PSYC 181 Exam 2
Hamlin on Social Knowledge and Intention
5 month old infants will prefer characters who are positive towards helpers. 8 month old infants will prefer both characters who were positive toward helpers as well as negative towards hinderers. Before children are 1, they learn and know about other people's behaviors, especially the intentions and goals that drive them
Representing Space Relative to the External Environment
6 month old infants are capable of using landmarks in their environments to code the location of objects and this ability improves with age. Children have difficulty forming spatial representation in the absence of prominent or obvious landmarks. The development of spatial skills is dependent on culture and there is a difference between how it develops for people raised in rural versus urban areas.
Xu & Garcia on Rational Learning
75 ping pong balls in a clear container. 70 are red, 5 are white. Infants observe experimenter close eyes and "randomly" pick a ball. Infants were more surprised and stared longer when more white balls were drawn, indicating a violation of expectancy.
Violation-of-Expectancy
A method used to explore object knowledge in infants. Infants are shown an event that violates something that infants know or assume to be true. In experimental situations, infants as young at 3.5 months looked longer at impossible events than at possible events.
Morphemes
The smallest units of meaning in a language, composed of one or more phonemes.
Phonemes
The smallest units of sound in speech. A change in a phoneme changes the meaning of a world, such as rake and lake.
Counting Principles Acquired by Preschool
1. One-one correspondence: each object must be labeled by a single number. 2. Stable order: the numbers should always be recited in the same order. 3. Cardinality: the number of objects in the set corresponds to the last number stated. 4. Order irrelevance: objects can be counted in any order and the amount will remain the same. 5. Abstractions: any set of discrete objects or events can be counted.
Ways of studying visual perception
1. Preferential Technique 2. Habituation 3. Visual Scanning
Skinner on Language Development
A behaviorist who believed that nurture played the biggest role on language development.
Naive Psychology
A commonsense level of understanding of other people and oneself that is crucial to human functioning.
Classical Conditioning
A form of learning that consists of associating an initial stimulus with a stimulus that always evokes a particular reflexive response. Unconditioned Stimulus: the stimulus that evokes a reflexive response Unconditioned Response: the reflexive response elicited by the unconditioned stimulus Conditioned Stimulus: the stimulus that does not evoke a reflexive response and is paired with the unconditioned stimulus Conditioned Response: the originally reflexive response that becomes elicited by the conditioned stimulus
Object Substitution
A form of pretense in which an object is used as something other than itself.
Universal Grammar
A hard-wired set of principles and rules that governs grammar in all languages.
Theory of Mind Module (TOMM)
A hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings. Support for TOMM comes from children with autism spectrum disorder, who often have difficulties with false-belief problems as well understanding people in general. The belief is that these difficulties in understanding the social world appears to be a result of atypical sizes of certain brain areas that are crucial for understanding people.
Differentiation
A key process in perceptual learning in which children extract from the constantly changing stimulation and events in the environment in relation to the elements that are constant. Allows children to realize that objects are separate from each other.
Preferential Technique
A method for studying visual attention in infants, involves showing infants two patterns or objects and observing their preference for one over the other
Habituation (Visual Perception)
A method for studying visual perception, the decline in response to an object.
Visual Scanning
A method for studying visual perception, using eye-tracking to measure the path that eye's follow during visual perception. From ages 1 month to 2 months old, there is a significant increase in how much visual scanning occurs. Used to study object permanence. For example, can observe whether a child expects a ball to come out the other side after moving behind an obscuring block. Can study whether the child understands that the ball continues moving in the same direction even when you cannot see it. Used to study the development of smooth tracking skills.
Study: "Back to Basics: A Bilingual Advantage of Infant Visual Habituation"
A micro-genetic study that sampled monolingual and bilingual children of various languages and observed their habituation to different stimulus. Measured habituation by observing how long children stayed fixated after exposure to the stimuli. Length of fixation helps measure how long the child saw the stimulus as "new" or "novel". Found that, while bilingual children fixated for longer than monolingual children when first exposed to the stimulus, bilingual children got bored of the stimulus much faster. Takeaway: there is a bilingual advantage to learning, specifically through habituation.
Species-Universal
A quality of language, meaning that language learning is achieved by all typically developing infants across the globe.
Species-Specific
A quality of language, meaning that only humans acquire language in the normal course of development.
Vocabulary Spurt
A rapid increase in an infants vocabulary caused by adult influences on word learning, amount and quality of speech, contexts in which words are used by talking adults, and consistency between visual environment and spoken words.
Habituation (Learning)
A simple form of learning that involves a decrease in response to a repeated or continued stimulus. Infants raised in bilingual homes tend to habituate faster.
Study: "A Cross-National Investigation of the Relationship Between Infant Walking and Language Development"
A study that measured the relationship between the development of walking with language development. Compared a sample of crawling and walking infants of the same age from US and China. Measured receptive vocabulary (the ability to understand what other people say) and productive vocabulary (the ability to take action on the meaning of the words). In both US and China, walking infants had both higher receptive and productive vocabulary than crawling infants.
The Shopping Cart Study
A study which explored whether children have sense of self and can understand the impact that they have on the world around them. Demonstrate to child how to push the shopping cart. Attach a carpet to the shopping cart and ask the child the push the shopping cart to their mother while they are standing on the carpet. At 15 months, children can't figure out why cart won't move. At 18 months, children understand that it is because they are standing on the mat that they cannot push the cart. Takeaway: infants don't understand their contribution as a physical agent until about 18 months old.
Connectionism
A type of information-processing approach that emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units.
Statistical Learning
A type of learning involving picking up information from the environment and detecting statistically predictable patterns. When regularity and predictability of objects, events, and other stimuli is violated, infants take notice.
Intentionality
A type of pragmatic cue used in language acquisition.
Socio-dramatic Play
Activities in which children enact miniature dramas with other children or adults.
Play
Activities that are pursued for their own sake, with no motivation other than the enjoyment they bring.
Dr. Alison Gopnik on TOM
Adult shares food preferences with child by saying "Ew yuck I tasted the crackers" and "Yum, broccoli". Wanted to see if the child can use this information to make inferences by adult's mental state and preferences. Would place crackers and broccoli in front of child and ask, "can I have some?" Children younger than 18 months would consistently hand the adult the crackers because they did not understand that they had different preferences. Ambiguous figures; Show child an image that looks like either a duck or a rabbit depending on how it is oriented. Child only sees it as a duck at first. 3 and 4 year olds have difficulty switching between the different representations. 5 and 6 year olds recognize that it can be either a duck or a rabbit depending on how you look at the image.
Theory of Mind (TOM)
An organized understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behavior. Continues to develop into teen years.
Distinguishing Living from Nonliving Things
By 1 year, children can distinguish people from other animals and from inanimate objects. By 3 or 4 years, they can assess properties of living and nonliving things. It is only by 7 to 9 years of age that children realize that plants are living things, however children from rural areas learn this sooner.
Causal Reasoning in Infancy
By 6 months, infants perceive causal connections among events and remember and imitate a sequence of actions. By the end of the second year, children infer the causal impact of one variable based on indirectly relevant information about the other.
Tomasello on Language
Argues that language is not an instinct and rather must be learned. Claims that language acquisition requires human interaction, which implies that it must not be innate.
Bidirectional Association Between Visual Perception and Motor Development
As infants undergo motor development, there is an increase in opportunities for object exploration in their physical environment, which has effects on visual perception. Being able to reach for objects that may be farther than others can induce learning and strategic reaching. Infants who are better at sitting up and moving around are going to have better perception of 3D object completion.
Pragmatic Cues
Aspects of social context that are used for word learning. For example, using an adult's attention to cue the word's meaning.
Scale Errors
Attempts by young children to perform an action on a miniature object that is impossible due to the large discrepancy in the relative sizes of the child and the object.
Chomsky on Language Development
Believed in innate language skills and that language is generative. Proposed the notion that humans are born with universal grammar, a set of highly abstract, unconscious rules that are common to all languages.
Andrew Meltzoff, PhD, on Observational Learning
Believes that imitation is a fundamental learning system, especially because children learn through gestures more so than language early on. Children learn skills about how to use objects by observing how their parents use them such as how to apply lipstick or use a fork. Infants also learn through observation which behaviors are appropriate in particular situations.
Study: "Learning in Complex Environments: The Effects of Background Speech on Early Word Learning"
Children living in poverty are more likely to experience crowded and noisy home environments and be exposed to street noise and other sources of noise pollution that make it difficult for them to process language input.
Language Development and Socioeconomic Status
Children living in poverty are more likely to experience crowded and noisy home environments and be exposed to street noise and other sources of noise pollution that make it difficult for them to process language input. When infants in low-income communities are paired with other infants who have low-language skills, they are more likely to show less language growth than others who are placed with infants that have high language skills.
Motor Development
Children who don't develop these motor skills when they are expected often face issues with development in other areas. This is because when infants acquire new ways to interact with the world, they are provided with new things to learn and new ways to think about the world.
Tomasello Study on Intentionality
Children will infer the intention of a novel word and learn it if an adult uses it clearly and intentionally. Adult would say "where is the gazzer" and "I'm looking for the gazzer" and would express happiness and excitement when holding a particular object and unhappiness when looking at a different object. Child inferred that the object that adult was happy to see is the "gazzer".
Telegraphic Speech
Children's first sentences. Generally two-word utterances such as "drink juice" or "read me".
Color Perception in Infants
Color perception appears at 2 months. Infants have low color acuity because their cones are not fully developed. Infants prefer unique hues over hue combinations There is evidence of color categories in infants' brains. Color categorization is present before language acquisition.
Collective Monologues
Conversation between children that involves a series of non-sequiturs. The content of each child's turn has little or nothing to do with what the other child has just said.
Study: "Stress Changes the Representational Landscape: Evidence from Word Segmentation"
Curtin et al. A series of experiments on 7 and 9 month olds exploring if the way syllables were stressed changed the way that infants took note of what was being said. Found that infants better identified stressed words than stressed non-words.
Narratives
Descriptions of past events that have the basic structure of a story that can be produced by 5 years of age.
Perceptual Narrowing
Developmental changes in which experience fine-tunes the perceptual system (e.g., adults lose the ability to distinguish phonemes that are not used in their native language)
Alison Gopnik, PhD
Developmental psychologist who studies learning in children. Believes that children learn from everyday interactions with the world and people around them.
Representing Space Relative to Oneself
Early in life, children understand the location of objects relative to their bodies and they reach for objects closer to themselves. 7 month olds reach for the correct locations for hidden objects. Maturation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for planning and integrating previously learned information, occurs in spatial processing. Self-locomotion is also a helping factor in spatial coding.
Early vs. Current Views of Motor Development.
Early pioneers believed that infants' motor development is governed by brain maturation. Current theorists believe that motor development results from a confluence of neural mechanisms, increase in infants' strength, posture control, balance, perceptual skills, changes in body proportions, and motivation.
Study: "Speech Perception in Infants"
Elimas et al. wanted to study if infants would be able to tell if a sound cue changed. Used different conditions with different phonemes and voice onset times. Found that it was not the VOT that caused infants' dis-habituation, it was that infants can distinguish the sounds and that infants cannot generally distinguish in changes in VOT. Infants generally performed the same as adults on speech perception.
Mutual Exclusivity
Expectation that an entity will only have one given name.
Genie Case
Feral child discovered at 13 years of age after being locked alone in a room her whole life. Her language skills never developed, even after discovery and intensive training. Supports the notion of a critical period of language acquisition.
Green et al on Social Knowledge
Found that there are cultural differences in the interpretation of goals from behavior. Infants from China are more likely to understand goal-directed actions when an actor uses chopsticks rather than a western-stye spoon. The opposite was shown to be true for western-born children.
Cognition
How we think about information, perceive cause and effect, and learn about things.
Reference
In language and speech, the association of words and meaning.
Categorization of Objects in Infancy
Infants categorize objects along dimensions of color, size, and movement using perceptual organization. During second year, overall shape is the basis for categorizing objects.
Grasping
Infants close their fingers around anything that touches the palm of their hands.
Gergely, Bekkering, & Kiraly on Observational Learning
Infants interpret intention and will imitate based on their reasoning behind the actions of the person they are watching. If an adult leans over a touches a box with their forehead, infants will do the same. However, if the adult's hands are occupied and act like they have no other choice than to use their forehead to touch the box, the infant can infer that they should just use their hand to touch the box.
Touch in Infants
Infants learn about their environments through touch. Oral exploration is dominant in infants. Around the age of 4 months, infants rub, finger, probe, and bang objects. Their actions become specific to the properties of the objects. They develop mental maps of their own bodies.
Amanda Woodward Study on Social Knowledge
Infants learn the name of a new object that is pointed to by an adult with shared attention, but do not learn as well when the adult is not looking at the object. 6 month olds saw a hand repeatedly reach toward one of two objects sitting side by side. The position of the two objects was swapped and the hand reached again. Infants looked longer when the adult's hand reached for the new object in the old place than wen the hand reached for the old object. Infants understand that when human's reach it is at a particular object rather than towards a location, indicating that infants understand the goal-directed nature of human behavior.
Music Perception
Infants prefer infant-directed singing over adult-directing singing and speech. Infant music perception is adult-like and infants prefer consonant music as opposed to dissonant music.
Social Knowledge
Infants understand that the behavior of others is purposeful and goal-directed.
Physical Knowledge
Infants' knowledge about the physical world that is not limited to what they know and are learning about objects. For example, in the first year, infants can understand that objects do not float in midair.
Reflexes
Innate fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation. Not necessarily automatic. For example, rooting generally only occurs when a child is hungry. However, when a child is hungry, rooting becomes an automatic reflex. At birth, normally functioning reflexes are a sign of an infant being in good shape. Specifically, their CNS has developed correctly. Most neonatal reflexes naturally fade over time. Persistence of neonatal reflexes can indicate a neurological problem. Unusual reflex development is usually a sign of brain damage.
Study: "Critical Period Effects in Second Language Learning"
Johnson and Newport, compared the acquisition of the english language for people who moved to the US at various ages. Young children learned english as a second language much better than adults. Found that the critical period for language acquisition peaks between 3-7 years and then decreases gradually until puberty.
Language Location within the Brain
Language is in the left side of the brain. Audiovisual content engages the left temporal lobe. The right hemisphere of sleeping infant can perceive sentential prosody, the rhythm of language. Additionally, pitch detection is associated with the right side of the brain.
Active Learning
Learning by acting on the world, rather than passively observing objects and events.
Instrumental / Operant Conditioning
Learning the relation between one's behavior and the resulting consequences Positive Reinforcement: the addition of a stimulus in order to increase a particular behavior Negative Reinforcement: the removal of a stimulus in order to increase a particular behavior Positive Punishment: the addition of a stimulus in order to decrease a particular behavior Negative Punishment: the removal of a stimulus in order to decrease a particular behavior
Semantic Development
Learning the system for expressing meaning in a language.
Observational Learning / Imitation
Learning through observation of other people's behavior. This is how object related knowledge such as how to use certain objects is learned. Additionally, this is how social conventions are learned.
Cones
Light-sensitive neurons that are highly concentrated in the fovea (the central region of the retina). Infants have low acuity, as cones are not fully developed.
Pretend Play
Make-belief activities in which children create new symbolic relations, acting as if they were in a situation different from their actual one. Emerges around 18 months of age.
Nativists vs. Empiricists on Numbers
Nativists: children are born with a core concept of number such as raw quantity and more or less. A special mechanisms is present for learning about numbers of objects in sets, counting, addition, and subtraction. The intraparietal sulcus in the brain is involved in number processing, supporting the nativist view. Empiricists: children learn about numbers through experiences.
Nativists vs. Empiricists on Space
Nativists: children possess an innate module specialized for learning about space that is separate from other types of information. Empiricists: spatial representation is a result of experience like other behavioral patterns. Both agree that spatial concepts are understood early in life, moving in the environment stimulates processing of spatial information, development of the hippocampus brings about this learning, and geometric cues are important in understanding space.
Nativists vs. Empiricists on Causality
Nativists: infants possess an innate causal module that allows them to extract core information from events they observe. Empiricists: infants' causal understanding arises from observations of innumerable events in the environment, as well as its effects on their own actions. Both sides agree that children show impressive causal reasoning from infancy
Comprehension
One of the three focal parts of language development and required to develop language skills, refers to understanding what others say or write.
Production
One of the three focal parts of language development, refers to speaking or writing.
Symbols
One of the three focal parts of language development, systems of representing our thoughts, feelings, and knowledge, and for communicating them to other people.
Affordances
Part of perceptual learning, the possibilities for action offered, or afforded, by objects and situations.
Gross Motor Skills
Physical abilities involving large body movements such as sitting, standing, and walking.
Reaching and Pre-Reaching
Pre-reaching movements are clumsy swiping movements by young infants toward the general vicinity of objects they see. At about 7 months, reaching becomes stable when infants can sit independently. Reaching behavior enhances several aspects of infants' understanding of the world around them. Social environment also affects reaching behavior. Having an adult, especially a parent, around increases the probability that a child will reach for and object.
Causal Reasoning during the Preschool Period
Preschoolers expect that if a variable causes an effect then it should do so consistently. 3 and 4 year olds do not understand magic but by age 5, children are fascinated by magic tricks.
Babbling
Producing syllables made of of a consonant followed by a vowel ("pa", "ba", "ma") that are repeated in strings ("mamama") that are produced during early phases of language development.
Sucking/Swallowing
Reflexes that are tactics for nourishment. Infants innately know how to breast-feed.
Syntax
Rules in a language that specify how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, etc.) can be combined.
Taste and Smell in Infants
Sensitivity to taste develops prenatally. Newborns prefer sweet flavors and the scent of breast milk. Infants can distinguish the smell of their mothers from the smell of other women.
Visual Acuity
Sharpness of visual discrimination. Measured by whether children can distinguish simple versus complex patterns, such as very wide stripes versus very thin stripes that almost blend together.
Berko Study on Generative Knowledge
Show children a picture of an object. Say, "This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ____". Children who say "wugs" display an understanding of generative knowledge, evidence of learning morphology.
Woodward & Marman on Mutual Exlusivity
Showed 3 year olds pairs of objects with one familiar and one novel object. Adults said "give me the blicket" or some other nonsense word. The child would hand the adult the novel object because they know that the familiar object had a different name.
Overregularization
Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular. For example, saying "mans" instead of "men" or "goed" instead of "went". While parents play a large role in children's language development, they play a limited role on children's grammatical development because parents are more likely to correct factual errors than grammatical ones.
Study: "Visual Statistical Learning in Infancy: Evidence for a Domain General Learning Mechanism"
Studied 48 infants and found that infants looked longer at novel sequences relative to familiar sequences. Infants were familiarized with a series of discrete visual stimuli whose ordering was defined solely by statistical regularities, and subsequently demonstrated a reliable preference for novel sequences whose ordering violated the transitional probability that defined grouping of the original stimuli. All infants showed higher looking time a to a novel stimulus as opposed to one that was statistically predictable and familiar.
Study: "Physically Developed and Exploratory Young Infants Contribute to Their Own Long-Term Academic Achievement"
Studied typical, healthy 5 month old infants from 370 European and American families. Observed infants in their homes and took measurements of "exploration" and exploratory behavior. 10 and 15 years later, got intellectual function and academic achievement scores. Children with more exploratory behavior showed higher signs of intellectual and academic achievement, even after controlling for external factors such as parents' intellect, etc.
Dr. Janet Werker on Infant Speech Perception
Studies when perceptual narrowing occurs in the discrimination of phonemes. Taught children to turn their head every time they detect a sound change. Found that infants can discriminate better between sounds in all languages than adults, and infants gradually lose this ability with age.
Study: "A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Children's Imitative Flexibility"
Study by Clegg and Legare on observational and social learning. Sampled 6-8 year olds fro Vanuatu and the US with two conditions: 1. Instrumental condition: "I'm going to make a necklace, just watch what I'm doing, I'm going to make a necklace". Children learn how to use the objects to make a necklace. 2. Conventional condition: "Everyone always makes a necklace like this". Children prioritize learning the way other people do things and what is socially acceptable. Takeaway: children value and prioritize learning what is socially acceptable.
Study: "Cognitive Gains in 7-Month-Old Bilingual Infants"
Study by Kovacs that used speech-like cues to observe the benefits of bilingualism in infants. Bilingual children showed improved learning than monolingual children. Bilingual children also showed enhanced ability to adapt when things didn't go at expected.
Study: "Object Permanence in 3.5 and 4.5 Month Olds"
Study by Renee Baillargeon on object knowledge, exploring how this ability emerges earlier than we once thought. Cart goes behind screen, comes out other end. Place a box in the cart's path behind the screen and the cart still rolls through. Infants looked longer at the second event as it appears impossible, signifying that they know that objects still exist. Found that infants who habituate faster are more engaged with the impossible event.
Study: "Exploratory Behavior in the Development of Perceiving, Acting, and the Acquiring of Knowledge"
Study in support of affordances. Found that differentiation is allowed by the environment, and not necessarily self-directed and egocentric. Contradicts Piaget's theory that children are egocentric and unable to differentiate themselves from the external, objective things around them.
Spelke Experiment on Physical Knowledge
Study looking at how infants react to a ball defying gravity. Infants at 7 months old look longer at unnatural acceleration. 5 month olds look longer at the natural event, potentially because they understand that it was what is supposed to happen and the unnatural event made no sense to them, whereas the 7 month olds were interested in understanding how the impossible event worked.
Hespose Experiment on Physical Knowledge
Study looking at whether 4 and 5 month olds understand solids and liquids. Adults would rotate solids and liquids in front of infants and pour them over a filter to see if it goes down. Found that infants habituated to understand and were surprised by the liquid.
Carolyn Rovee-Collier on Instrumental Conditioning
Study looking on the effects of instrumental conditioning on infants kicking and mobiles in a crib. Found that kicks increase when they result in the reward of the mobile moving and making noise. This is a form of positive reinforcement. Infants younger than 6 months remember the kicking response for a week, only when the mobile is identical to the one used during the conditioning. They are unable to generalize what they've learned. 6 month olds remember the kicking response for two weeks even with novel mobiles. They are able to generalize what they've learned.
Study: "The Social Reach: 3-Month-Olds Reach for Unobtainable Objects in the Presence of Another Person"
Study that found that, in the presence of an adult, the likelihood that an infant will reach for an unobtainable object increases. This is likely because infants feel safer and more confident when an adult is present. This is especially true when the object is farther away and the child may be generally less confident that they can reach it.
Study: Testing Fear of Heights in Infants and Whether it is Innate
Study that would have infants crawl on a glass table that conveys the appearance of a cliff or drop-off. Younger infants didn't appear to notice and would crawl right over the drop-off. Older infants with more development of depth perception will hesitate until they realize that there isn't really a drop-off. Takeaway: it's not that children develop a fear of heights, but rather that they develop depth perception and learn about their bodies in space, which allows them to understand what is safe.
Category Hierarchies
Subordinate level: the most specific level within a category hierarchy Superordinate level: the most general level within a category hierarchy Basic level: the middle level within a category hierarchy
False-Belief Problems
Tasks that test a child's understanding that other people will act in line with their own beliefs, even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect. Show child a box of crayons filled with candles. "What do you think is inside the box?" Child thinks it's crayons until you show them that it is candles. "What does Snoopy think is inside this box?" Young children don't understand that Snoopy doesn't yet know that candles are inside the box. Four year olds can recognize that Snoopy will think that there are crayons in the box. Performance improves between 3 and 5 for false-belief problems across different societies and cultures.
Contrast Sensitivity
The ability to detect differences in light and dark areas in a visual pattern. High-contrasting patterns are easier to identify, whereas low-contrasting patterns require more fine-tuned perception. This affects children's attention and how they engage with the social world.
Self-Locomotion
The ability to move oneself around in the environment.
Rational Learning
The ability to use prior experiences to predict what will occur in the future. Depends on the infant's ability to track statistics about their environment.
Pragmatic Development
The acquisition of knowledge about how language is used.
Prosody
The characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, and notational patterns with which a language is spoken. This varies by language.
Ecocentric Spatial Representations
The coding of spatial locations relative to one's own body without regard to the surroundings.
Intermodal Perception
The combination of information from two or more sensory systems. Initially perceived as separate sensory information, then gradually unifies. For example, seeing a plate shatter on the floor and understanding that the crashing sound as well as the visual stimulus are coming from the same event.
Object Knowledge
The development of knowledge about objects.
Binocular Disparity
The difference between the retinal image of an object in each eye that results in two slightly different signals being sent to the brain. This is handled by stereopsis.
Infant-Directed Speech
The distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies and very young children. Used by virtually all cultures, where pitch goes from high to low faster than in regular speech, and making facial expressions while speaking.
Phonological Development
The first step of acquisition of knowledge about sound system of language.
Perceptual Organization
The grouping together of objects that have similar appearances
Modularity Hypothesis
The idea that the human brain contains an innate, self-contained language module that is separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning.
Generativity
The idea that, through the use of the finite set of words and morphemes in human language that we can put together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas.
Object Segregation
The identification of separate objects in a visual array. Experience with specific objects and culture play a role in the development of object segregation.
Syntactic Development
The learning of the syntax of a language.
Voice Onset Time (VOT)
The length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating.
Dual Representation
The notion that the symbolic artifact must be represented mentally in two ways at the same time: as a real object and as a symbol for that object. Very young children have trouble managing dual representation. School-age children have the ability to understand dual representation, which enables them to discover the abstract nature of various symbolic artifacts.
Perceptual constancy
The perception of objects as being of constant size, shape, color, and so on, in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object. E.g., a ball is the same size whether it is right in front of you or 10 feet away, even thought the size of its retinal image is much larger when it is right in front of you. Experience is not necessary for the development of size constancy and it has no critical period.
Categorical Perception
The perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories. E.g, b vs. p.
Auditory Localization
The perception of the location in space of a sound source. This improves as the infant grows
Monocular Depth (Pictorial Cues)
The perceptual cues of depth, such as relative size and interposition, that can be perceived by one eye alone.
Holophrastic Period
The period when children begin using the words in their small productive vocabulary one word at a time.
Distributional Properties
The phenomenon that, in any language, certain sounds are more likely to appear together than others are.
Stereopsis
The process by which the visual cortex combines the differing neural signals caused by binocular disparity. This process depends on the distance of the object. Binocular fusion is the part of stereopsis in which vision converges on an object, allowing us to see a single object. double vision occurs when the visual axes are parallel, leading to seeing the object twice.
Word Segmentation
The process of discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech. Recognizing when a word or phrase has ended and a new one has begun.
Perception
The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information about objects, events, and the world around us
Fast Mapping
The process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of a familiar and the unfamiliar word.
Sensation
The processing of basic information for the world through sense organs
Numerical Equality
The realization that all sets of N objects have something in common. Infants as young at 5 months old appear to have some sense of this.
Syntactic Bootstrapping
The strategy of using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out word meanings. Showed children two videos: 1. Duck pushing a rabbit. Adult says, "the duck is kradding the rabbit". 2. Rabbit and duck waving hands. Adult says, "the rabbit and the duck are kradding". Children were able to identify the meaning of the word depending on the sentence structure.
Critical Period (Language)
The time during which language develops readily and after which language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful. Sometime between age 5 and puberty.
Overextension
The use of a given word in a broader context than is appropriate.
Essentialism
The view that living things have an essence inside them that makes them what they are.
Cross-Cultural Differences in Motor Development
There are cross-cultural differences in motor development. For example, in Kenya, children are expected to sit up independently where as in the US, infants sit in chairs. As a result, children in Kenya and the US develop motor skills differently.
Tonic Neck Reflex
Turning the head to one side, resulting in the arm and leg on the same side extending, while the other opposite limbs bend.
Rooting
Turning their heads toward the direction of touch and opening their mouth. Not necessarily automatic. For example, rooting generally only occurs when a child is hungry. However, when a child is hungry, rooting becomes an automatic reflex.
Attempts to Teach Language to Other Species
Wallman taught sign language to a chimpanzee. The chimp was able to use sign language to say things like "more", "open", and "hurry" and would correct you if you called a black item red by signing "it's black". However, this does not qualify as language because there was no evidence of syntactic structure. Rather it showed that the chimp was able to learn and memorize through conditioning. Savage-Rumbaugh et al taught bonobos words with lexigrams. Researchers would say a word out loud and the bonobo could select the symbol that represented that word. Border collie learned more than 200 words and was able to identify which toy to get based on a spoken instruction. Again, not language because lacked syntactic structure. Takeaway: nun-human animals are able to learn words and symbols but lack the syntactic structure that human language has.
Study: "Peer Effects in Preschool Classrooms: Is Children's Language Growth Associated with Their Classmates' Skills?"
When infants in low-income communities are paired with other infants who have low-language skills, they are more likely to show less language growth than others who are placed with infants that have high language skills.
Dr. Linda Acredolo on "Baby Signs"
When infants learn signs with words it enhances their overall word learning.
Optical Expansion
When the visual image of an object increases in size as the object comes toward us, occluding more and more in the background.
