paths that individual children follow as they combine the sounds that they have been attending closely to and producing themselves into new and more complex patterns in an attempt to achieve a most important goal: communicating effectively with their companions -As the vocal tract matures during the preschool period, and children have more and more opportunities to decipher and produce the phonemic combinations in the speech of older models, their pronunciation errors become much less frequent. -> 4 and 5 year olds speak pretty much the same as older adults

How is intelligence measured?: Assessing Infant Intelligence -Evidence for Continuity in Intellectual Performance

-info-processing theories found that certain measures of infant attention and memory are much better at predicting IQ during the preschool and elementary school years than are the Bayley scales or other measures of infant development -> 3 measures: 1) how quickly infants look when presented with a visual target (visual reaction time) 2) the rate at which they habituate to repetitive stimuli 3) and the extent to which they prefer novel stimuli to familiar ones (preference for novelty). -> measure obtained in first 4-8 months has a correlation of .45 with IQ in childhood

The Holophrastic Period: Early Semantics: Building a Vocabulary general

-first words usually between 10 and 15 months of age -as learn to speak, words progress one at a time, 3-4 months may go by before can speak 10 words -> pace of word learning quickens b/n 18 and 24 months, learn 10-20 words a week: aka naming explosion: the term used to describe the dramatic increase in the pace at which infants acquire new words in the latter half of the second year; so named because many of the new words acquired are the names of objects. -> vocabulary growth is an important developmental achievement as the size of productive vocabulary at 2 years of age can be a strong predictor of subsequent language and literacy competence up to Grade 5 -work of Janet Werker and colleagues: studied novice and more experienced word learners to see whether these differences in ability over time can be explained by children's knowledge of the sounds of words or whether other knowledge or resources available to children can explain this change in skill. -> suggests that there are developmental differences in the ability to use perceptual information (specifically, phonetic information) that may be attributed to cognitive limitations such as attentional resources -Nelson: studied 18 infants as learn first 50 words, 2/3 of these words referred to objects, which included people: -these objects were nearly all either manipulable by the child (e.g., balls or shoes) or capable of moving themselves (e.g., animals, vehicles); rarely do infants mention objects, such as plates or chairs, that simply sit there without doing anything. -Toddlers' first words also include many references to familiar actions -young infants are especially likely to understand and use words introduced in multimodal motherese: an older companion's use of information that is exaggerated and synchronized across two or more senses to call an infant's attention to the referent of a spoken word. -table 11.1: Types of Words Used by Children with Productive Vocabularies of 50 Words: object words, action words, modifiers (properties of things), personal/social words, function words (words that have a grammatical function)

Factors That Influence Attachment Security: ecological considerations for attachment

-he quality of a caregiver's relationship with his or her spouse can also have a dramatic effect on parent-infant interactions: parents who were unhappily married prior to the birth of their child are less sensitive caregivers after the baby is born, express less favourable attitudes about their infant and the parenting role, and establish less secure ties with their infants and toddlers -newborns who are at risk of later emotional difficulties are likely to have nonsynchronous interactions with their parents only when the parents are unhappily married. It seems that a stormy marriage can hinder or prevent the establishment of secure emotional ties between parents and their infants.

Improving Cognitive Performance through Compensatory Education - The Importance of Intervening Early

-head start begins too late, after age 3 -Carolina Abecedarian Project: -Program participants were selected from families with children at risk for mild intellectual disability. These families were all on welfare, and most were headed by a single parent (the mother) who had scored well below average on a standardized IQ test, obtaining an IQ of 70 to 85 -began when the participating children were only 6 to 12 weeks old, and it continued for the next five years -Half of the high-risk children took part in a special daycare program designed to promote their intellectual development until began school -> Abecedarian program participants began to outperform their counterparts in the control group on IQ tests, starting at 18 months of age and maintaining this IQ advantage through age 15. -this is expensive but important and -extensive two-generation interventions emphasizing quality daycare often pay for themselves by (1) allowing more parents freedom from full-time child care to work, thereby reducing their need for public assistance, and (2) providing the foundation for cognitive growth that enables most disadvantaged children to avoid special education in school—a savings that, by itself, would justify the expense of extensive compensatory interventions -> economic gains later in life, higher income and pay more taxes maybe

environmental influences on temperament

-home environments that siblings share most clearly influence such positive aspects of temperament as smiling/sociability and soothability, yet shared environment contributes very little to children's activity levels and to negative attributes such as irritability and fearfulness -bc siblings living together barely resemble each other on negative aspects of temperament -egatively toned temperamental attributes are shaped more by nonshared environmental influences—those aspects of environment that siblings do not share and that conspire to make them temperamentally dissimilar -> parents notice early behavioural differences among their children and adjust their parenting to each child -> e.g. if notice child is more fearful, may not push them to be in new situations, and reinforce that behaviour more

Language: The Nativist Perspective general

-how acquire grammar -Chomsky: -argued that the structure of even the simplest of languages is incredibly elaborate—far too complex, he believed, to be either taught by parents, as Skinner proposed, or discovered via simple trial-and-error processes by cognitively immature toddlers and preschool children -humans come equipped with language acquisition device (LAD): Chomsky's term for the innate knowledge of grammar that humans were said to possess, which might enable young children to infer the rules governing others' speech and to use these rules to produce language. -> LAD contains universal grammar: in nativist theories of language acquisition, the basic rules of grammar that characterize all language. -Slobin: -does not assume that children have any innate knowledge of language (as Chomsky did), but he thinks that they have an inborn language-making capacity (LMC)—a set of cognitive and perceptual abilities that are highly specialized for language learning -innate mechanisms enable young children to process linguistic input and to infer the phonological regularities, semantic relations, and rules of syntax that characterize whatever language they are listening to -> represent a "theory" of language that children construct for themselves and use to guide their own attempts to communicate -language acquisition is quite natural and almost automatic, as long as children have linguistic input to process.

Language: The Learning (or Empiricist) Perspective general

-imitation and reinforcement Skinner: -children learn to speak appropriately because they are reinforced for grammatical speech -adults begin to shape a child's speech by selectively reinforcing those aspects of babbling that most resemble words, thereby increasing the probability that these sounds will be repeated -> and infants do produce more babbling of phonemes in their native language when their mothers provide immediate positive responses compared to infants of mothers who do not -> Once they have "shaped" sounds into words, adults then withhold further reinforcement (attention or approval) until the child begins combining words, first into primitive sentences and then into longer grammatical utterances using word chains or sequences—with the first word and its context serving as the stimulus for the second word and Bandura: -children acquire much of their linguistic knowledge by carefully listening to and imitating the language of older companions. According to the learning perspective, caregivers "teach" language by modelling and reinforcing grammatical speech

Hereditary and Environmental Influences on Temperament general

-important to study hereditary and environmental influences together when studying temperament

What do intelligence tests predict? IQ as a Predictor of Health, Adjustment, and Life Satisfaction - low IQ

-intellectual disability: significant sub-average intellectual functioning associated with impairments in adaptive behaviour in everyday life. -disorder with onset during the developmental period that includes both intellectual and adaptive functioning deficits in conceptual, social, and practical domains -need to meet 3 criteria to have intellectual disability: 1) Deficits in intellectual functions such as reasoning, problem-solving, planning, abstract thinking, judgement, academic learning, and learning from experience, confirmed by both clinical and individualized, standardized intelligence testing. 2) Deficits in adaptive functioning that result in failure to meet developmental socio-cultural standards for personal independence and social responsibility. Without ongoing support, the adaptive deficits limit functioning in one or more activities of daily life, such as communication, social participant, and independent living, across multiple environments, such as home, school, work, and community. 3) Onset of intellectual and adaptive deficits during the developmental period. -differ a lot in level of severity - basis of adaptive functioning: mild, moderate, severe, profound -> Individuals with moderate to profound intellectual disability are often affected by organic factors—deficits caused by such identifiable causes as Down syndrome, diseases, or injuries. - may need more help -> Mild intellectual disabilities are more common and are associated with cultural-familial environments—deficits reflecting a combination of lower genetic potential and an unstimulating rearing environment -can learn both academic and practical skills at school, and they can often work and live independently or with occasional help as adults. -many individuals with mild intellectual disabilities adapt to the demands of adult life, displaying a fair amount of the practical intelligence, or "street smarts," that Sternberg (1997) talks about and that is not measured by standardized IQ tests.

factors that influence IQ scores: the evidence for environment: Adoption Studies

-intellectual growth of adopted children who left disadvantaged family backgrounds and were placed with highly educated adoptive parents: -> By the time these adoptees were 4 to 7 years old, they were scoring well above average on standardized IQ tests -> IQ scores of these adoptees were still correlated with the IQs of their biological mothers, thus reflecting the influence of heredity on intellectual performance. -> Yet the actual IQs these adoptees attained were considerably higher (by 10 to 20 points) than one would expect on the basis of the IQ and educational levels of their biological parents -> staying slightly above norm into adolescence -the phenotype that one displays on a genetically influenced attribute like intelligence is clearly influenced by one's environment

factors that influence IQ scores: the evidence for heredity: TWIN STUDIES

-intellectual resemblance between pairs of individuals living in the same home increases as a function of their kinship (i.e., genetic similarity) -the IQ correlation for identical twins, who inherit identical genes, is substantially higher than the IQ correlations for fraternal twins and nontwin siblings, who have only half their genes in common -However, in the case of identical and fraternal twins raised together, the influence of the home environment is relatively constant

language: the interactionist perspective: general

-interactionist theory: the notion that biological factors and environmental influences interact to determine the course of language development.

language: the interactionist perspective:- Summing up

-language development is the product of a complex transaction between nature and nurture -Children are born with a powerful human brain that matures slowly and predisposes them to acquire new understandings that they are motivated to share with others -also emphasize how conversations with older companions foster cognitive and language development. -> As their nervous systems continue to mature and children grow intellectually, they express their new understandings in increasingly complex utterances that prompt close companions to increase the complexity of their replies -> this is reciprocal: the language of young children is heavily influenced by a rich, responsive, and ever more complex linguistic environment that they have had a hand in creating -although the interactionist perspective is the approach that many developmentalists favour, the question of how children acquire language is by no means resolved. We still know much more about what children acquire as they learn a language than about exactly how they acquire this knowledge.

language: the interactionist perspective: Environmental Supports for Language Development

-language is primarily a means of communicating that develops in the context of social interactions as children and their companions strive to get their messages across one way or another

language: Support for the Nativist Perspective general

-language universals around the world -language is species-specific: -Although animals can communicate with each other, no species has ever devised anything in the wild that closely resembles an abstract, rule-bound linguistic system. -although apes can learn sign language, only humans spontaneously use language

theories of language development general

-learn such a complex symbol system very fast -> many infants are using arbitrary and abstract signifiers (words) to refer to objects and activities before they can walk. -And by age 5, children already seem to know and use most of the syntactical structures of their native tongue, even though they have yet to receive their first formal lesson in grammar. -Learning theorists represent the empiricist point of view: -language is learned (e.g canadian kids learn english) -but also are linguistic universals: an aspect of language development that all children share.: -children the world over seem to display similar linguistic achievements at about the same age: they all babble by 6 to 9 months of age -utter their first meaningful word between age 10 and 15 months -begin to combine words by the end of the second year -know the meanings of many thousands of words and are constructing a staggering array of grammatical sentences by the age of 4 or 5 -> suggested to nativists that language acquisition is a biologically programmed activity that may even involve highly specialized linguistic processing capabilities that operate most efficiently early in childhood -interactionists, who believe that language acquisition reflects a complex interplay among a child's biological predispositions, her cognitive development, and the characteristics of her unique linguistic environment

How Do Infants Become Attached?:Theories of attachment: Contemporary Theories of Attachment: The Ethological Theory

-major assumption of the ethological approach is that all species, including human beings, are born with a number of innate behavioural tendencies that have in some way contributed to the survival of the species over the course of evolution, which John Bowlby (1969, 1980) came to believe are specifically designed to promote attachments between infants and their caregivers -attachment relationship itself has adaptive significance, protects young from predators and ensures needs are met, primary attachment allows to live long enough to reproduce -origins: Lorenz and duck imprinting: an innate or instinctual form of learning in which the young of certain species follow and become attached to moving objects (usually their mothers). -> imprinting automatic, occurs within critical period, irreversible -> preadapted characteristic: an attribute that is a product of evolution and serves some function that increases the chances of survival for the individual and the species.

psychometric views of intelligence: later multicomponent theories of intelligence -> A More Recent Hierarchical Model

-many psychometricians today favour hierarchical models of intelligence models in which intelligence is viewed as consisting of (1) a general ability factor at the top of the hierarchy, which influences one's performance on many cognitive tests, and (2) a number of specialized ability factors (something similar to Thurstone's primary mental abilities) that influence how well one performs in particular intellectual domains (e.g., on tests of numerical reasoning or tests of spatial skills). -most elaborate version is three-stratum theory of intelligence: Carroll's hierarchical model of intelligence with g at the top of the hierarchy, eight broad abilities at the second level, or stratum, and narrower domains of each second-stratum ability at the third stratum -> .implies that each of us may have particular intellectual strengths or weaknesses depending on the patterns of "second-stratum" intellectual abilities we display. -> so explains how a person of below-average general ability (g) might actually excel in a narrow third-stratum domain (e.g., musical discrimination in the case of Leslie Lemke in our chapter opener) if he displays an unusually high second-stratum ability (general memory) that fosters good performance in that domain -Hierarchical models depict intelligence as both an overarching general mental ability and a number of more specific abilities with each pertaining to a particular intellectual domain.

Making American Tests Valid in Canada

-many researchers have called for "Canadianized" tests and "Canadianized" norms to reflect our cultural differences: two areas where there are cultural differences 1) there are simple but noticeable differences between our two countries that reflect our social, educational, life, and, to some extent, socioeconomic experiences. To address these differences, specific items on tests can be altered if they do not apply (e.g. activities related to 4th of july) -> Canadian norms are devised by testing large numbers of Canadian individuals -> Wechsler mainly fine for canadians but some research indicates differences between American and Canadian children on some subtests of the WPPSI test, but others dont 2) Language: Canada has two official languages, a number of Indigenous languages, and many other languages consistent with our multicultural diversity. -> Tests devised in the United States are prepared in English and Spanish. -> A partial solution to this problem has been to translate tests like the WISC into French and to test them among French-speaking populations. The indications are that the translated versions are reliable and valid

Why Do Groups Differ in Intellectual Performance? -Motivational Factors

-minority children may be wary of unfamiliar examiners (most of whom are white) or strange testing procedures, and they may see little point in trying to do well and often appear more interested in answering quickly (rather than correctly) to get the unpleasant testing experience over with -changing testing procedures can help: When minority children are allowed to warm up to a "friendly" examiner who is patient and supportive, they score several points higher on IQ tests than they normally would when tested in the traditional way by a strange examiner

What do intelligence tests predict? IQ as a Predictor of Scholastic Achievement

-modern intelligence tests do predict academic achievement quite well -> average correlation between children's IQ scores and their current and future grades at school is about 0.50 to 0.66 -Children with high IQs not only tend to do better in school but also stay there longer; that is, they are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely than other high school graduates to attempt and complete university -both IQ tests and measures of scholastic achievement reflect knowledge and reasoning skills that are culturally valued -> schooling, which largely reflects cultural values, actually improves IQ test performance - promotes skills measured in the test -about group scores, individual variations: e.g. depending on student's work habits, interests, motivation to succeed

Morphology

-morphology: the rules governing the formation of meaningful words from sounds. -English: include the rule for forming past tenses of verbs by adding -ed, the rule for forming plurals by adding -s, rules for using other prefixes and suffixes, and rules that specify proper combinations of sounds to form meaningful words.

Improving Cognitive Performance through Compensatory Education - The Importance of Parental Involvement

-most effective early intervention programs involve parents -Sprigle and Schaefer: evaluated Head Start and Learning to Learn (LTL), a program that educated parents about its goals, provided them with informational updates about their children's progress, and repeatedly emphasized that a partnership between home and school was necessary to ensure the program's success -> outcomes consistently favoured the LTL program, in which parents had been heavily involved, not necessarily on IQ tests, but in academic performance -Other investigators favour two-generation interventions that not only provide children with high-quality preschool education, but also provide disadvantaged parents with social support and the educational and vocational training they need to lift themselves out of poverty -> likely to improve parents' psychological well-being, which may translate into more effective patterns of parenting and, ultimately, into long-term gains in children's intellectual performances

Preschool Period: Development of Pragmatics and Communication Skills general

-preschoolers acquire many conversational skills that help them communicate effectively accomplish objectives -e.g. 3-year-olds are already beginning to understand illocutionary intent—that the real underlying meaning of an utterance may not always correspond to the literal meaning of the words speakers use (e.g. I always get an ice cream - means I want an ice cream) -3-5 year olds also learning that must tailor their messages to their audience if they hope to communicate effectively -> study by Shatz and Gelman: introduced new toy to 2 year old or adult, recorded speech of 4 year olds when did this: 4 year olds use short sentences and words to attract 2-year old's attention, 4-year-olds explaining how the toy worked to an adult used complex sentences and were generally more polite.

The Holophrastic Period: Early Semantics: Building a Vocabulary - Individual and Cultural Variations in Early Language

-most infants display Nelson's referential style: an early linguistic style in which toddlers use language mainly to label objects. -> see words as for naming objects -smaller number of infants displayed expressive style: an early linguistic style in which toddlers use language mainly to call attention to their own and others' feelings and to regulate social interactions. -> vocabularies were more diverse and contained a larger number of personal/social words such as please, thank you, don't, and stop it -birth-order influences linguistic environment: -> Most first-borns in Western cultures adopt a referential style, perhaps reflecting parents' willingness to label and to answer questions about interesting objects that have captured their attention -> , later-borns hear a great deal of speech directed to an older sibling that first-borns have not heard -> later-born children may spend somewhat less time talking with parents about objects and more time listening to speech designed to control their own or their siblings' conduct. As a result, they are more likely than first-borns to conclude that the function of language is to regulate social interactions, prompting them to adopt an expressive language style -culture: -> When talking about a stuffed animal, American mothers treat the interaction as an opportunity to teach the infant about objects ("It's a doggie! Look at its big ears"), thereby encouraging a referential style -> Japanese mothers, by contrast, are more inclined to emphasize social routines and consideration for others ("Give the doggie love!") that seem to promote an expressive style -> Indeed, in Asian cultures (such as those of Japan, China, and Korea) that stress interpersonal harmony, children are much quicker to acquire verbs and personal/social words than are American children

Fathers as Caregivers - Fathers as Contributors to Emotional Security and Other Social Competencies

-not at all unusual for a child to be securely attached to one parent and insecure with the other -compared to children who are securely attached to only one or neither parent, those who are secure with both parents are less anxious and socially withdrawn and make better adjustments to the challenges of attending school -Children who are secure with their fathers also display better emotional self-regulation, greater social competencies with peers, and lower levels of problem behaviours and delinquency throughout childhood and adolescence -> but insecure/ambivalent style with fathers higher in perceptual sensitivity, cuddliness, and more low-intensity pleasure -t a secure attachment to one's father may help to buffer against the potentially harmful effects of an insecure mother-child attachment relationship

Is Attachment History Destiny?

-not just about secure relationships with parents, A secure relationship with another person such as a grandparent or daycare provider can help to offset whatever undesirable consequences might otherwise result from an insecure attachment with a parent -secure attachments may often become insecure should a mother experience a major life stress (e.g., depression, hospitalization, marital difficulties) that can influence mother-infant responses

The Holophrastic Period: Attaching Meaning to Words - common errors in word use

-overextension: the young child's tendency to use relatively specific words to refer to a broader set of objects, actions, or events than adults do (e.g., using car to refer to all motor vehicles). -Underextension: the young child's tendency to use general words to refer to a smaller set of objects, actions, or events than adults do (e.g., using candy to refer only to mints). -one-third of the speech generated by children younger than years of age contains overextensions and underextensions -> likely that fast-mapping contributes to errors (havent seen enough examples when start using words) -> also retrieval difficulty and developing categorization skills -> also unclear what new words refer to often

Preschool Period: Development of Grammatical Morphemes: Overregularization

-overregularization: the overgeneralization of grammatical rules to irregular cases where the rules do not apply (e.g., saying mouses rather than mice). -children have often used correct forms of irregulars before learn grammatical morphemes -Even after acquiring a new rule, a child's overregularizations are relatively rare, occurring on only about 2.5 to 5 percent of those occasions in which irregular verbs are used -most of the errors seem to occur because children occasionally fail to retrieve the irregular form of a noun or a verb from memory and must then apply their new morpheme (overregularize) that follows the regular grammatical rule (e.g., foots versus feet) to communicate the idea (e.g., plurality) they are trying to express

language: the interactionist perspective: Environmental Supports for Language Development -Lessons from Negative Evidence

-parents provide child with negative evidence; that is, they respond to ungrammatical speech in ways that subtly communicate that an error has been made and provide information that might be used to correct these errors -> e.g. if a child says, "Doggie go," an adult may respond with an expansion—a grammatically correct and enriched version of the child's ungrammatical statement, "Yes, the doggie is going away." -also: recast: responding to a child's ungrammatical utterance with a nonrepetitive statement that is grammatically correct. -> e.g. a child who says, "Doggie eat," might have his sentence recast as "What is the doggie eating?" or "Yes, the doggie is hungry." -parents are likely to respond to grammatically appropriate sentences by simply maintaining and extending the conversation (topic extension). -> By carrying on without revising the child's utterance, adults provide a strong clue that the utterance was grammatical -adults who frequently expand, recast, or otherwise extend their children's speech have youngsters who are quicker to acquire grammatical rules and who score relatively high on tests of expressive language ability compared with children whose parents rely less on these conversational techniques

Pragmatics

-pragmatics: principles that underlie the effective and appropriate use of language in social contexts -> knowledge of how language can be used to communicate effectively -sociolinguistic knowledge: culturally specific rules specifying how language should be structured and used in particular social contexts. (registers) -> To communicate most effectively, children must become "social editors" and take into account where they are, with whom they are speaking, and what the listener already knows, needs, and wants to hear -the task of becoming an effective communicator requires not only a knowledge of these five aspects of language but also an ability to properly interpret and use nonverbal signals (facial expressions, gestures, and so on) that often help to clarify the meaning of verbal messages and are important means of communicating in their own right.

A Semantic Analysis of Telegraphic Speech

-psycholinguistics tried to describe rules that young children use to form sentences like it's a foreign language -> specifying syntax (structural characteristics) -> clear that many of two-word sentences follow some grammatical rules, e.g. realize some word orders are important -BUT - analyzing according to just syntax underestimates young children's linguistic abilities -bc young children often use the same two-word utterance to convey different meanings (or semantic relations) in different contexts -e.g. "Mummy sock," on two occasions during the same day—once when she picked up her mother's sock and once while her mother was putting a sock on the child's foot. In the first instance, "Mummy sock" seems to imply a possessive relationship—"Mummy's sock." But in the second instance, the child was apparently expressing a different idea—namely, "Mummy is putting on my sock." -> to properly interpret telegraphic statements, one must determine the child's meaning or semantic intent by considering not only the words generated but also the contexts in which these utterances take place.

the five components of language general

-psycholinguists: those who study the structure and development of children's language. -> the "what" question, What must children learn to master the intricacies of their native tongue? -five kinds of knowledge underlie the growth of linguistic proficiency: phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. -the task of becoming an effective communicator requires not only a knowledge of these five aspects of language but also an ability to properly interpret and use nonverbal signals (facial expressions, gestures, and so on) that often help to clarify the meaning of verbal messages and are important means of communicating in their own right.

Displaying Emotions: The Development (and Control) of Emotional Expressions: socialization of emotions and emotional self-regulation - regulating emotions

-regulating: strategies for managing emotions or adjusting emotional arousal to an appropriate level of intensity. -first few months - caregivers regulate infants' emotions -by middle of first year - regulate negative arousal by turning away, sucking on objects -> esp effective when mothers observe -year 1: additional strategies: rocking themselves, chewing on objects, moving away from people or events that upset them 18-24 months: try to control actions of others, cope with frustrations through distraction, but cannot regulate fear (attract support by looking sad) -as preschoolers talk and discuss feelings, parents help deal constructively with negative emotions (like Vygotsky wrote) -> children who are exposed to frequent displays of negative emotion at home, whether it is directed at them or not, often display high levels of negative emotionality that they have difficulty regulating -children with developmental delays may also experience difficulty in emotional regulation, particularly if their parents use few scaffolding skills -Parents often call attention to (and thereby seek to maintain) the uneasiness that young children experience after causing another person distress or breaking a rule. Why? Because they hope to persuade youngsters to reinterpret these feelings in ways that cause them to: (1) sympathize with victims of distress and act on this concern, or (2) feel guilty about their transgressions and become less inclined to repeat them -also seek to maintain pride in accomplishments, which can help develop positive academic self-concept -effective regulation of emotions involves an ability to suppress, maintain, or even intensify emotional arousal to remain productively engaged with the challenges we face or the people we encounter

Creativity: The Multicomponent (or Confluence) Perspective

-researchers today generally believe that creativity results from a convergence of many personal and situational factors -Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart (1996) have argued that most people have the potential to be creative, and will be, at least to some degree, if they can marshal the resources that foster creativity and can invest themselves in the right kinds of goals -> investment theory of creativity: theory specifying that the ability to invest in innovative projects and to generate creative solutions depends on a convergence of creative resources; namely, background knowledge, intellectual abilities, personality characteristics, motivation, and environmental support and encouragement.

Preschool Period: Grammatical development: Mastering Transformational Rules general

-rules of transformational grammar: rules of syntax that allow us to transform declarative statements into questions, negatives, imperatives (commands), and other kinds of sentences (like compound sentences). -Between the ages of 2 and , most children begin to produce some variations of declarative sentences, many of which depend on their mastery of the auxiliary verb to be -children acquire transformational rules in a step-by-step fashion, so their earliest transformations are very different from those of an adult

Home environment and IQ - Does the HOME Inventory Predict IQ?

-scores that families obtain on the HOME inventory do predict the intellectual performances of toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary-school-aged children, regardless of their social class or ethnic backgrounds -similar results in canada and other cultures -BUT did not predict performance on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. -among American samples, gains in IQ from age 1 to age 3 are likely to occur among children from stimulating homes. O -n the other hand, children from families with low HOME scores often experience 10- to 20-point declines in IQ over the same period—much as the cumulative-deficit hypothesis would predict

Secure Attachment

-securely attached: an infant-caregiver bond in which the child welcomes contact with a close companion and uses this person as a secure base from which to explore the environment -About 65 percent of 1-year-old North American infants fall into this category.

Hereditary Influences on Temperament

-study by comparing temperamental similarities between identical and fraternal twins -By the middle of the first year, identical twins are already more similar than fraternal twins are on most temperamental attributes, including activity level, demands for attention, irritability, and sociability -heritability coefficients—the proportion of phenotypic variance that can be attributed to genetic factors - for most temperamental attributes are moderate at best throughout infancy and the preschool period BUT many important components of temperament are genetically influenced.

Long-Term Correlates of Secure and Insecure Attachments

-seems that infants who have established secure primary attachments are likely to display more favourable developmental outcomes: -better problem solvers -more complex and creative symbolic play -fewere neg emotions -more attractive playmates -> nfants whose primary attachments are disorganized/disoriented are at risk of becoming hostile and aggressive preschool and elementary school children whom peers are likely to reject -Waters study: hildren who had been securely attached to their mothers at 15 months were now social leaders in the nursery school: they often initiated play activities, were generally sensitive to the needs and feelings of other children, and were very popular with their peers. By contrast, children who had been insecurely attached at 15 months were socially and emotionally withdrawn, and were hesitant to engage other children in play activities. -hildren whose attachments to parents were or are currently insecure are more likely than those with secure attachments to be less enthused about mastering challenges and to be less prepared to deal constructively with the social and academic stresses surrounding their transition to college -more likely to display poor peer relations, to have fewer close friendships, and to display deviant behaviours (such as disobedience at school) throughout childhood, adolescence and sometimes early adulthood

Social Class, Culture, Race, and Ethnic Differences in IQ

-socioeconomic status influences brain development, which in turn is related to cognitive development and to scores on standardized IQ tests, except for infants -we cannot predict anything about the IQ or the future accomplishments of an individual on the basis of his or her culture, ethnicity, or skin colour: -> the IQ distributions for samples of African Americans and white Americans overlap considerably. So, even though the average IQ scores of African Americans are typically somewhat lower than those of white Americans, the overlapping distributions mean that many African American children obtain higher IQ scores than many white children. -> intelligence is somewhat malleable and can be significantly impacted by environmental opportunities: seemed to be large differences in intelligence between three ethnic groups in a study, but parental income accounted for much variability, as well as parental expectations for education

Home environment and IQ - Which Aspects of the Home Environment Matter Most?

-some HOME scales better predictors of intellectual performance than others -During infancy, HOME subscales measuring parental involvement with the child, provision of age-appropriate play materials, and opportunities for variety in daily stimulation are the best predictors of children's later IQs and scholastic achievement -preschool measures of parental warmth and stimulation of language and academic behaviours are also closely associated with children's future intellectual performances -> an intellectually stimulating home is one in which parents are warm, verbally engaging, and eager to be involved with their child

language: Problems with the Nativist Approach

-some developmentalists have challenged the findings that nativists cite as support for their theory. -> For example, the fact that human infants can make important phonemic distinctions in the first days and weeks of life no longer seems to be such compelling support for the existence of a uniquely human LAD. Why? Because the young of other species (e.g., rhesus monkeys and chinchillas) show similar powers of auditory discrimination -nativists don't really explain language development by attributing it to a built-in language acquisition device. An explanation would require knowing how such an inborn processor sifts through linguistic input and infers the rules of language, yet nativists are not at all clear about how a LAD (or LMC) might operate -> incomplete approach -nativists have overlooked the many ways in which a child's language environment promotes linguistic competencies

How is intelligence measured?: Assessing Infant Intelligence - stability of IQ in childhood

-starting at about age 4, there is a meaningful relationship between early and later IQs, relationship grows stronger over childhood -the shorter the interval between two testings, the higher the correlations between children's IQ scores. But even after a number of years have passed, IQ seems to be a reasonably stable attribute. After all, the scores that children obtain at age 6 are still clearly related to those they obtain at age 10. -> see table 10.3 -but each of correlations based on large groups of children, not individuals -> study found that more than half of individuals displayed large fluctuations in IQ over time, and the average range of variation in the IQ scores of the test takers whose scores fluctuated was more than 20 points -> more stable for some children than others -> IQ doesnt reflect individual's absolute potential for learning or intellectual capacity ->>> oday, many experts believe that an IQ score is merely an estimate of a person's intellectual performance at one particular point in time—an estimate that may or may not be a good indication of the person's intellectual capacity. -children who's IQ change the most: scores tend to increase or decrease over time: gainers come from homes where parents enriching learning, losers - often live in prolonged poverty -> cumulative-deficit hypothesis: the notion that impoverished environments inhibit intellectual growth and that these inhibiting effects accumulate over time -> involves cumulative exposure to negative but not traumatic events or factors. -> The effects can be diffuse, influencing multiple areas of the child's life, can be amplified over time and can be unpredictable, based on the specific child and the child's specific experiences. -> Therefore, the immediate social context can have significant and long-term effects (referred to as social causation) on children's intelligence.

Preschool Period: Grammatical development: Mastering Transformational Rules - Producing Negative Sentences

-step 1: place a negative word in front of word or statement they want to negate -> "No mitten" (but ambiguous, what is it really saying?) -step 2: clarifies ambiguity: inserts the negative word inside the sentence, in front of the word that it modifies (e.g., "I not wear mitten" or "That not mitten"). -step 3: learn to combine negative markers with the proper auxiliary verbs to negate sentences in much the same way adults do -Villiers study: children persuaded to argue with talking puppet: negate what puppet says -> 3-4 year olds ere quite capable of using a wide variety of negative auxiliaries, including wouldn't, wasn't, hasn't, and mustn't, to properly negate almost any sentence the puppet produced. -> However, children as old as 5 years old have difficulties producing negative questions such as "What don't you like?" Instead, they produce "What you don't like?"

How Do Infants Become Attached?: Attachment-related fears of intimacy: Stranger Anxiety

-stranger anxiety: a wary or fretful reaction that infants and toddlers often display when approached by an unfamiliar person. -Most infants react positively to strangers until they form their first attachment, and then become apprehensive shortly thereafter -Wary reactions to strangers peak at 8 to 10 months of age and gradually decline in intensity over the second year

Language Learning during Middle Childhood: Further Development of Communication Skills general

-study of children's referential communication skills -> s, 4- to 10-year-olds were asked to describe blocks with unfamiliar graphic designs on them to a peer who was on the other side of an opaque screen so that the peer could identify them -> preschool children did not perform this well -> but 6-10 year olds provided much more informative messages -> . They realized that their listener could not see what they were referring to, thus requiring them to somehow differentiate these objects and make each distinctive if their messages were to be understood. -> However, when a simpler task (such as describing the steps to solve a simple puzzle) is used, 3- to 6-year-olds are able to adjust their instructions and provide more details for the listener - Four- and 5-year-olds perform much better on referential communication tasks that require them to describe the whereabouts of real (rather than abstract) objects that are hidden or missing, but still worse at it than elementary school children -elementary age so much better bc of growth of cognitive skills and sociolinguistic understanding -> also less egocentric and acquire role-taking skills - so can adapt speech to needs of listener -sociolinguistic understanding is required to make the right kinds of speech adjustments, because messages that are clear for one listener may not be for others - e.g. different familiarity with stimuli -> Six- to 10-year-olds do provide longer messages to unfamiliar than to familiar listeners. Yet only the 9- and 10-year-olds among them adjusted the content of their communications to the listeners' needs by providing richer differentiating information to an unfamiliar listener

Attachments as Reciprocal Relationships: Establishment of Interactional Synchrony

-synchronized routines: generally harmonious interactions between two persons in which participants adjust their behaviour in response to the partner's feelings and behaviours. -contributes to attachment -esp during first few months -begin gazing and showing more interest in mother's face -4-9 weeks -by 2 to 3 months are beginning to understand some simple social contingencies as well. -> expect responsiveness - "still face" experiment -Even very young infants have come to expect some degree of "synchrony" between their own gestures and those of caregivers -coordinated interactions, often likened to dances, are most likely to develop if the caregiver attends carefully to their baby's state, provides playful stimulation when the baby is alert and attentive, and avoids pushing things when an overexcited or tired infant is fussy -Stern: synchronized interactions occur several times a day, import to emotional attachment -> infant interacts with responsive caregiver, learns what caregiver is like, and e caregiver also becomes better at interpreting the baby's signals and learns how to adjust her behaviour to successfully capture and maintain the baby's attention. Thus, the relationship can become more satisfying for both parties, often blossoming into a strong reciprocal attachment -mother-child interactional synchrony is often more evident than father-child synchrony

The Holophrastic Period: Attaching Meaning to Words -Strategies for Inferring Word Meanings: Synactical clues to word meanings

-syntactical bootstrapping: the notion that young children make inferences about the meaning of words by analyzing the way words are used in sentences and inferring whether they refer to objects (nouns), actions (verbs), or attributes (adjectives). -> the verb's syntax—the form that it takes in a sentence—provides important clues about what it means -, 2-year-olds can use the meaning of a familiar verb to limit the possible referents of a novel noun. -> So if they know what "eating" means and hear the sentence "Daddy is eating cabbage," they will map this name onto the leafy substance that dad is consuming rather than wondering whether "cabbage" refers to the ham, bread, or other objects on the dining room table -. By age 3, children become so proficient at inferring word meanings from syntactical cues that they trust their understanding of sentence structure rather than other processing constraints when (1) the referent of a new word is unclear and (2) syntactical cues and other processing constraints would lead to different interpretations

Syntax

-syntax: the structure of a language; the rules specifying how words and grammatical markers are to be combined to produce meaningful sentences. -word meanings (semantics) interact with sentence structure (word order) to give the entire sentence a meaning. -> Clearly, children must acquire a basic understanding of the syntactical features of their native tongue before they can become proficient at speaking or understanding that language.

Stability of Temperament

-t several components of temperament—activity level, irritability, sociability, exuberance, positive emotionality, negative emotionality, constraint, and fearfulness—are moderately stable through infancy, childhood, and sometimes even into the early adult years -like adult personality, capacity for stability and change -Kagan: studied behavioural inhibition: a temperamental attribute reflecting a tendency to withdraw from unfamiliar people or situations -displayed this behavior at 4 months, 21 months, and 3, 5.5, and 7.5 years -> moderately stable with deep biological roots: -> t infants easily upset by novelty show greater electrical activity in the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain (the centre for negative emotions) than in the left hemisphere, whereas infants who are less reactive show either the opposite pattern or no hemispheric differences in electrical activity -> Kagan found that children at the extremes of the continuum—the most highly inhibited and most highly uninhibited youngsters—were most likely to display such long-term stability, with most other children showing considerable fluctuation in their levels of inhibition over time -likely to remain inhibited over time if: 1) caregivers are overprotective and allow them little autonomy 2) caregivers are not very accurate at appraising their feelings, or are insensitive to them and make snide comments -other temperamental traits—such as lower levels of positive emotionality—affect stability of behavioural inhibition

Recognizing and Interpreting Emotions: conversations about emotions

-talking about emotions, which toddlers do aty 18024 months, allows for richer understandings -the more often 3-year-olds had discussed emotional experiences with other family members, the better they were at interpreting others' emotions and at settling disputes with friends when evaluated three years later in elementary school. -empathy: ability to experience the same emotion as other people. -> important to understand the causes of others' emotions to get here -> parents talk just as much about positive emotions as about negative emotions to their 2- to 5-year-olds, although discussions about negative emotions centre more heavily on their causes, on their relationships to other mental states and goals, and on regulating issues

Creativity and Special Talents: gifted

-term was once limited to people, such as those in Terman's longitudinal study, with IQs of 140 or higher -More recent definitions of giftedness have been broadened to include not only a high IQ but also singular talents in particular areas such as music, art, literature, or science

Why Do Groups Differ in Intellectual Performance? - the genetic hypothesis => Criticisms of the Genetic Hypothesis

-the evidence that heredity contributes to within-group differences in intelligence says nothing at all about between-group differences in intelligence. -even though genes partially explain individual differences in IQ within ethnic groups, the average difference in IQ between two ethnicities may represent nothing more than differences in the environments they typically experience -Data available on mixed-race children also fail to support the genetic hypothesis -Research has shown that childhood intelligence is heritable (40-50 percent) but that this heritability is related to multiple genes across the genome (from human genome studies) -self-classification and visible differences did not fully capture the racial genetic makeup of the sample, with many people who visibly appear to belong to one group or another actually being multiracial -there is no evidence to conclusively demonstrate that group differences in IQ are genetically determined

Phonology

-the sound system of a language and the rules for combining these sounds to produce meaningful units of speech. -basic units of sound: phonemes -600 consonants and 200 vowels in languages of world- each language uses only a subset of sounds - 45 phonemes in English, 25 in Japanese -children must learn how to discriminate, produce, and combine the speechlike sounds of their native tongue in order to make sense of the speech they hear and to be understood when they try to speak graphemes: letters used to represent phonemes

Early Temperamental Profiles and Later Development: temperamental profiles and children's adjustment

-these patterns (chess and thomas patterns) persist over time, influence adjustment to settings -temperamentally difficult children are more likely than other children to have problems adjusting to school activities, and are often irritable and aggressive in their interactions with siblings and peers -About half of all children who are slow to warm up show a different kind of adjustment problem: their hesitancy to embrace new activities and challenges may cause their peers to ignore or neglect them, more likely to be shy children

Sternberg and Lubart's Investment Theory (of Creativity): Intellectual resources general:

-three intellectual abilities are particularly important to creativity: 1) the ability to find new problems to solve or to see old problems in new ways. 2_ the ability to evaluate your ideas to determine which are worth pursuing and which are not. 3) must be able to sell others on the value of new ideas in order to gain the support that may be necessary to fully develop them

The Holophrastic Period: Attaching Meaning to Words general

-toddlers figure out what words mean through: fast-mapping - process of linking a word with its referent after hearing the word once or twice. -even 13- to 15-month-olds can learn the meaning of new words by fast-mapping, although the names of objects are more easily acquired at this age than the names of actions or activities -Eighteen- to 20-month-olds are likely to learn the meaning of novel words that a speaker introduces only if they and the speaker are jointly attending to the object that is labelled -yet by 24 to 30 months, children are much better at inferring what speakers are talking about and will now fast-map a novel word to its referent, even if (1) they've merely overheard the word as the speaker addresses someone else or (2) other objects or events are competing for their attention -fast-mapping allows youngest language users to comprehend word meanings, but that they have trouble retrieving known words from memory when they try to talk. -> study "whats inside the box?" -> . Toddlers who had yet to enter the naming explosion generally could not retrieve words they knew well to answer correctly, whereas their counterparts who had already displayed a vocabulary spurt performed much better.

The Holophrastic Period: Attaching Meaning to Words -Strategies for Inferring Word Meanings: Summing up

-toddlers well--prepared for task of figuring out what new words mean -especially sensitive to novel aspects of the speech they hear and highly motivated to use contextual cues and other available information to decode new words -By age 2, toddlers already produce nearly 300 words—a sufficient baseline for lexical contrast. And apparently they already understand enough about sentence structure (syntax) to determine whether many new words are nouns, verbs, or adjectives—a second important clue to word meaning -do make errors, but often seem to know much more about the meaning of words than their errors might indicate. -> toddlers who know relatively few words may use overextension as yet another strategy for learning the names of new objects and activities. -> A child who sees a horse may call it a doggie not because she believes it is a dog, but because she has no better word in her vocabulary to describe this animal and has learned from experience that an incorrect label is likely to elicit reactions such as "No, Jennie, that's a horse. Can you say horsie? C'mon, say horsie"

How is intelligence measured?: the Wechsler Scales

-two intelligence tests for children, both widely used: Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence -Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—V (WISC-V): widely used individual intelligence test that includes a measure of general intelligence and both verbal and performance intelligence: children ages 6 years to 17 years (16 and 11 months) -Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence—IV (WPPSI-IV): designed for children between ages 2 years 6 months and 7 years 7 months -believed that earlier versions of the Stanford-Binet were overloaded with items that require verbal skills, thought this discriminated against children for whom English is a second language, or children who have certain language learning disabilities—for example, those who have reading difficulties or who are hard of hearing -> Wechsler's scales contain some items that require verbal skills and other items that are nonverbal—or "performance" subtests. -> Test takers receive a full-scale IQ score, as well as four composite index scores that include verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed -allows children from all backgrounds to display their intellectual strengths and are sensitive to inconsistencies in mental skills that may be early signs of neurological problems or learning disorders -> the test appeared to be measuring the same cognitive factors (such as verbal comprehension and perceptual reasoning) in all of the countries included in a study (14) -Saklofske and colleagues developed methods for estimating normative WISC-IV full-scale intelligence applicable specifically for Canadian children, which are based on both demographic and combined estimation procedures -> Saklofske also studies emotional intelligence

Preschool Period: Grammatical development: Mastering Transformational Rules - Asking Questions

-two types of questions common to all languages: 1) Yes/no questions, the simpler form that is mastered first, ask whether particular declarative statements are true or false 2) wh- questions call for responses other than a simple yes or no. These queries are called wh- questions because, in English, they almost always begin with a wh- word such as who, what, where, when, or why. -earliest questions: declarative with rising intonation -> becomes yes/no question, or wh- words sometimes placed at beginning of telegraphic sentences (e.g. where doggie?) -second phase: start using proper auxiliary (helping) verbs -> e.g. What daddy is eating?" -last stage: learn the transformational rule that calls for moving the auxiliary verb ahead of the subject and they begin to produce adultlike questions such as "What is daddy eating?"

How Do Infants Become Attached?: Why do infants fear strangers and separations? The Cognitive-Developmental Viewpoint

-view both stranger anxiety and separation anxiety as natural outgrowths of the infant's perceptual and cognitive development. -Kagan: 6- to 10-month-olds have developed stable schema for (1) the faces of familiar companions and (2) the fact that absent companions do return. -a strange face that is discrepant with the infants' schema for caregivers now upsets children because they can't explain who this is or what has become of familiar caregivers. Kagan also proposes that 7- to 10-month-olds will not protest most separations within the home because they have a pretty good idea where a caregiver has gone; but should a caregiver violate this "familiar faces in familiar places" schema by leaving the house, an infant cannot easily account for her or his whereabouts and will probably cry.

The Modern Information-Processing Viewpoint of Intelligence: the contextual component

-what qualifies as "intelligent" behaviour will depend in large part on the context in which it is displayed -> intelligent people can adapt to environment and shape it to suit them better -> if can do so, display practical intelligence, street smarts -> sternberg emphasizes intelligence in real life context

The Prelinguistic Period: Before Language - definition

For the first 10 to 13 months of life, children are said to be in the prelinguistic phase of language development—the period before speaking their first meaningful words. But even though young infants are preverbal, they are quite responsive to language from the day they are born.

emotional development general (infants)

In one study, more than half the mothers of 1-month-old infants said that their babies displayed at least five distinct emotional expressions: interest, surprise, joy, anger, and fear

Disorganized/Disoriented Attachment

These infants (about 5 percent of 1-year-olds) are most stressed by the strange situation and may be the most insecure -Disorganized/disoriented attachment: an insecure infant-caregiver bond, characterized by the infant's dazed appearance on reunion or a tendency to first seek and then abruptly avoid the caregiver.

language and characteristics (chapter info)

a small number of individually meaningless symbols (sounds, letters, gestures) that can be combined according to agreed-on rules to produce an infinite number of messages. -human languages flexible and productive -language inventive tool to express thoughts and interpretations of world -vocables: unique patterns of sound that a prelinguistic infant uses to represent objects, actions, or events.

Shandra would like her son, Alex, to grow up with a strong prosocial attitude, including concern and empathy for others. When she discovers that Alex has hit another boy in his preschool class, she strongly reprimands Alex by saying, "Alex, it is wrong to hit! It hurts other people's feelings. You need to go over and apologize and give that boy a hug." This type of reaction from Shandra is likely to make Alex feel____but not______.

guilty, shameful

Why Do Groups Differ in Intellectual Performance? overview

three general hypotheses to account for racial, ethnic, and social class differences in IQ: (1) a cultural/test bias hypothesis that standardized IQ tests and the ways they are administered are geared toward white, middle-class cultural experiences and seriously underestimate the intellectual capabilities of economically disadvantaged children, especially those from minority subcultures; (2) a genetic hypothesis that group differences in IQ are hereditary; and (3) an environmental hypothesis that the groups scoring lower in IQ come from intellectually impoverished backgrounds—that is, neighbourhoods and home environments that are not very conducive to intellectual growth.

Preschool Period: Development of Pragmatics and Communication Skills: Referential Communication

referential communication skills: abilities to generate clear verbal messages, recognize when others' messages are unclear, and clarify any unclear messages one transmits or receives -used to think that preschoolers could not detect uninformative messages and resolve most problems in communication -> often fail to detect linguistic ambiguities because they are focusing on what they think the speaker means rather than on the (ambiguous) literal meaning of the message -> why guess? because they are often quite successful at inferring the true meaning of ambiguous utterances from other contextual cues, such as their knowledge of a particular speaker's attitudes, preferences, and past behaviours -Four-year-olds are also less likely than 7-year-olds to detect and rephrase their own uninformative messages. In fact, they often assume that their own statements are perfectly informative and that failures to communicate should be blamed on their listeners -BUT better in natural environment than lab - esp when contextual cues that help clarify -Even 3-year-olds know that they cannot carry out an unintelligible request made by a yawning adult, and they quickly realize that other impossible requests (such as "Bring me the refrigerator") are problematic as well -> also understand how to respond: "huh", "its too heavy!" -> , 3- to 5-year-olds are not very good at detecting ambiguities in the literal meaning of oral messages. Nevertheless, they are better communicators than many laboratory studies of comprehension monitoring might suggest because they are often successful at inferring what an ambiguous message must mean from nonlinguistic contextual information.

Answer The infant's capability for__________is thought to be necessary for the development of all complex emotions

self-recognition or self-evaluation

temperament and development general

temperament: a person's characteristic modes of responding emotionally and behaviourally to environmental events, including such attributes as activity level, irritability, fearfulness, and sociability. -Rothbart and Bates -emotional and behavioural building blocks of adult personality -6 dimensions: 1) Fearful distress: wariness, distress, and withdrawal in new situations or in response to novel stimuli 2) Irritable distress: fussiness, crying, and showing distress when desires are frustrated (sometimes called frustration/anger) 3) Positive affect: frequency of smiling, laughing, and willingness to approach others and to cooperate with them (called sociability by some researchers) 4) Activity level: amount of gross motor activity (e.g., kicking, crawling) 5) Attention span/persistence: length of time child orients to and focuses on objects or events of interest 6) Rhythmicity: regularity/predictability of bodily functions such as eating, sleeping, and bowel functioning -infant temperament reflects two kinds of negative emotionality (fearfulness and irritability) as well as a single, general measure of positive affect. -the first five of these six temperamental components are also useful for describing temperamental variations that preschool and older children display -, fearful distress does not appear until age 6 to 7 months, and variations in attention span, while certainly apparent early, become more noticeable later in the first year