Exam 3: Developmental Psychology

Contemporary Extensions

Current theorists and test designers combine both approaches of Louis Thurstone & Charles Spearman. They propose hierarchical models of mental abilities. At the highest level is g, assumed to be present to some degree in all separate factors. These factors, in turn, are measured in subtests, which are groups of related items. Subtests scores provide information about a child's strengths and weaknesses. They also can be combined into a total score representing general intelligence.

Theories of Language Development

Linguist Noam Chomsky (1957) proposed a nativist theory that regards language as a uniquely human accomplishment, etched into the structure of the brain. Focusing on grammer, Chomsky reasoned that the rules for sentence organization are too complex to be directly taught to or discovered by even a cognitively sophisticated young child.

Critics of Gardner's Theory

Question the independence of his intelligences. Excellence in most fields requires a combination of intelligences.

Give-and-Take

*between 4 and 6 months* ~both adults and caregivers are engaged with communication ex. pat-a-cake 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. Around the first birthday, babies extend their joint attention and social interaction skills. They point toward an object or location while looking back toward the caregiver - in an effort to direct the adult's attention and influence their behavior. One year old's also grasp the communicative function of others' pointing. They interpret pointing to indicate the location of a hidden toy only when the adult also makes eye contact, not when the adult looks down at his or her finger.

Stability of Absolute Scores

-Examines same child's profile of scores over repeated testings -Most children fluctuate ~Typically 10-20 points during childhood and adolescence -Some either increase or decrease with age -Environmental cumulative deficit hypothesis Children who change the most typically have orderly profiles - with scores either increasing or decreasing with age. Examining personality traits and life experiences associated with these profiles reveals that gainers tended to be more independent and competitive about doing well in school. Parents more likely to use warm, rational discipline and encourage them to succeed. Decliners often had parents who used either very severe or vary lax discipline and who offered little intellectual stimulation.

Psychometric Researchers Ask These Questions:

1.) What factors, or dimensions, make up intelligence, and how do they change with age? 2.) How can intelligence be measured so that scores predict future academic achievement, career attainment, and other aspects of intellectual success? 3.) Are mental test scores largely stable over childhood and adolescence, or can performance change dramatically? 4.) To what extent do children of the same age differ in intelligence, and what explains those differences?

The Factor Analysts - A Multifaceted View

A complicated correlational procedure that is used to find out whether intelligence is a single trait or an assortment of abilities. The Factor Analysis identifies sets of test items that cluster together, meaning that test-takers who do well on one item in a cluster tend to do well on the others. Distinct clusters are called factors.

Individual and Cultural Differences

Although children typically produce their first word around their first birthday, the range is large, from 8 to 18 months - variation due to a complex blend of genetic and environmental influences. Many studies show that girls are slightly ahead of boys in early vocabulary growth. The most common biological explanation is girls' faster rate of physical maturation, which is believed to promote earlier development of the left cerebral hemisphere.

1916 - Lewis Terman at Stanford University

Adapted Binet & Simon's intelligence test for use with English-speaking school children. English version is known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence scale.

Later Phonological Development

Although phonological development is largely complete by age 5, a few syllable stress patterns signaling subtle differences in meaning are not acquired until middle childhood or adolescence. Changes in syllabic stress when certain abstract words take on endings ("humid" to "humidity" "method" to "methodical") are not mastered until adolescence. These words are more difficult to pronounce due to the semantic complexity. Even at later ages, working simultaneously on the sounds and meaning of a new word may overload the cognitive system, causing children to sacrifice pronunciation temporarily until they better grasp the word's meaning.

How do young children build their vocabularies so quickly?

An improved ability to categorize experience, recall words, and pronounce new words is involved. In addition, a better grasp of others' intentions, evident in toddlers' imitation around 18 months, supports rapid vocabulary growth because it helps toddlers figure out what others are talking about. As toddlers' experiences broaden, they have a wider range of interesting objects and events to label.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

An innate system that permits children, once they have acquired sufficient vocabulary, to combine words into grammatically consistent, novel utterances and to understand the meaning of sentences they hear. According to Chomsky, within the LAD is a universal grammer, a built-in storehouse of rules common to all human languages. Young children use this knowledge to decipher grammatical categories and relationships in any language to which they are exposed. Because the LAD is specifically suited for language processing, children master the structure of language spontaneously, with only limited language exposure. In this way, the LAD ensures that language, despite its complexity, will be acquired early and swiftly.

Psychometric Approach

Approach in cognitive development with the basis for the wide variety of intelligence tests available for assessing children's mental abilities. Unlike Piagetian, Vygotskian, and information processing views, which focus on the process of thinking, the psychometric perspective is product-oriented, largely concerned with outcomes & results - how many and what kinds of questions children of different ages answer correctly.

Aptitude & Achievement Tests

Aptitude tests assess an individual's potential to learn a specialized activity. For example, mechanical aptitude is the capacity to acquire mechanical skills, musical aptitude is the capacity to acquire musical skills, and scholastic aptitude is the capacity to master school tasks. SAT and ACT - measure scholastic aptitude. Achievement Tests - aim to assess actual knowledge and skill attainment. When a school district assesses fourth-grade reading comprehension or a college professor gives a final exam, an achievement test has been used.

Evidence Relevant to the Nativist Perspective

Are children innately primed to acquire language? Children have a remarkable ability to invent new language systems. Three additional sets of evidence - efforts to teach language to animals, localization of language functions in the human brain, and investigations into whether a sensitive period for language development exists - are consistent with Chomsky's view.

Bonobo Chimps

Are more intelligent and social than common chimps. The linguistic attainments of a bonobo named Kanzi are especially impressive. While young, Kanzi picked up his mother's artifical language by observing trainers interact with her. To encourage his language development, Kanzi's caregivers communicated in both artificial langauge and English. Through listening to fluent speech, Kanzi acquired remarkable comprehension of English, including the ability to discriminate hundreds of English words and to act out unusual sentences he had not heard before.

First speech sounds

Around 2 months, babies begin to make vowel-like noises, called cooing because of their pleasant "oo" quality. Gradually, consonants are added, and around 6 months babbling appears, in which infants repeat consonant-vowel combinations, often in long strings such as "babababa" and "nananana" Babies everywhere start babbling at about the same age and produce similar range of early sounds. But for babbling to develop further, infants must hear human speech. In hearing-impaired babies, these speechlike sounds are delayed and limited in diversity of sounds produced over time. A deaf baby not exposed to sign language will stop babbling entirely.

Becoming a Communicator

At birth, infants are prepared for some aspects of conversational behavior. For example, newborns initiate interaction through eye contact and terminate it by looking away. By 3 to 4 months, infants start to gaze in the same general direction adults are looking - a skill that becomes more accurate at 10 to 11 months. Around this time, babies become sensitive to adults' percise direction of gaze, suggesting that they realize that others' focus provides information about their communicative intentions - (to talk about an object) - or other goals (to obtain an object) - Around a baby's first birthday, they realize that a person's visual gaze signals a vital connection between the viewer and his or her surroundings, and they want to participate.

Babbling & Context

Babies babble depending on certain contexts - for example, when exploring objects, looking at books, or walking upright. Infants seem to experiment with the sound system and meaning of language before they speak in conventional ways. Toddlers continue to babble for four or five months after they say their first words. Deaf infants exposed 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.

Developmental Quotients

Because most infant scores do not tap the same dimensions of intelligence assessed in older children, they are conservatively labeled developmental quotients rather than IQs. Infant tests are somewhat better at making long-term predictions for very low-scoring babies. Today they are largely used for screening - helping to identify for further observation and intervention infants whose very low scores mean that they are at risk for future developmental problems.

Genetic Influences

Behavioral geneticists examine the relative contributions of heredity and environment to complex traits by conducting kinship studies, which compare the characteristics of family members.

Arthur Jensen

Believed that IQ and scholastic achievement could not be boosted much. he claimed that heredity is largely responsible for individual, ethnic, and SES differences in IQ. Jensen's work sparked an outpouring of research studies and responses, including ethical challenges reflecting deep concern that his conclusions would fuel social prejudices.

Richard Lewontin

Believed that using within-group heritabilities to account for between-group differences is like comparing different seeds in different soil. Imagine planting a handful of flower seeds in a pot of soil generously enriched with fertilizer and another handful in a pot with very little fertilizer. The plants in each pot vary in height, but those in the first pot grow much taller than those in the second pot. WITHIN each group, individual differences in plant height are largely due to heredity because the growth environments of all plants were about the same. But the average difference in height BETWEEN the TWO GROUPS, is probably environmental because the second group got far less fertilizer. To verify this conclusion, we could design a study in which we expose the second group of seeds to a full supply of fertilizer and see if they reach an average height that equals that of the first group. Then we would have powerful evidence that environment is responsible for the group difference.

Phonological Strategies

By the middle of the second year, children move from trying to pronounce whole syllables and words to trying to pronounce each individual sound within a word. As a result, they can be heard experimenting with phoneme patterns - One 21 month old pronounced "juice" as "du" "ju" "dus" "jus" "sus" "zus" "fus" within a single hour. This marks n intermediate phase of development in which pronunciation is partly right and partly wrong. Because young children get more practice perceiving and producing phoneme patterns that occur frequently in their language, they pronounce words containing those patterns more accurately and rapidly. At first, children produce minimal words, focusing on the stressed syllable and trying to pronounce its consonant vowel combination ("du" or "ju" for juice). Soon they add consonants "jus", adjust vowel length ("bee" for "please") and add unstressed syllables ("maedo" for "tomato".). Finally, they produce the full word with a correct stress pattern,although they may still need to refine its sounds.

Creative Intelligence

People who are creative think more skillfully than others when faced with novelty. Given a new task, they apply their information-processing skills in exceptionally effective ways, rapidly making those skills automatic so that working memory is freed for more complex aspects of the situation.

Analytical Intelligence

Consists of the information-processing components that underlie all intelligent acts: Applying strategies, acquiring task-relevant and metacognitive knowledge, and engaging in self-regulation. But on mental tests, processing skills are used in only a few of their potential ways, resulting in far too narrow a view of intelligent behavior.

IQ As Predictor of Academic Achievement

Correlations between IQ and achievement test scores range from the .40s to the .80s, typically faling between .50 and .60. Students with higher IQs also get better grades and stay in school longer. Beginning at age 7, IQ is moderately correlated with adult educational attainment.

Environmental Cumulative Deficit Hypothesis

Children who lived in poverty are selected for special study and many show mental-test score declines. The negative effects of underprivileged rearing conditions increase the longer children remain in those conditions. As a result, early cognitive deficits lead to more deficits, which become harder to overcome. Many studies show that children from economically disadvantaged families fall further and further behind their agemates in both IQ and achievement as they get older, and children who suffer from more stressors experience greater declines. In sum, many children show substantial changes in the absolute value of IQ that are the combined result of personal characteristics, child-rearing practices, and living conditions. Nevertheless, once IQ becomes reasonably stable in a correlational sense, it predicts a variety of important outcomes.

Comprehension vs Production

Children's comprehension (the language they understand) develops ahead of production (the language they use). Toddlers can follow specific instructions even if they don't use the same words in their own speech. A five month lag exists between the time English-speaking toddlers comprehend 50 words and the time they produce that many. Comprehension requires only that children RECOGNIZE the meaning of a word. But for PRODUCTION, children must RECALL, or actively retrieve from their memories, not only the word but also the concept for which it stands. Toddlers who are faster and more accurate in comprehension tend to show more rapid growth in words understood and produced as they approach age 2. Quick comprehension frees space in working memory for picking up new words and for the more demanding task of using them to communicate.

The Early Phase

Children's first words are influenced in part by the small number of sounds they can pronounce. The easiest sound sequences start with consonants, end with vowels, and include repeated syllables. such as mama, dada, bye-bye. Infants/toddlers do not pick up the fine details of a word's sounds, which contributes to their pronunciation errors. In several studies, 14 month olds were unable to associate two similar sounding nonsense words with different objects - despite easily detecting the "b" and "d" contrast in sound discrimination tasks. As toddlers' vocabularies increases, they become better at using their perceptual abilities to distinguish similar-sounding new words. Once they acquire several sets of words that sound alike, they may be motivated to attend more closely to find-grained distinctions between others.

The Texas Adoption Project

Confirms that both environment and heredity contribute to IQ. Children adopted in the early years attain IQs that, on average, match the scores of their adoptive parents' biological children and the scores of nonadopted peers in their schools and communities. These outcomes suggest a sizable role for environment in explaining SES variations in mental test scores. At the same time, adoption studies repeatedly reveal stronger correlations between the IQ scores of biological relates than between those of adoptive relatives - clear evidence for a genetic contribution.

Age-related Changes in Twins

Correlations for identical twins increase modestly into adulthood, whereas those for fraternal twins drop sharply at adolescence. Common rearing experiences support the similarity of fraternal twins during childhood. But as they get older and experience more influences outside their families, each fraternal twin follows a path of development, or finds a niche, that fits with his or her unique genetic makeup. As a result, their IQ scores diverge. In contrast, the genetic likeness of identical twins causes them to seek out similar niches in adolescence and adulthood. Consequently, their IQ resembles strengthens.

Environment is Clearly Involved

Correlations for twin, nontwin sibling, and parent-child pairs living together are stronger than for those living apart. And parents and adopted children, as well as unrelated siblings living together, show low positive correlations, again supporting the influence of environment.

Alfred Binet

Created the first successful intelligence test with his colleague Theodore Simon in 1905. Responded to the need of students who were unable to benefit from regular classroom instruction. Was asked to devise an objective method for assigning pupils to special classes - based on mental ability - not classroom disruptiveness. Binet believed that test items should tap complex mental activities involved in intelligent behavior, such as memory & reasoning. Thus, Binet & Simon devised a test of general ability that included a variety of verbal and nonverbal items, each requiring thought and judgement. Their test was also the first to associate items of increasing difficulty with chronological age. This enabled Binet and Simon to estimate how much a child was behind or ahead of her agemates in intellectual development.

Limitations of Nativist Perspective

Despite wide acceptance of Chomsky's belief in humans' unique, biologically based capacity to acquire language, his account of development has been challenged on several grounds: 1) Researchers have had great difficulty specifying Chomsky's universal grammar. A persistent problem is the 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. According to critics, one set of rules cannot account for the multiplicity of grammatical forms - indeed, variation in every structural way possible - among the world's 5,000 to 8,000 languages. How children manage to link such rules with the extraordinary diversity in strings of words they hear is also unclear. 2.) Chomsky's assumption that grammatical knowledge is innately determined does not fit with certain observations of language development. Once children begin to use an innate grammatical structure, we would expect them to apply it to all relevant instances in their language. But later we will encounter evidence that children refine and generalize many grammatical forms gradually, engaging in much piecemeal learning and making errors along the way. Complete mastery of some forms is not achieved until well into middle childhood. This suggests that more experimentation and learning are involved than Chomsky assumed. 3.) Chomsky's theory also lacks comprehesiveness. His theory cannot explain how children weave statements together into connected discourse and sustain meaningful conversations. Perhaps because Chomsky did not dwell on the pragmatic side of language, his theory grants little attention to the quality of language input or to social experience in supporting language progress. Furthermore, the nativist perspective does not regard children's cognitive capacities as important.

Language

Develops with extraordinary speed in early childhood. Language consists of several subsystems that have to do with sound, meaning, overall structure, and everyday use. Language development entails mastering each of these aspects and combining them into a flexible communication system.

Charles Spearman (1927)

First influential factor analyst. He found that all test items he examined correlated with one another. As a result, he proposed that a common underlying general intelligence, called g, influenced each of them. At the same time, noticing that the test items were not perfectly correlated, Spearman concluded that they varied in the extent to which g contributed to them and suggested that each item, or a set of similar items, also measured a specific intelligence unique to the task. Inferred that g represents abstract reasoning capacity.

Predicting IQ

Flexible attention, memory, and reasoning strategies are important as basic processing efficiency in predicting IQ and they explain some of the relationship between response speed and good test performance. Working memory resources depend in part on effective inhibition - keeping irrelevant information from intruding on the task at hand. Inhibition & Sustained and selective attention are among a wide array of attentional skills that are good predictors of IQ. Identifying relationships between cognitive processing and mental test scores brings us closer to isolating the cognitive skills that contribute to high intelligence.

Language Areas in the Brain

For most individuals, language is largely housed in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex. Within it are two important language related structures - To clarify their functions, researchers have, for several decades, studied adults who experienced damage to these structures and display APHASIAS, or communication disorders. The patient's linguistic deficits suggested that BROCA'S area, located in the left frontal lobe, supports grammatical processing and language production, while WERNICKE'S AREA, located in the left temporal lobe, plays a role in comprehending word meaning.

Unique Biological Basis

Gardner believes that intelligence has a unique biological basis - a distinct course of development, and different expert or "end-state" performances. He also emphasizes that a lengthy process of education is required to transform any raw potential into a mature social role. Cultural values and learning opportunities affect the extent to which a child's strengths are realized and the way they are expressed. Gardner believes that tests would show little relationship to one another. But finds neurological support for their separateness particularly compelling. Research indicates that damage to a certain part of the adult brain influences only on ability (such as linguistic or spatial), while sparing others, which suggests that the affected ability is independent.

Hereitability estimates

Hereitability estimates are usually derived from comparisons of identical and fraternal twins. In Western industrailized nations, the typical value is about .50, meaning that half the variation in IQ is due to individual differences in heredity. This moderate heritability estimate may be too high because twins reared together often experience very similar overall environments. Even twins reared apart are placed in homes that are advantaged and similar in many ways. When the range of environments to which twins are exposed is restricted, heritabilities underestimate the role of environment and overestimate the role of heredity.

heritability of intelligence

Heritability Estimate - Researchers correlate the IQs of family members who vary in the extent to which they share genes. Then, using a complicated statistical procedure to compare the correlations, they arrive at an index of heritability, ranging from 0 to 1, which indicates the proportion of variation in a specific population due to genetic factors. The greater the genetic similarity between family members, the more they resemble one another in IQ. Two correlations reveal that heredity is, without question, partially responsible for individual differences in mental test performance. The correlation for identical twins reared apart is much higher than for fraternal twins reared together.

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences defines intelligence in terms of distinct sets of processing operations that permit individuals to solve problems, create products, and discover new knowledge in a wide range of culturally valued activities. Dismissing the idea of general intelligence, Gardner proposes at least 8 independent intelligences.

IQ as a predictor of psychological adjustment

IQ is moderately correlated with emotional and social adjustment. For example, higher IQ children and adolescents tend to be better-liked by their agemates. Besides IQ, good peer relations are linked to patient but firm child-rearing practices and an even-tempered, sociable personality, both of which are positively correlated with IQ. Many findings provide strong justification for not relying on IQ alone when forecasting a child's future or making important educational placement decisions.

The Early Phase

In a study tracking the first ten words used by several hundred U.S. and Chinese babies, important people, common objects, and sound effects were mentioned most often. And action words and social routines were more often produced by Chinese than U.S. babies, who also named more important people. In their first 50 words, toddlers rarely name things that just sit there, like "table" or "vase". Young toddlers add to their vocabularies slowly, at a pace of one to three words per week. Gradually, the number of words learned accelerates.

Crystallized vs. Fluid Intelligence (Raymound B. Cattell)

In addition to g, intelligence consists of two broad factors: Crystallized intelligence - which refers to skills that depend on accumulated knowledge and experience, good judgement, and mastery of social customs - abilities acquired because they are valued by the individual's culture. On intelligence tests, vocabulary, general information, and arithmetic problems are examples of items that emphasize crystallized intelligence. Fluid Intelligence - depends more heavily on basic information-processing skills - the ability to detect relationships among stimuli, the speed with which the individual can analyze information, and the capacity of working memory. Fluid intelligence, which is assumed to be influenced more by conditions in the brain and less by culture, often works with crystallized intelligence to support effective reasoning, abstraction, and problem solving. Among children with similar cultural and educational backgrounds, crystallized and fluid intelligence are highly correlated and difficult to distinguish in factor analyses, probably because children high in fluid intelligence acquire information more easily. But in children differing greatly in cultural and educational experiences, the two abilities show little relationship; children with the same fluid capacity may perform quite differently on crystalized tasks. As these findings suggest, Cattell's theory has important implications for the issue of cultural bias in intelligence testing. Tests aimed t reducing culturally specific content usually emphasize fluid over crystallized items.

Is acquiring a second language also harder after a sensitive period has passed?

In one study, researchers examined U.S. census data, selecting immigrants from Spanish and Chinese speaking countries who had resided in the U.S. for at least 10 years. The census form had asked the immigrants to rate how competently they spoke English, from "not at all" to "Very well". As age of immigration increased from infancy and early childhood into adulthood, English proficiency declined, regardless of respondents' level of education. Other research confirms an age-related decline beginning around age 5 to 6 in capacity to acquire a second language with a native accent. Brain imaging measures brain activity that indicates that second-language processing is less lateralized, and also overlaps less with brain areas devoted to first-language processing in older than in younger learners. Second-language competence does not drop sharply at a certain age - rather a continuous, age-related decrease occurs

Adoption Research on the black-white IQ gap.

In two studies, African American children adopted into economically well-off white homes during the first year of life scored high on intelligence tests, attaining mean IQs of 110 and 117 by middle childhood - 20 to 30 points higher than the typical scores of children growing up in low-income black communities. In one investigation, the IQs of black adoptees declined in adolescence, perhaps because of the challenges faced by minority teenagers in forming an ethnic identity that blends birth and adoptive backgrounds. The black adoptees remained above the IQ average for low-SES African-Americans. The IQ gains of black children "reared in the culture of the tests and schools" are consistent with a wealth of evidence that poverty severely depresses the scores of many ethnic minority children. Dramatic gains in IQ from one generation to the next further support the conclusion that, given new experiences and opportunities, members of oppressed groups can move far beyond their current test performances.

Practical Intelligence

Intelligence is a practical, goal-oriented activity aimed at adapting to, shaping, or selecting environments. Intelligent people skillfully adapt their thinking to fit with both their desires and the demands of their everday worlds. When they cannot adapt to a situation, they try to shape, or change, it to meet their needs. If they cannot shape it, they select new contexts that better match their skills, values, or goals. Practical intelligence reminds us that intelligent behavior is never culture-free. Some children with different backgrounds may not do as well as other children on intelligent tests due to their upbringing and culture.

Computation and Distribution of IQ Scores

Intelligence tests for infants, children, and adults are scored in the same way - by computing an intelligence quotient (IQ), which indicates the extent to which the raw score (number of items passed) deviates from the typical performance of same-aged individuals. To make this comparison possible, test designers engage in standardization - giving the test to a large, representative sample and using the results as the standard for interpreting scores. Within the standardization sample, scores at each age level form a normal distribution, in which most scores cluster around the mean, or average, with progressively fewer falling toward each extreme.

Broca's Aphasia & Wernicke's Aphasia

Involve the spread of injury to nearby cortical areas and widespread abnormal activity in the left cerebral hemisphere, triggered by the brain damage. Contrary to long-held belief - Broca's and Wernicke's areas are not solely or even mainly responsible for specific language functions. Nevertheless, depending on the site of injury to the adult left hemisphere, language deficits do vary predictably. Damage to frontal-lobe areas usually yields language production problems, damage to the areas in the temporal lobes comprehension problems - patterns that are highly consistent across individuals. At birth, the brain is not fully lateralized, it is highly plastic. Language areas in the cerebral cortex DEVELOP as children acquire language. If the left hemisphere is injured in the first few years, other regions take over language functions, and most such children eventually attain normal language competence. Thus, left-hemispheric localization is not necessary for effective language processing.

Speed of habituation & Recovery to visual Stimuli

Is among the best infant correlates of later intelligence. Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence - Consists entirely of habituation/recovery items. Infant sits on the mother's lap and views a series of pictures. Examiner records looking time toward a novel picture paired with a familiar one.

Carroll's Model

Is the most comprehensive factor analytic classification of mental abilities to date. It provides useful framework for researchers seeking to understand mental-test performance in cognitive-processing terms.

Do Heritability estimates explain ethnic and SES variations in IQ?

Jensen relied on the heritability estimate to support the argument that ethnic and SES differences in IQ have strong genetic basis. This is inappropriate though, because heritability estimates computed within black and white populations, though similar, provide no direct evidence on what accounts for between-group differences. Factors associated with low income and poverty, including weak or absent prenatal care, family stress, low-quality schools, and lack of community supports for effective child rearing, prevent children from attaining their genetic potential.

Definitions of Intelligence

Laypeople and experts viewed intelligence as made up of at least three broad attributes which include: VERBAL ABILITY, PRACTICAL PROBLEM SOLVING, and SOCIAL COMPETENCE. Yet most people think of intelligence as a complex combination of attributes, though little consensus exists among experts on its ingredients. And whereas some people view the various abilities that make up intelligence as closely interconnected, others expect them to be relatively distinct - to correlate weakly. This tension between intelligence as a single capacity versus a collection of loosely related skills is everpresent in historical and current theories on which mental tests are based.

Grammatical Competence

May depend more on specific brain structures than the other components of language. When 2 to 2 1/2 year-old children and adults listened to short sentences - some syntactically correct, others with phrase-structure violations - both groups showed similarly distinct ERP brain-wave patterns for each sentence type in the left frontal and temporal lobes. This suggests that 2 1/2 year olds process sentence structures with the same neural system as adults do. Furthermore, in older children and adults with left hemispheric brain damage, grammatical abilities are more impaired than semantic or pragmatic abilities, which seem to draw more on right-hemispheric regions. When the young brain allocates language to the right hemisphere after injury - as a result of left hemispheric damage or learning of sign language - it localizes it in roughly the same regions that typically support language in the left hemisphere. This suggests that those regions are uniquely disposed for language processing.

Processing Speed

Measured in terms of reaction time on diverse cognitive tasks and is moderately related to general intelligence and to gains in mental test performance over time. Individuals whose central nervous system function more efficiently, permitting them to take in and manipulate information quickly, appear to have an edge in intellectual skills. fMRI research reveals that the metabolic rate of the cerebral cortex is lower for high-scoring individuals, suggesting that they require less mental energy for thinking.

Grammer

Once mastery of vocabulary is under way, children combine words and modify them in meaningful ways. Grammer is the third component of language, and consists of two main parts: SYNTAX - The rules by which words are arranged into sentences, and MORPHOLOGY - The use of grammatical markers indicating number, tense, case, person, gender, active or passive voice, and other meanings.

Tests for Infants

Most infant measures emphasize perceptual and motor responses. But new tests are being developed that tap early language, cognition, and social behavior. Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development - Children 1 month - 3 1/2 years. Most recent edition - Bayley-III - has 3 main subtests: 1) Cognitive Scale, which includes such items as attention to familiar and unfamiliar objects, looking for a fallen object, and pretend play. 2) Language Scale - Taps understanding and expression of langauge - for example, recognition of objects & people, following simple directions, and naming objects and pictures 3) Motor Scale - assesses gross and fine-motor skills, such as grasping, sitting, stacking blocks, and climbing stairs. Two additional Bayley-III scales depend on parental report - 4) The Social-Emotional Scale, which asks caregivers about such behaviors as ease of calming, social responsiveness, and imitation in play. 5) The Adaptive Behavior Scale- Which asks about adaption to the demands of daily life - including communication, self-control, following rules, and getting along with others. Unfortunately, most infant tests predict later intelligence poorly. Infants easily become distracted, fatigued, or bored during testing, so their scores often do not reflect their true abilities.

A sensitive period for language development

Must language be acquired early in life, during an age span in which the brain is particularly responsive to language stimulation? Evidence for a sensitive period coinciding with brain lateralization would support the nativist position that language development has unique biological properties. To test this idea, researchers have examined the language competence of deaf adults who acquired their first language - American Sign Language - at different ages. The later learners, whose parents chose to educate them through the oral method, which relies on speech and lip-reading and discourages signing, did not acquire spoken langauge because of their profound deafness. And consistent with the sensitive period notion, those who learned ASL in adolescence or adulthood never became as proficient at any aspect of language as those who learned in childhood. Furthermore, the typical right-hemispheric localization of ASL functions, which require visual-spatial processing of hand, arm, and facial movements, is greatly reduced in individuals who learned ASL beyond childhood.

Practical Intelligence

Once a person enters an occupation, practical intelligence - mental abilities apparent in the real world but not in testing situations - predicts on-the-job performance as well as, and sometimes better than, IQ. Yet mental test performance and practical intelligence require distinctly different capacities. Practical problems are not clearly defined, are embedded in everyday experiences, and generally have several appropriate solutions, each with strengths and limitations. Practical intelligence is evident in the assembly-line worker who discovers moves needed to complete a product or the business manager who increases productivity by making her subordinates feel valued. In sum - occupational outcomes are a complex function of traditionally measured intelligence, education, family influences, motivation, and practical know-how. Current evidence indicates that IQ, though influential, is not more important than these other factors.

Why do preschool scores predict less well than later scores?

One reason is that with age, test items focus less on concrete knowledge and more on complex reasoning and problem solving, which require different skills. Another explanation is that during periods of rapid development, children frequently change places in distribution. One child may spurt ahead and reach a plateau, a second child, progressing slowly and steadily, may eventually overtake the first. Lastly, IQ may become more stable after schooling is under way because daily classroom activities and test items become increasingly similar. Then, variations among children in quality of school experiences and in mastery of those experiences may help sustain individual differences in IQ.

Correlational Stability

One way of examining the stability of IQ is to correlate scores obtained at different ages. This tells us whether children who score low or high in comparison to their agemates at one age continue to do so later. Researchers have identified two generalizations about the stability of IQ - 1) The older the child at the time of testing, the better the prediction of later IQ. Preschool IQs do not predict school-age scores well; correlations are typically no better than in the .30s. But after age 6, stability improves, with many correlations in the .70s and .80s. Relationships between two testings in adolescence are as high as the .80s and .90s. 2) The closer in time two testings are, the stronger the relationship between the scores. In one long term study, a 4-year-old IQ correlated with a 5-year-old IQ at .52, but prediction dropped to .46 by age 9 and to .42 by age 12.

Phonological Development

Phonological development is a complex process that depends on the child's ability to attend to sound sequences, produce sounds, and combine them into understandable words and phrases. Between 1 and 4 years, children make great progress at this task. In trying to talk like people around them, they draw on their impressive capacity to distinguish the phonemic categories of their native language, which is well developed by the end of the first year. They also adopt temporary strategies for producing sounds that bring adult words within their current range of physical and cognitive capabilities.

Quantity of Caregiver-Child conversation and Richness of adults' vocabulary

Play a strong role. Commonly used words for objects appear early in toddlers' speech and the more often caregivers use a particular noun, the earlier that noun will become part of young children's productive vocabularies. Mothers talk more to toddler-age girls than to boys, and parents converse less often with shy than sociable children.

Native Language

Properties of the child's native language are influential. Two-year-olds' spoken vocabularies vary substantially across languages - about 180 - 200 words for children acquiring Swedish, 250-300 words for children acquiring English, 500 words for Mandarin Chinese. In Swedish, a complicated phonology makes syllable and word boundaries challenging to discriminate and pronounce. Mandrian Chinese presents children with many short words that have easy to pronounce initial consonants.

Louis Thurstone (1938)

Questioned the importance of g. His factor analysis of college students' scores on more than 50 intelligence tests indicated that separate, unrelated factors exist. Thus, Thurstone called them PRIMARY MENTAL ABILITIES.

Spurt in Vocabulary

Rate of word learning between 18 and 24 months is at one or two words per day. A transition between a slow and a faster learning phase once the number of words produced reaches 50 to 100. But research indicates that most children do not experience a spurt in vocabulary. Rather, they show a steady, continuous increase in rate of word learning that persists through the preschool years, when children add as many as nine new words per day.

Pragmatics

Refers to the rules for engaging in appropriate and effective communication. To converse successfully, children must take turns, stay on the same topic as their conversational partner, and state their meaning clearly. They must also figure out how gestures, tone of voice, and context clarify meaning. Furthermore, because society dictates how language should be spoken, pragmatics involves sociolinguistic knowledge. Children must acquire certain interaction rituals, such as verbal greetings and leave-takings. They must adjust their speech to mark important social relationships, such as differences in age and status. And they must master their culture's narrative mode of sharing personally meaningful experiences with others.

Phonology

Refers to the rules governing the structure and sequence of speech sounds. In English, you easily apply an intricate set of rules to comprehend and produce complicated sound patterns. How you acquired this ability is the story of phonological development.

Shortcoming of the Componential Approach

Regards intelligence as entirely due to causes within the child. Previously, we have seen how cultural and situational factors also affect children's thinking - Thus, Robert Sternberg has expanded the componential approach into a comprehensive theory that views intelligence as a product of inner and outer forces.

IQ as a predictor of occupational attainment

Research indicates that childhood IQ predicts adult occupational attainment just about as well as it correlates with academic achievement. Yet the relationship between IQ and occupational attainment is far from perfect. Other factors are related, such as family background, parental encouragement, modeling of career success, and connections in the world of work, also predict occupational choice and attainment. Educational attainment is a stronger predictor than IQ of occupational success and income.

Ethnic and Socioeconomic Variations in IQ

Researchers assess a family's standing on this continuum through an index called socioeconomic status (SES) - which combines three interrelated- but not completely overlapping - variables - 1) Years of education 2) The prestige of one's job and the skill it requires, both of which measure social status 3) Income, which measures economic status These findings are responsible for the IQ nature-nurture debate. If group differences in IQ exist, then either heredity varies with SES and ethnicity, or certain groups have fewer opportunities to acquire the skills needed for successful test performance. American black children and adolescents score, on average, 10 to 12 IQ points below American white children. Hispanic children fall midway between black and white children, and Asian Americans score slightly higher than their white counterparts - about 3 points. Ethnicity and SES account for only about one-fourth of the total variation in IQ.

Personality as a factor in Occupational Attainment

Researchers found from longitudinal studies that after childhood IQ and parents' educational and occupational attainment were controlled, such traits as childhood emotional stability, conscientiousness, and sociability positively predicted career success, whereas belligerence and negative emotionality forecast unfavorable career outcomes, including job instability, reduced occupational prestige, and lower income.

Adoption Studies: Joint Influence of Heredity & Environment

Researchers gather two types of information in adoption studies: 1) Correlations of the IQs of adopted children with those of their biological and adoptive parents, for insight into genetic and environmental influences 2) Changes in the absolute value of the IQ as a result of growing up in an advantaged adoptive family, for evidence of the power of the environment. Findings reveal that when young children are adopted into caring, stimulating homes, their IQs rise substantially compared with the IQs of nonadopted children who remain in economically deprived families. Adopted children benefit to varying degrees - In the Texas Adoption Project, children of two extreme groups of biological mothers - those with IQs below 95 and those with IQs above 120 - were adopted at birth by parents who were well above average in income and education. During the school years, the children of the low-IQ biological mothers scored above average in IQ but did less well than the children of high-IQ biological mothers placed in similar adoptive families. Furthermore, parent-child correlations revealed that as the children grew older, they became more similar in IQ to their biological mothers and less similar to their adoptive parents.

Explaining Individual and group Differences in IQ

Researchers have carried out hundreds of studies aimed at explaining individual, ethnic, and SES differences in mental abilities. The evidence is of three broad types: 1) investigations addressing the importance of heredity 2) Those that look at whether IQ scores are biased measures of the abilities of low-SES and minority children 3) Those that examine the influence of children's home environments on their mental test performance.

Fast-Mapping

Researchers have discovered that children can connect a new word with an underlying concept after only a brief encounter. Even 15 to 18 month olds comprehend new labels remarkably quickly, but they need more repetitions of the word's use across several situations than preschoolers, who process speech-based information faster and are better able to categorize and recall it. Toddler's understanding of a fast-mapped word is incomplete at first, deepening with repeated exposure. They start to form networks of related concepts and words, which help them fast-map new words, contributing to the age-related increase in rate of word learning.

Deaf-born 5 month old received a cochlear implant

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 in which exposure to speech is essential for the brain to develop the necessary organization for normal speech processing.

Temperment

Shy toddlers often wait until they understand a great deal before trying to speak. Once they do speak, their vocabularies increase rapidly, although they remain slightly behind their agemates in language skills during the preschool years. Negative toddlers also acquire language more slowly. Their high emotional reactivity diverts them from processing linguistic information,and their relationships with caregivers are often conflict-ridden and poorly suited to promoting language progress.

Expressive Style

Smaller number of toddlers use this style compared with referential children. They initially produce many more social formulas and pronouns - "thank you" "done" "i want it" . They are usually compressed phrases that sound like single words. Believe words are for talking about people's feelings and needs. Highly sociable, and their parents more often use verbal routines that support social relationships.

What factors underlie the younger-age language-learning advantage?

Some researchers assign a key role to the narrowing of speech perception during the second half of the first year - from discrimination among nearly all language sounds to heightened sensitivity to sound distinctions in the language that babies hear. As a result, neural networks become dedicated to processing native-language sounds, strengthening native-language learning while weakening capacity to acquire unfamiliar languages. 7-month-olds' skills at perceiving native-language sounds, along with their insensitivity to sound variations in languages they do not hear, predicts rapid vocabulary and grammatical development in the second and third years. The more committed the brain is to native-language patterns, the better children's mastery of their native language and the less effectively they acquire foreign languages. This neural commitment increases with mastery of language and thus, with age.

Why does IQ predict scholastic performance?

Some researchers believe that both IQ and achievement depend on the same abstract reasoning processes that underlie g. Consistent with this interpretation, IQ correlates best with achievement in the more abstract school subjects, such as English, mathematics, and science. Other researchers disagree, arguing that both IQ and achievement tests draw on the same pool of culturally specific information. From this perspective, an intelligence test is, in fact, partly an achievement test and a child's past experiences affect performance on both measures. Support for this view comes from evidence that crystallized intelligence is a better predictor of academic achievement than is its fluid counterpart.

What do Intelligence Tests Predict, and How Well?

Stability of IQ Scores: Stability refers to how effectively IQ at one age predicts itself at the next. Researchers rely on longitudinal studies to find out if children who obtain a particular IQ score at age 3 or 4 perform about the same during elementary school and again in high school.

Infant Point leads to two communicative gestures

The first is PROTODECLARATIVE- in which the baby points to, touches, or holds up an object while looking at others to make sure they notice . The second is PROTOIMPERATIVE - where the baby gets another person to do something by reaching, pointing, and often making sounds at the same time. Over time, these gestures become explicitly symbolic - much like those in children's early make believe play, such as flapping arms to resemble a butterfly or raising up palms to signal "all gone" Over time, gestures recede, and words become dominant. Toddlers use of preverbal gestures predicts faster early vocabulary growth in the second and third years. The sooner toddlers form word-gesture combinations and the greater number they use, the sooner they produce two-word utterances at the end of the second year and the more complex their sentences at 3 1/2. Some findings suggest that adult molding of communication during the first year is not essential. But by the second year, caregiver-child interaction contributes greatly to the transition to language.

Commonly Used Intelligence Tests

The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale - The modern descendant of Alfred Binet's first successful intelligence test is the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, fifth edition - for individuals aged 2 - adulthood. Measures general intelligence and five intellectual factors: fluid reasoning, quantitative reasoning, knowledge, visual-spatial processing, and working memory. Verbal and non verbal mode of testing. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Fourth edition of a widely used test for 6- through 16-year olds. The Wechsler Tests offered both a measure of general intelligence and a variety of factor scores long before the Stanford-Binet. As a result, many psychologists and educators came to prefer them. The WISC-IV includes four intellectual factors: verbal reasoning, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed. Each factor is made up of two or three subtests, yielding 10 separate scores in all. The WISC-IV was designed to downplay crystallized, culture-dependent intelligence, which is emphasized on only one factor (verbal reasoning). The remaining three factors focus on fluid, information-processing skills. According to the test designers, the result is the most theoretically current and "culture-fair". First to use samples representing the total population of the U.S., including ethnic minorities, to devise standards for interpreting test scores.

Semantics

The second component of language - involves vocabulary. The way underlying concepts are expressed in words and word combinations. When children first use a word, it often does not mean the same thing as it does to adults. To build a versatile vocabulary, children must refine the meanings of thousands of words and connect them into elaborate networks of related terms.

Measuring Intelligence

The scores of intelligence tests are modest to good predictors of future success - in school, on the job, and in other aspects of life. The group-administered tests given from time to time in classrooms permit large numbers of students to be tested at once and are useful for instructional planning and for identifying students who require more extensive evaluation with individually administered tests. Individually administered tests, unlike group tests, demand considerable training and experience to give well. The examiner not only considers the child's answers but also carefully observes the child's behavior, noting such reactions as attention to and interest in the tasks and the wariness of the adult. These observations provide insights into whether the test results accurately reflect the child's abilities.

Combining Psychometric and Information-Processing Approaches

To overcome the limitations of factor analysis, investigators combine psychometric and information processing approaches. They conduct COMPONENTIAL ANALYSES of children's test scores, looking for relationships between aspects (or components) of information processing and children's intelligence test performance.

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory

Triarchic Theory of Successful Intelligence - Made up of three broad, interacting intelligences 1) Analytical Intelligence or information processing skills 2) Creative Intelligence - The capacity to solve novel problems 3) Practical Intelligence - Application of intellectual skills in everyday situations. Intelligent behavior involves balancing all three intelligences to achieve success in life, according to one's personal goals and the requirements of one's cultural community.

The Three Stratum Theory of Intelligence

Using improved factor-analytic methods, John Carroll reanalyzed relationships among items in hundreds of studies. His findings yielded a three-stratum theory of intelligence that elaborates the models proposed by Spearman, Thurstone, and Cattell. Carroll represented the structure of intelligence as having three tiers. As figure 8.1 shows, g presides at the top. In the second tier, there are an array of broad abilities - which Carroll considered the basic biological components of intelligence. They are arranged from left to right in terms of decreasing relationship with g. In the third tier are narrow abilities - specific behaviors through which people display the second-tier factors.

Can animals acquire language?

With extensive training, members of specific species can acquire a vocabulary ranging from several dozen to several hundred symbols and can produce and respond to short, novel sentences, although they do so less consistently than a preschool child. Chimpanzees are closest to humans in the evolutionary hierarchy. Common chimps have been taught artificial languages and American Sign Language. Yet even after years of training, common chimps are unable to produce strings of three or more symbols that conform to a rule-based structure. Their language limitations may, in part, reflect a narrow understanding of others' mental states. They cannot recognize less obvious behaviors such as those that motivate the use of language, such as when others want to exchange knowledge and ideas.

Semantic Development

Word comprehension begins in the middle of the first year. When 6-month-olds listened to the words "Mommy" and "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. On average, children say their first word around 12 months. By age 6, they understand the meaning of about 10,000 words. Children learn about 5 new words each day.

Referential Style

Young children have unique styles of early language learning - which affect early vocabulary development. The referential style refers to vocabularies that consist mainly of words that are objects. Think words are for naming things. Vocabularies grow faster than expressive toddlers because all language contains more nouns than social terms. These children have an especially active interest in exploring objects. Also eagerly imitate their parents' frequent naming of objects and their parents imitate back - a strategy that promotes swift vocabulary growth by helping children remember new labels.

Savant Syndrome

a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing Children with autism occasionally show this pattern. Often associated with damage to the left cerebral hemisphere, which may have caused the right hemisphere to compensate, yielding an "island of strength."

Around 7 Months

babbling includes consonant-vowel syllables common in spoken languages. And as caregivers respond contingently to infant babbles, infants modify their babbling to include sound patterns like those in the adult's speech. By 8 to 10 months, babbling reflects the sounds and intonation of children's language community, some of which are transferred to their first words.

Gardner's Multiple Intelligences

linguistic - Sensitivity to the sounds, rhythms, and meaning of words and the functions of language (Poet, journalist) logico-mathematical- Sensitivity to, and capacity to detect, logical or numerical patterns; ability to handle long chains or logical reasoning (Mathematician) musical - Ability to produce and appreciate pitch, rhythm (or melody), and aesthetic quality of the forms of musical expressiveness. (Instrumentalist, composer) spatial - Ability to perceive the visual-spatial world accurately, to perform transformations on those perceptions, and to re-create aspects of visual experience in the absence of relevant stimuli. (Sculptor, navigator) bodily-kinesthetic - Ability to use the body skillfully for expressive as well as goal-directed purposes; ability to handle objects skillfully. (Dancer, athlete) naturalist- Ability to recognize and classify all varieties of animals, minerals, and plants. (Biologist) interpersonal- Ability to detect and respond appropriately to the moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions of others. (Therapist, salesperson) intrapersonal - Ability to discriminate complex inner feelings and to use them to guide one's own behavior; knowledge of one's own strengths, weaknesses, desires, and intelligences. (Person with detailed, accurate knowledge.)

Researchers Disagree

on Kanzi's linguistic achievements. Some argue that he is a remarkable conversationalist while other claim that he uses language only to get what he wants, not to share information. His mastery of grammer does not exceed that of a 2 year old. Overall though, the findings support Chomsky's assumption of a uniquely human capacity for an elaborate grammar. No evidence exists that even the brightest animals can comprehend and produce sentences that are both complex and novel.

The Bell-Shaped Distribution

results whenever researchers measure individual differences in large samples. When intelligence tests are standardized, the mean IQ is set at 100. An individual's IQ is higher or lower than 100 by an amount that reflects how much his or her test performance deviates from the standardization-sample mean. A child with an IQ of 100 performed better than 50 percent of same-age children. A child with an IQ of only 85 did better than only 16 percent, whereas a child with an IQ of 130 outperformed 98 percent. The IQs of the great majority of peopple (96 percent) fall between 70 and 130; only a few achieve higher or lower scores.

Joint Attention

when the child attends to the same object or event as the caregiver - who often labels it- contributes greatly to early language development. Infants and toddlers who frequently experience 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 joint attention 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.

Low SES Children

who receive less verbal stimulation in their homes than higher-SES children, usually have smaller vocabularies. Limited parent-child book reading contributes substantially. As early as 2 years of age, quality of children's home literacy experiences strongly predicts vocabulary size.