Chapter 6: Study Questions

Describe the overall condition of child care for infants and toddlers in the United States

Standards are set by the individual states and vary widely. 20 to 25 percent provided infants and toddlers with sufficiently positive, stimulating experiences to promote healthy psychological development. Most settings offered substandard care. Unfortunately, many U.S. children from low-income families experience inadequate _________. Worst care tend to serve middle-SES families. Parents are especially likely to place their children in _________ where quality tends to be lowest.

2 factors do researchers believe are responsible for gains in information-processing capacity.

Capacity of the system—the amount of information that can be retained and processed at once—and the speed with which it can be processed increases, making more complex forms of thinking possible with age . Brain development Improvements in strategies—such as attending to information and categorizing it effectively—that are already under way in the first two years of life.

Information-processing research underscores the (continuity / discontinuity) of human thinking from infancy into adulthood.

Continuity

Accommodation

Creating new schemes or adjusting old ones to produce a better fit with the environment

standardization

In constructing intelligence tests, designers engage in ___________ giving the tests to a large, representative sample and using the results as the standard for interpreting scores.

Sensorimotor substage - Tertiary circular reactions

Infants engage in goal-directed behavior and begin to attain object permanence.

Object permanence

Understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight

Assimilation

Using current schemes to interpret the external world

True or False: Early vocabulary development proceeds at about the same rate for boys and girls.

False Many studies show that girls are slightly ahead of boys in early vocabulary growth. The most common explanation is girls' faster rate of physical maturation, which is believed to promote earlier development of the left cerebral hemisphere.

Secondary circular reactions

4-8 months Actions aimed at repeating interesting effects in the surrounding world; imitation of familiar behaviors.

12

On average, children say their first word at 12 months of age.

In what way does information-processing research challenge Piaget's view of early cognitive development?

Findings on memory and categorization join with other research in challenging Piaget's view of early cognitive development. Infants' capacity to recall events and to categorize stimuli attests, once again, to their ability to mentally represent their experiences.

Follow-up research on Piaget's sensorimotor stage yields broad agreement on two issues.

First, many cognitive changes of infancy are gradual and continuous rather than abrupt and stagelike, as Piaget thought/ Second, rather than developing together, various aspects of infant cognition change unevenly because of the challenges posed by different types of tasks and infants' varying experiences with them. These ideas serve as the basis for another major approach to cognitive development—information processing

advent of a clear self-image

Research suggests that ___________ contribute to the end of infantile amnesia.

Explain how a child's environment influences language development.

Rich social environment builds on young children's natural readiness to speak their native tongue.

To which subjects do these words commonly refer?

U.S. and Chinese (both Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking) babies, common objects ("ball," "bread") important people ("Mama," "Dada") sound effects ("woof-woof," "vroom") Action words ("hit," "grab," "hug") & social routines ("hi," "bye"), were more often produced by Chinese than U.S. babies. Usually include people, objects that move, foods, animals (in families with pets), familiar actions, outcomes of such actions ("hot," "wet"), and social terms. In their first 50 words, toddlers rarely name things that just sit there, like "table" or "vase."

Purpose an infant intelligence test is largely used

Used for screening Helping to identify for further observation and intervention babies whose very low scores mean that they are likely to have developmental problems.

Tertiary circular reactions

12-18 months Exploration of the properties of objects by acting on them in novel ways; imitation of novel behaviors; ability to search in several locations for a hidden object (accurate A-B search)

What is one explanation for video deficit effect phenomenon?

2-year-olds typically do not view a video character as offering socially relevant information. After an adult on video announced where she hid a toy, few 2-year-olds searched In contrast, when the adult stood in front of the child and uttered the same words, 2-year-olds promptly retrieved the object.

Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME)

A checklist for gathering information about the quality of children's home lives through observation and parental interview.

Home-based interventions

A skilled adult visits the home and works with parents, providing social support and teaching them how to stimulate a very young child's development.

Parts of the information-processing system

A. Sensory register B. Working, or short-term, memory C. Long-term memory

How do infants initially respond to video images of people? Give specific examples.

Aas if viewing people directly—smiling, moving their arms and legs, and (by 6 months) imitating actions of a televised adult. But they confuse the images with the real thing). 9-month-olds manually explored the screen, as they do with pictures. By 19 months, touching and grabbing had declined in favor of pointing at the images.

intentional, or goal oriented behavior

Ability to coordinate schemes deliberately to solve simple problems.

language acquisition device (LAD)

According to Chomsky's nativist perspective, all children have ________. An innate system containing a universal grammar, or set of rules common to all languages, that enables them to understand and speak as soon as they pick up enough words.

schemes

According to Piaget, specific psychological structures— these are organized ways of making sense of experience —change with age.

In what ways do information-processing researchers agree with Piaget's theory?

Agree with Piaget that children are active, inquiring beings. But instead of providing a single, unified theory of cognitive development, they focus on many aspects of thinking, from attention, memory, and categorization skills to complex problem solving.

Regardless of SES and ethnicity, what aspects measured by HOME repeatedly predict better language and IQ scores in toddlerhood and early childhood?

An organized, stimulating physical setting and parental affection, involvement, and encouragement of new skills/ The extent to which parents talk to infants and toddlers is particularly important. Affluence of the surrounding neighborhood.

What is the greatest drawback of the information-processing approach to cognitive development?

Analyzing cognition into its components, such as perception, attention, memory, and categorization. This is also its central strength.

Part of the information-processing system - Sensory register

Area where sights and sounds are represented directly and briefly stored

Early language acquisition process - operant conditioning

As the baby makes sounds, parents reinforce those that are most like words with smiles, hugs, and speech in return. For example, at 12 months, my older son, David, often babbled something like "book-a-book-a-dook-a-dook-a-book-a-nook-a-book-aaa." One day as he babbled away, I held up his picture book and said, "Book!" Soon David was saying "book-aaa" in the presence of books.

Type of error - overextension

As vocabulary expands, a more common error is _________. Applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate. For example, Grace used "car" for buses, trains, trucks, and fire engines. Toddlers' over-extensions reflect their sensitivity to categories. They apply a new word to a group of similar experiences: "car" to wheeled objects, "open" to opening a door, peeling fruit, and untying shoelaces. Children often do this deliberately because they have difficulty recalling or have not acquired a suitable word. And when a word is hard to pronounce, toddlers are likely to substitute a related one they can say. As vocabulary and pronunciation improve, ______ disappear

Type of interactionist theory - The information-processing perspective

Assume children make sense of their complex language environments by applying powerful cognitive capacities of a general kind. Regions of the brain housing language also govern similar perceptual, motor, and cognitive abilities. For example, damage to parts of the left hemisphere, including Wernicke's area, results in difficulty comprehending both language and other patterned stimuli, such as music and a series of moving lights that depict familiar shapes.

babbling

At around 6 months of age, ________ appears Repeat consonant-vowel combinations, often in long strings.

preverbal gestures

At the end of the first year, infants use _________ to direct adults' attention, to influence their behavior, and to convey helpful information.

core knowledge perspective

Babies are born with a set of innate knowledge systems, or core domains of thought. Physical knowledge Numerical knowledge Linguistic knowledge

Explain why it is difficult to measure babies' intelligence.

Babies cannot answer questions or follow directions. All we can do is present them with stimuli, coax them to respond, and observe their behavior. Therefore, mphasize on perceptual and motor responses.

Sensorimotor substage - Secondary circular reactions

Babies try to repeat interesting events in the surrounding environment that are caused by their own actions.

Why do Piagetian object-permanence tasks predict later IQ more effectively than traditional infant intelligence tests?

Because reflect a basic intellectual process—problem solving.

Ways in which attention improves during infancy

Between 1 and 2 months of age, infants shift from focusing on single, high-contrast features of their visual world to exploring objects and patterns more thoroughly. Infants gradually become more efficient at managing their attention, taking in information more quickly with age. Preterm and newborn babies require a long time to habituate and recover to novel visual stimuli—about 3 or 4 minutes. But by 4 or 5 months, infants require as little as 5 to 10 seconds to take in a complex visual stimulus and recognize that it differs from a previous one . Becomes increasingly flexible and voluntary in another way: Within the first few months, it is already future-oriented. When 2- and 3-month-olds viewed a series of pictures that alternated in a left-right sequence, they quickly engaged in anticipatory looking, shifting their focus to the location of the next stimulus before it appeared/ Recall, also, 4- and 5-month-olds' ability to engage in predictive tracking of objects' movements.

Explain how caregivers can support conversational give-and-take in babies

Between 4 and 6 months, interactions between caregivers and babies begin to include give-and-take, as in pat-a-cake and peekaboo games. The parent starts the game and the baby is an amused observer. But even 4-month-olds are sensitive to the structure and timing of these interactions, smiling more to an organized than to a disorganized peekaboo exchange. By 12 months, babies participate actively, trading roles with the caregiver. As they do so, they practice the turn-taking pattern of human conversation, a vital context for acquiring language and communication skills. Infants' play maturity and vocalizations during games predict advanced language progress in the second year

Explanations for infantile amnesia

Brain development Suggesting that vital changes in the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex pave the way for an explicit memory system—one in which children remember deliberately rather than implicitly, without conscious awareness. But as we have seen, mounting evidence indicates that even young infants engage in conscious recall. Older children and adults often use verbal means for storing information, whereas infants' and toddlers' memory processing is largely nonverbal—an incompatibility that may prevent long-term retention of early experiences.

Name the two language-specific areas of the brain.

Broca's area Wernicke's area

Adaptation

Building schemes through direct interaction with the environment

solve problems by analogy

By 10 to 12 months of age, infants can ____________. They apply a solution strategy from one problem to other relevant problems

Explain how adults can foster sustained attention during infancy and toddlerhood.

By taking note of an infant or toddler's current interest, encouraging it ("Oh, you like that bell!"), and prompting the child to stay focused ("See, it makes a noise!").

Consequences of high-quality child care for mental development

Can reduce the negative impact of a stressed, poverty-stricken home life, and it sustains the benefits of growing up in an economically advantaged family. In Swedish longitudinal research, ________ in infancy and toddlerhood was associated with cognitive, emotional, and social competence in middle childhood and adolescence.

Sign of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care - Caregiver qualifications

Caregiver has some training in child development, first aid, and safety.

Sign of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care - Interactions among adults and children

Caregivers respond promptly to infants' and toddlers' distress; hold, talk to, sing, and read to them; and interact with them in a manner that respects the individual child's interests and tolerance for stimulation.

Center-based interventions

Children attend an organized child-care or preschool program where they receive educational, nutritional, and health services and their parents receive child-rearing and other social service supports.

Early Head Start

Congress to provide limited funding for intervention services directed at infants and toddlers who already have serious developmental problems or who are at risk for problems because of poverty. Begun in 1995, currently has 700 sites serving 65,000 low-income families. Offers an array of coordinated services delivered through a center-based, home-based, or mixed approach, depending on community needs.

Sign of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care - Daily activities

Daily schedule includes times for active play, quiet play, naps, snacks, and meals. It is flexible rather than rigid, to meet the needs of individual children. Atmosphere is warm and supportive, and children are never left unsupervised.

Describe Bayley Scales of Infant Development.

Designed for children between 1 month and 3½ years Commonly used infant test. Three main subtests: Cognitive Scale Language Scale Motor Scale

developmental quotients (DQs)

Due to concerns that infant test scores do not tap the same dimensions of intelligence measured at older ages, they are labeled __________ Rather than IQs rather than IQs.

Explain how the phenomenon of infantile amnesia can be reconciled with infants' and toddlers' remarkable memory skills.

During the first few years, children rely heavily on nonverbal memory techniques, such as visual images and motor actions. But as language develops, their ability to use it to refer to preverbal memories requires strong contextual cues, such as direct exposure to the physical setting of the to-be-recalled experience. Only after age 3 do children often represent events verbally. As children encode autobiographical events in verbal form, they can use language-based cues to retrieve them, increasing the accessibility of those memories at later ages

Many studies show that infants understand concepts (earlier / later) than Piaget believed.

Earlier

Factors evaluated by HOME

Emotional and verbal responsiveness of the parent Parental acceptance of the child Organization of the physical environment Provision of appropriate play materials Parental involvement with the child Opportunities for variety in daily stimulation

Mastery of object permanence is a (gradual / sudden) achievement

Gradual

A-not-B search error.

If they reach several times for an object at a first hiding place (A), then see it moved to a second (B), they still search for it in the first hiding place (A).

According to the behaviorist perspective, what two processes account for early language acquisition?

Imitation Operant Conditioning.

Sign of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care - Caregiver-child ratio

In child-care centers, caregiver-child ratio is no greater than one to three for infants and one to six for toddlers. Group size (number of children in one room) is no greater than six infants with two caregivers and 12 toddlers with two caregivers. In family child care, caregiver is responsible for no more than six children; within this group, no more than two are infants or toddlers. Staffing is consistent, so infants and toddlers can form relationships with particular caregivers.

Discuss the effectiveness of early intervention programs with regard to infant and toddler mental development.

In most programs of either type, participating children score higher than untreated controls on mental tests by age 2. The earlier it begins, the longer it lasts, and the greater its scope and intensity (for example, year-round high-quality child care plus generous support services for parents), the better participants' cognitive and academic performance is throughout childhood and adolescence.

Carolina Abecedarian Project

In the 1970s, more than 100 infants from poverty-stricken families, ranging in age from 3 weeks to 3 months, were randomly assigned to either a treatment group or a control group. Treatment infants were enrolled in full-time, year-round child care through the preschool years. T here they received stimulation aimed at promoting motor, cognitive, language, and social skills and, after age 3, literacy and math concepts. Special emphasis was placed on rich, responsive adult-child verbal communication. All children received nutrition and health services; the primary difference between treatment and controls was the intensive child-care experience.

Briefly describe the nature of toddlers' first words.

In the second half of the first year, infants begin to understand word meanings. When 6-month-olds listened to the words "Mommy" or "Daddy" while looking at side-by-side videos of their parents, they looked longer at the video of the named parent. At 9 months, after hearing a word paired with an object, babies looked longer at other objects in the same category than at those in a different category. Around 1 year, build on the sensorimotor foundations Piaget described and on categories infants have formed.

sustained attention

In toddlerhood, attention to novelty declines and_________ improves. Increasing the capacity for goal directed behavior.

Describe Bayley Scales of Infant Development subset - Motor Scale.

Includes gross and fine-motor skills, such as grasping, sitting, stacking blocks, and climbing stairs.

Domain of thought studied by core knowledge theorists - Physical knowledge

Includes object permanence, object solidity (that one object cannot move through another), and gravity (that an object will fall without support)

Cognitive Scale

Includes such items as attention to familiar and unfamiliar objects, looking for a fallen object, and pretend play.

Sign of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care - Physical setting

Indoor environment is clean, in good repair, well-lighted, and well-ventilated. Fenced outdoor play space is available. Setting does not appear overcrowded when children are present.

How does joint attention contributes to early language development?

Infants and toddlers who often engage in it sustain attention longer, comprehend more language, produce meaningful gestures and words earlier, and show faster vocabulary development through 2 years of age. Gains in _______ at the end of the first year enable babies to establish a "common ground" with the adult, through which they can figure out the meaning of the adult's verbal labels.

Sensorimotor substage - Primary circular reactions

Infants repeat chance behaviors largely motivated by basic needs.

Sensorimotor substage - Reflexive schemes

Infants' primary means of adapting to the environment is through reflexes.

parent-child communication experienced by deaf children of hearing parents and deaf children of deaf parents.

Less positive less responsive to their child's efforts to communicate less effective at achieving joint attention and turn-taking less involved in play, and more directive and intrusive Quality of interaction resembles that of hearing children and hearing parents. , they lack experience with visual communication,. Deaf parents know they must wait for the child to turn toward them before interacting. Hearing parents tend to speak or gesture while the child's attention is directed elsewhere—a strategy that works with a hearing but not with a deaf partner. When the child is confused or unresponsive, hearing parents often feel overwhelmed and become overly controlling

2 reasons why the violation-of-expectation method is controversial

Limited awareness of physical events, not the full-blown, conscious understanding that was Piaget's focus in requiring infants to act on their surroundings, as in searching for hidden objects Reveals only babies' perceptual preference for novelty, not their understanding of experience.

Broca's area

Located in the left frontal lobe, supports grammatical processing and language production.

Wernicke's area

Located in the left temporal lobe, plays a role in comprehending word meaning.

Explain why in the United States, child-care settings that serve middle-SES families tend to provide the worst care.

Low-SES children more often attend publicly subsidized, nonprofit centers, which have smaller group sizes and better teacher-child ratios. Greater access to adult stimulation, infants and toddlers in high-quality family child care score higher than those in center care in cognitive and language development.

referential style

Most toddlers use a _______ of language learning, in which early words consist largely of names for objects. This style is associated with faster vocabulary development.

Recognition

Noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced. It is the easiest form of memory: All babies have to do is indicate (by kicking, pressing a lever, or looking) whether a new experience is identical or similar to a previous one.

Factors not evaluated by HOME

Nutrition and opportunities for physical exercise Ethnicity and cultural background Strength of the parents' relationship

telegraphic speech

Once toddlers produce about 200 words, they start to combine two words: "Mommy shoe," "go car," "more cookie." Two-word utterances are called Like a telegram, they focus on high-content words, omitting smaller, less important ones ("can," "the," "to"). Children the world over use them to express an impressive variety of meanings.

Sign of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care - Relationships with parents

Parents are welcome anytime. Caregivers talk frequently with parents about children's behavior and development

genetic-environmental correlation

Parents who are genetically more intelligent may provide better experiences while also giving birth to genetically brighter children, who evoke more stimulation from their parents.

Signs of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care

Physical setting Toys and equipment Caregiver-child ratio Daily activities Caregiver qualifications Relationships with parents Licensing and accreditation

Sign of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care - Toys and equipment

Play materials are appropriate for infants and toddlers and are stored on low shelves within easy reach. Cribs, highchairs, infant seats, and child-sized tables and chairs are available. Outdoor equipment includes small riding toys, swings, slide, and sandbox.

Engage toddlers in joint make-believe play.

Promotes all aspects of conversational dialogue.

Play social games, such as pat-a-cake and peekaboo.

Provides experience with the turn-taking pattern of human conversation

Read to toddlers often, engaging them in dialogues about picture books.

Provides exposure to many aspects of language, including vocabulary, grammar, communication skills, and information about written symbols and story structures.

autobiographical memory

Recall of personally meaningful one-time events from both the recent and the distant past.

Explain how categorization helps infants make sense of experience.

Reduce the enormous amount of new information they encounter everyday so they can learn and remember

Why are Renée Baillargeon' x findings controversial?

Several researchers using similar procedures failed to confirm findings. He maintain's that these opposing investigations did not include crucial controls. And they emphasize that infants look longer at a wide variety of unexpected events involving hidden objects Critics question what babies' looking preferences tell us about what they actually know.

Vygotsky's view of make-believe play

Society provides children with opportunities to represent culturally meaningful activities in play. Like other complex mental activities, it is first learned under the guidance of experts . Peter extended his capacity to represent daily events when Ken drew him into the baking task and helped him act it out in play.

Early language acquisition process - imitation

Some behaviorists believe that children rely on _______ to rapidly acquire complex utterances, such as whole phrases and sentences. Can combine with reinforcement to promote language, as when a parent coaxes, "Say 'I want a cookie,'" and delivers praise and a treat after the toddler responds, "Wanna cookie!"

Piaget's sensorimotor stage

Spans the first 2 years of life, infants and toddlers "think" with their eyes, ears, and hands.

Provide evidence supporting Chomsky's view that human infants are biologically primed to acquire language.

Specialized language areas in the brain Sensitive period for language development

Organization

Taking new schemes, rearranging them, and linking them with other schemes to create an interconnected cognitive system

Language Scale

Taps understanding and expressions of language—for example, recognition of objects and people, following simple directions, and naming objects and pictures.

Explain how adults use scaffolding to introduce children to new tasks.

The adult picks a task that the child can master but that is challenging enough that the child cannot do it by herself. Or the adult capitalizes on an activity that the child has chosen. The adult guides and supports, adjusting the level of support offered to fit the child's current level of performance. As the child joins in the interaction and picks up mental strategies, her competence increases, and the adult steps back, permitting the child to take more responsibility for the task. This form of teaching promotes learning at all ages

joint attention

The child attends to the same object or event as the caregiver, who often labels it. Contributes greatly to early language development.

displaced reference

The symbolic capacity. Realization that words can be used to cue mental images of people and objects that are not physically present.

Children of deaf parents

Their language (use of sign) and play maturity are on a par with hearing children's. After school entry, deaf children of deaf parents learn easily and get along well with adults and peers.

What did Renée Baillargeon conclude about object permanence, based on the tests she gave to infants?

They claimed to have found evidence for object permanence in the first few months of life. After habituating to a short and a tall carrot moving behind a screen, infants were given two test events: (1) an expected event, in which the short carrot moved behind a screen, could not be seen in its window, and reappeared on the other side (2) an unexpected event, in which the tall carrot moved behind a screen, could not be seen in its window (although it was taller than the window's lower edge), and reappeared. Infants as young as 2½ to 3½ months looked longer at the unexpected event, suggesting that they had some awareness that an object moved behind a screen would continue to exist.

Explain the violation-of-expectation method, which is often used by researchers to identify infants' grasp of object permanence and other aspects of physical reasoning.

To discover what infants know about hidden objects and other aspects of physical reality. They may habituate babies to a physical event (expose them to the event until their looking declines) to familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge will be tested. Or they may simply show babies an expected event (one that is consistent with reality) or an unexpected event (a variation of the first event that violates reality). Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is "surprised" by a deviation from physical reality and, therefore, is aware of that aspect of the physical world

60%

Today, more than ______ of U.S. mothers with children under age 2 are employed.

Sensorimotor substage - Mental representation

Toddlers create internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate.

Sensorimotor substage - Coordination of secondary circular reactions

Toddlers repeat behaviors with variation, producing new effects.

Two-Word Utterance Phase 1. List three developments that support rapid vocabulary growth during toddlerhood

Toddlers undergo a spurt in vocabulary—a transition from a slower to a faster learning phase. But recent evidence indicates that most children show a steady, continuous increase in rate of word learning that extends through the preschool years. Over the second year, they improve in ability to categorize experience, recall words, and grasp others' social cues to meaning, such as eye gaze, pointing, and handling objects . Furthermore, as toddlers' experiences broaden, they have a wider range of interesting objects and events to label. For example, children approaching age 2 more often mention places to go ("park," "store"). And as they construct a clearer self-image, they add more words that refer to themselves ("me," "mine," "Katy") and to their own and others' bodies and clothing ("eyes," "mouth," "jacket"

. True or False: Around 14 months, toddlers demonstrate a thorough understanding of hidden objects.

True Around 14 months, toddlers demonstrate a thorough understanding of hidden objects.

True or False: In some cultures, such as those of Indonesia and Mexico, make-believe play is more frequent and more complex with older siblings than with mothers.

True As early as age 3 to 4, children provide rich, challenging stimulation to their younger brothers and sisters, take these teaching responsibilities seriously, and, with age, become better at them In a study of Zinacanteco Indian children of southern Mexico, by age 8, sibling teachers were highly skilled at showing 2-year-olds how to play at everyday tasks, such as washing and cooking. They often guided toddlers verbally and physically through the task and provided feedback

True or False: Findings reveal that in the second half of the first year, as long as they have sufficient familiarity with category members, infants group objects into an impressive array of categories.

True Findings reveal that in the second half of the first year, as long as they have sufficient familiarity with category members, infants group objects into an impressive array of categories.

True or False: If the left-hemispheric region is injured in the early years, other regions of the brain take over its language functions.

True If the left-hemispheric region is injured in the early years, other regions of the brain take over its language functions.

True or False: Parent-toddler conversation strongly predicts early language development and academic success during the school years.

True It provides many examples of speech just ahead of the child's current level and a sympathetic environment in which children can try out new skills. Dialogues about picture books are particularly effective. They expose children to great breadth of language and literacy knowledge, from vocabulary, grammar, and communication skills to information about written symbols and story structures. From the end of the first year through early childhood, children who experience regular adult-child book reading are substantially ahead of their agemates in language skills

complex mental activities

Vygotsky believed that _____________, such as voluntary attention, deliberate memory, categorization, and problem solving, have their origins in social interaction

Explain why adults' participation in toddlers' make-believe play is so important.

When adults participate, toddlers' ____________ is more elaborate. They are more likely to combine schemes into complex sequences. The more parents pretend with their toddlers, the more time their children devote to _______.

Features that can be used to make video effective as a teaching tool for young children.

When it is rich in social cues—close-ups of characters who look directly at the camera Address questions to viewers, and pause to invite their response. Repetition of video programs also helps children over age 2 make sense of video content.

Type of error - underextension

When young children first learn words, they sometimes apply them too narrowly, an error. At 16 months, Caitlin used "bear" only to refer to the worn and tattered teddy bear she carried nearly constantly.

Why is the behaviorist perspective an incomplete explanation of early language development?

Young children create many novel utterances that are not reinforced by or copied from others. When they do imitate others' language, they do so selectively, focusing mainly on building their vocabularies and on refining aspects of language that they are working on at the moment.

comprehension

the language they understand. requires that children recognize only the meaning of a word.

production

the words and word combinations children use. children must recall not only the word but also the concept for which it stands.

When young children learn new words, they tend to make two types of errors. Name errors

underextension overextension

Ways in which caregivers can support early language learning.

- Respond to coos and babbles with speech sounds and words. - Play social games, such as pat-a-cake and peekaboo. - Engage toddlers in joint make-believe play. - Read to toddlers often, engaging them in dialogues about picture books. -Establish joint attention and comment on what child see. -Engage toddlers in frequent conversations..

Primary circular reactions

1-4 months Simple motor habits centered around the infant's own body; limited anticipation of events

Domain of thought studied by core knowledge theorists - Numerical knowledge

5-month-olds saw a screen raised to hide a single toy animal and then watched a hand place a second toy behind a screen. Finally, the screen was removed to reveal either one or two toys. If infants kept track of the two objects (requiring them to add one object to another), then they should look longer at the unexpected, one-toy display—which is what they did

What does research on deaf-born infants reveal about an early sensitive period for language development?

A deaf-born 5-month-old received a cochlear implant—an electronic device surgically inserted into the ear that converts external sounds into a signal to stimulate the auditory nerve. She showed typical babbling in infancy and resembled her hearing agemates in language development at 3 to 4 years. But if auditory input is not restored until after age 2 (the usual time for cochlear implant surgery), children remain behind in language development. And if implantation occurs after age 4, language delays are severe and persistent. These outcomes suggest an early sensitive period for the brain to develop the necessary organization for normal speech processing. Exposure to sign language from birth babble with their hands much as hearing infants do through speech/ Furthermore, hearing babies of deaf, signing parents produce babblelike hand motions with the rhythmic patterns of natural sign languages. This sensitivity to language rhythm, evident not just in perception of speech but also in babbling, whether spoken or signed, supports both discovery and production of meaningful language units

child-directed speech (CDS). List attributes.

A form of communication made up of short sentences with - hgh-pitched exaggerated expression - clear pronunciation - distinct pauses between speech segments - clear gestures to support verbal meaning, - repetition of new words in a variety of context. Deaf parents use a similar style of communication when signing to their deaf babies. From birth on, infants prefer ______ over other kinds of adult talk, and by 5 months they are more emotionally responsive to it

zone of proximal development

A range of tasks that the child cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of more skilled partners.

Part of the information-processing system - Working, or short-term, memory

Area in which mental strategies are used to synthesize information.

cooing

At around 2 months of age, babies begin to make vowel-like noises.

Why do habituation and recovery predict later IQ more effectively than traditional infant intelligence tests?

Because they assess memory as well as quickness and flexibility of thinking, which underlie intelligent behavior at all ages.

Summarize the outcomes of the Carolina Abecedarian Project.

By 12 months of age, the IQs of the two groups diverged. Treatment children sustained their advantage until last tested—at age 21. In addition, throughout their years of schooling, treatment youths achieved considerably higher scores in reading and math. These gains translated into more years of schooling completed, higher rates of college enrollment and employment in skilled jobs, and lower rates of drug use and adolescent parenthood.

Sign of developmentally appropriate infant and toddler child care - Licensing and accreditation

Child-care setting whether a center or a home, is licensed by the state or province. Voluntary accreditation by the National Academy of Early Childhood Programs (www.naeyc.org/accreditation) or the National Association for Family Child Care (www.nafcc.org) is evidence of an especially high-quality program

Outcomes for children who have hearing parents not fluent in sign language.

Delayed in development of language and make-believe play. In middle childhood, many achieve poorly in school. Deficient in social skills Display impulse-control problems

Type of interactionist theory - social interaction

Emphasize that children's social skills and language experiences are centrally involved in language development. In this view, an active child, well-endowed for making sense of language, strives to communicate. In doing so, she cues her caregivers to provide appropriate language experiences, which help her relate content and structure of language to its social meanings.

3 new capacities that result from the ability to create mental representations.

Enables older toddlers to solve advanced object permanence problems involving invisible displacement—finding a toy moved while out of sight, such as into a small box while under a cover. Permits deferred imitation—the ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present. Makes possible make-believe play, in which children act out everyday and imaginary activities.

Domain of thought studied by core knowledge theorists - Linguistic knowledge

Enables swift language acquisition in early childhood. Infants' early orientation toward people initiates swift development of psychological knowledge—in particular, understanding of mental states, such as intentions, emotions, desires, and beliefs.

Respond to coos and babbles with speech sounds and words.

Encourages experimentation with sounds that can later be blended into first words. Provides experience with the turn-taking pattern of human conversation.

Consequences of low-quality child care for mental development

Exposure to long hours of _______ child care—whether they come from middle-class or from low-SES homes—score lower on measures of cognitive, language, and social skills during the preschool and elementary school years.

True or False: Acquiring a second language is harder after a sensitive period has passed.

False Acquiring a second language is harder after a sensitive period has passed.

True or False: Habituation research confirms that infants need to be physically active to acquire new information.

False Habituation studies show that infants learn and retain a wide variety of information just by watching objects and events, without being physically active.

True or False: Infants regard pictures as symbols of objects

False Infants do not treat pictures as symbols. They touch, rub, and pat a color photo of an object or pick it up and manipulate it—behaviors that reveal confusion about the picture's true nature. This manual exploration increases from 4 to 9 months and then declines, becoming rare around 18 months.

True or False: Laboratory research on deferred imitation supports Piaget's conclusion that infants cannot mentally represent experience until about 18 months of age.

False Laboratory research reveals that deferred imitation is present at 6 weeks of age! Infants who watched an unfamiliar adult's facial expression imitated it when exposed to the same adult the next day. As motor capacities improve, infants copy actions with objects.

True or False: Research on the core knowledge perspective is less controversial than violation-of-expectation results.

False Like other violation-of-expectation results—are controversial.

True or False: Over 90 percent of deaf children have hearing parents who are fluent in sign language.

False NOT FLUENT

True or False: From the first few months of life, infant memory for operant responses is independent of context, meaning that infants apply learned responses to relevant new situations.

False Responses is highly context-dependent. If 2- to 6-month-olds are not tested in the same situation in which they were trained—with the same mobile and crib bumper and in the same room—they remember poorly. After 9 months, the importance of context declines.

True or False: Scores on infant intelligence tests are excellent predictors of later intelligence.

False Scores on infant intelligence tests are excellent predictors of later intelligence.

True or False: Research has found that all infants, regardless of their culture or native language, sort objects in the same way.

False Variations among languages lead to cultural differences in development of categories

Challenges to Chomsky's theory

First, researchers have had great difficulty specifying _________universal grammar. A Absence of a complete description of these abstract grammatical structures or even an agreed-on list of how many exist or the best examples of them. Doubt that one set of rules can account for the extraordinary variation in grammatical forms among the world's languages How children manage to link such rules with the strings of words they hear is also unclear. Assumption that grammatical knowledge is innately determined does not fit with certain observations of language development. Children refine and generalize many grammatical forms gradually, engaging in much piecemeal learning and making errors along the way. Complete mastery of some grammatical forms, such as the passive voice, is not achieved until well into middle childhood. This suggests that more experimentation and learning are involved than assumed.

Mental tests

Focus on cognitive products. Measure behaviors that reflect development and arrive at scores that predict future performance.

How do preverbal gestures contribute to language development?

For example, Caitlin held up a toy to show it, pointed to the cupboard when she wanted a cookie, and pointed at her mother's car keys lying on the floor. Carolyn responded to these gestures and also labeled them ("That's your bear!" "You want a cookie!" "Oh, there are my keys!"). In this way, toddlers learn that using language leads to desired results. Like gaze following, infant pointing predicts faster vocabulary development over the second year.

powerful mental representations

Images, or mental pictures of objects, people, and spaces Concepts, or categories in which similar objects or events are grouped together

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

Intelligence tests are scored by computing a(n) __________ Indicates the extent to which the raw score deviates from the typical performance of same-age individuals

100

Intelligence tests are standardized, the mean IQ is set at ____.

Recall

More challenging because it involves remembering something without perceptual support. To recall, you must generate a mental image of the past experience. By the middle of the first year, they can, as indicated by their ability to imitate actions hours or days after observing the behavior.

Three views on how infants gain skill in categorization.

Operant conditioning - In the first few months, babies categorize stimuli on the basis of shape, size, and other physical properties. By 6 months of age, they can categorize on the basis of two correlated features. This ability to categorize using clusters of features prepares babies for acquiring many complex everyday categories. Habituation - Show babies a series of pictures belonging to one category and then see whether they recover to (look longer at) a picture that is not a member of the category. In the second half of the first year, as long as they have sufficient familiarity with category members, infants group objects into an impressive array of categories—food items, furniture, birds, land animals, air animals, sea animals, plants, vehicles, kitchen utensils, and spatial location ("above" and "below," "on" and "in"). Besides organizing the physical world, infants of this age categorize their emotional and social worlds. Their looking responses reveal that they sort people and their voices by gender and age, have begun to distinguish emotional expressions, can separate people's natural actions (walking) from other motions, and expect people (but not inanimate objects) to move spontaneously. Based on similar overall appearance or prominent object parts: legs for animals, wheels for vehicles. But as infants approach their first birthday, more categories appear to be based on subtle sets of features. Older infants can even make categorical distinctions when the perceptual contrast between two categories is minimal (birds versus airplanes). As they gain experience in comparing to-be-categorized items in varied ways and their store of verbal labels expands, toddlers start to categorize flexibly: When 14-month-olds are given four balls and four blocks, some made of soft rubber and some of rigid plastic, their sequence of object touching reveals that after classifying by shape, they can switch to classifying by material (soft versus hard) if an adult calls their attention to the new basis for grouping. In addition to touching and sorting, toddlers' categorization skills are evident in their play behaviors. After watching an adult give a toy dog a drink from a cup, most 14-month-olds shown a rabbit and a motorcycle offered the drink only to the rabbit (Mandler & McDonough, 1998). They clearly understood that certain actions are appropriate for some categories of items (animals) but not for others (vehicles).

video deficit effect

Poorer performance after a video than a live demonstration 2-year-olds' deferred imitation, word learning, and means-end problem solving .

Establish joint attention and comment on what child sees.

Predicts earlier onset of language and faster vocabulary development

Engage toddlers in frequent conversations.

Predicts faster early language development and academic success during the school years

expressive style

Social formulas and pronouns are common and vocabulary grows more slowly.

Types of interactionist theory

Social interaction Information-processing perspective to language development.

infantile amnesia

The reason cannot be merely the passage of time because we can recall many personally meaningful one-time events from both the recent and the distant past: the day a sibling was born or a move to a new house—recollections known as autobiographical memory.

8. True or False: Research supports the idea that there is a biologically-based sensitive period for optimum language development.

True Research supports the idea that there is a biologically-based sensitive period for optimum language development. (p. 235)

True or False: The core knowledge perspective acknowledges that experience is essential for children to extend their initial knowledge.

True The core knowledge perspective acknowledges that experience is essential for children to extend their initial knowledge.

True or False: Piaget believed that infants already know a great deal about their world from the time they are born.

True According to Piaget, at birth infants know so little about their world that they cannot purposefully explore it.

True or False: Recent research indicates that the cognitive attainments of infancy and toddlerhood do, in fact, develop together in the neat, stepwise fashion that Piaget postulated.

True Recent research indicates that the cognitive attainments of infancy and toddlerhood do, in fact, develop together in the neat, stepwise fashion that Piaget postulated.

normal distribution

Within the standardization sample, performances at each age level form a _____________. In which most scores cluster around the mean, or average, with progressively fewer falling toward the extremes. This bell-shaped distribution results whenever researchers measure individual differences in large samples.

Services available through Early Head Start

child care educational experiences for infants and toddlers parenting education family social support health care

Part of the information-processing system - Long-term memory

he largest storage area, comprising the brain's permanent knowledge base.