Chapter 5:

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY Cognitive Development During the First 3 Years

Source: Papalia & Martorell (15th ed.), Santrock (17th ed.), Boyd & Bee (7th ed.)
Studying Cognitive Development • Accommodation
• Behaviorist Approach o Adjusting schemes to fit new information and
o Studies the basic mechanics of learning. experiences.
o Concerned with how behavior changes in response to • Organization
experience. o Grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a
• Psychometric Approach higher-order system.
o Measures quantitative differences in abilities that • Disequilibrium
make up intelligence by using tests that indicate or o The child is constantly faced with counterexamples to
predict these abilities. his or her existing schemes and with inconsistencies.
• Piagetian Approach • Equilibration
o Looks at changes, or stages, in the quality of cognitive o Mechanism by which children shift from one stage of
functioning. thought to the next.
o Concerned with how the mind structures its activities
and adapts to the environment. Six Substages of the Sensorimotor Stage
o More qualitative. • Use of Simple Reflexes (birth to about 1 month)
• Information-Processing Approach o Newborns suck reflexively when their lips are
o Focuses on perception, learning, memory, and touched.
problem solving. • Primary Circular Reactions (about 1 to 4 months)
o Aims to discover how children process information o Action and response both involve infant’s own body.
from the time they encounter it until they use it. • Secondary Circular Reactions (about 4 to 8 months)
• Cognitive Neuroscience Approach o Action gets a response from another person or object,
o Seeks to identify what brain structures are involved in leading to baby’s repeating original action.
specific aspects of cognition. • Coordination of Secondary Schemes (about 8 to 12 months)
• Socio-Contextual Approach o Infant’s behavior is more intentional and purposeful,
o Examines s the effects of environmental aspects of and they can anticipate events.
the learning process, particularly the role of parents o Infants try out, modify, and coordinate previous
and other caregivers. schemes to find one that works.
o Marks the development of complex, goal-directed
Behaviorist Approach behavior.
• Classical Conditioning • Tertiary Circular Reactions (about 12 to 18 months)
o Learning based on associating a stimulus that does o Action gets one pleasing result, leading baby to
not ordinarily elicit a response with another stimulus perform similar actions to get similar results.
that does elicit the response. o By trial and error, toddlers try behaviors until they find
o Enables infants to anticipate an event before it the best way to attain a goal.
happens. • Mental Combinations (about 18 months to 2 years)
• Operant Conditioning o Transition to the preoperational stage.
o Focuses on the consequences of behaviors and how o Representational Ability
they affect the likelihood of that behavior occurring ▪ Ability to store mental images or symbols of
again. objects and events.

Psychometric Approach Circular Reactions

• Intelligent Behavior - Processes by which an infant learns to reproduce desired
o Behavior that is goal oriented and adaptive to occurrences originally discovered by chance.
circumstances and conditions of life.
• Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Key Developments of the Sensorimotor Stage
o Psychometric tests that seek to measure intelligence • Object Concept
by comparing a testtaker’s performance with o Infants act as if an object no longer exist once it is out
standardized norms. of their line of sight.
• Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Bailey-III) • Object Permanence
o Developmental test designed to assess children from o Realization that something continues to exist when
1 month to 3½ years. out of sight.
o Scores indicate a child’s competencies in each of five o Develops gradually.
developmental areas: cognitive, language, motor, • Imitation
social-emotional, and adaptive behavior. o Children under 18 months could not engage in
o Developmental Quotients (DQ) deferred imitation.
▪ Separate scores for each scale.
▪ Most commonly used for early detection of
Deferred Imitation
emotional disturbances and sensory,
neurological, and environmental deficits. - Reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of
time by calling up a stored symbol of it.
• Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment
- Imitation that occurs after a delay of hours or days.
(HOME)
o Instrument to measure the influence of the home
environment on children’s cognitive growth. • Symbolic Development
• Early Intervention o Growth of pictorial competence.
o Systematic process of providing services to help o As children’s ability to recognize and understand
families meet young children’s developmental needs. visual features in pictures improves, so too does their
ability to draw those same features.
Piagetian Approach o Dual Representation Hypothesis
Cognitive Processes ▪ Proposal that children under age 3 have
difficulty grasping spatial relationships
• Schemes
because of the need to keep more than one
o Organized patterns of thought and behavior used in
mental representation in mind at the same
particular situations.
time.
• Assimilation
o Using existing schemes to deal with new information
or experiences.

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 Information-Processing Approach
• Habituation
o Type of learning in which familiarity with a stimulus
reduces, slows, or stops a response.
• Dishabituation
o Increase in responsiveness after presentation of a
new stimulus.
• Visual Preference
o Tendency of infants to spend more time looking at one
sight than another.
• Novelty Preference
o Infants prefer new sights to familiar ones. Classic Theories of Language Acquisition:
• Visual Recognition Memory The Nature-Nurture Debate
o Ability to distinguish a familiar visual stimulus from an Learning Theory (B.F. Skinner)
unfamiliar one when shown both at the same time. • Language learning is based on experience and learned
• Joint Attention associations.
o A shared attentional focus, typically initiated with eye • Children learn language through the processes of operant
gaze or pointing. conditioning.
• Cross-Modal Transfer • Social Learning Theory
o Ability to use information gained by one sense to o Babies imitate the sounds they hear adults make and,
guide another again, are reinforced for doing so.
Example:
▪ A person negotiates a dark room by feeling for Nativism (Noam Chomsky)
the location of familiar objects.
• Emphasizes the active role of the learner.
• Human brain has the innate capacity for acquiring language.
Cognitive Neuroscience Approach
• Babies learn to talk naturally as they learn to walk.
• Implicit Memory (Procedural Memory)
o Remembering that occurs without effort or even • Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
conscious awareness. o Inborn mechanism that programs children’s brains to
o Commonly pertains to habits and skills. analyze the language they hear and to figure out its
rules.
• Explicit Memory (Declarative Memory)
o Intentional and conscious memory, generally of facts, • Almost all children master their native language in the same
names, and events. age-related sequence without formal teaching.
• Working Memory
Language’s Rule Systems
o Short-term storage of information being actively
processed. • Phonology
o Sound system of the language, including the sounds
Social-Contextual Approach that are used and how they may be combined.
o Phoneme
• Guided Participation
▪ Basic unit of sound in a language.
o Mutual interactions with adults that help structure
▪ Smallest unit of sound that affects
children’s activities and bridge the gap between a
meaning.
child’s understanding and an adult’s.
o Often occurs in shared play and in ordinary, everyday • Morphology
activities in which children informally learn the skills, o Units of meaning involved in word formation.
knowledge, and values important in their culture. o Morpheme
▪ Minimal unit of meaning.
Language Development ▪ Word or a part of a word that cannot be
broken into smaller meaningful parts.
• Language
o Communication system based on words and • Syntax
grammar. o The ways words are combined to form acceptable
phrases and sentences.
• Infinite Generativity
o Ability to produce and comprehend an endless • Semantics
number of meaningful sentences using a finite set of o The meaning of words and sentences.
words and rules. • Pragmatics
o The appropriate use of language in different contexts.

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 Sequence of Early Language Development Example:
• Prelinguistic Speech ▪ Lisa knows her family pet is a “doggy” and her
o Utterance of sounds that are not words. dog, and only her dog, is a “doggy.” Other dogs
o Includes crying, cooing, babbling, and accidental and are not “doggy.”
deliberate imitation of sounds without understanding • Overextending
their meaning. o Babies use words in too broad of a category.
• Early Vocalization Example:
o Crying is a newborn’s first means of communication. ▪ Amir thought that because his grandfather had
o Different pitches, patterns, and intensities of crying gray hair, all gray-haired men could be called
signal hunger, sleepiness, or anger. “Gampa.”
o There’s cooing and babbling.
o Babbling, although initially nonsensical, becomes Influences on Early Language Development
more wordlike over time. • Brain Development
• Perceiving Language Sounds and Structure o Our brains have structures that have been shown to
o Infants’ brains seem to be preset to discriminate basic be directly implicated in language use.
linguistic units, perceive linguistic patterns, and • Social Interaction and the Linguistic Environment
categorize them as similar or different. o Children who grow up without normal social contact
• Cultural Differences in Perceptual Attunement do not develop language normally.
o Learning of tonal or nontonal languages. • Child-Directed Speech (Parentese/Motherese/Baby Talk)
o Babies s learning a tonal language are better at o Form of speech often used in talking to babies or
distinguishing lexical tones and become increasingly toddlers.
accurate at doing so. o Includes slow, simplified speech, a high-pitched tone,
o Nontonal learning infants’ tonal sensitivity rebounds at exaggerated vowel sounds, short words and
about 17 to 18 months. sentences, and much repetition.
o As nontonal language children learn more about the • Recasting
social context of speech and the nonverbal o Rephrasing something the child has said that might
information that is relayed by vocal tone, they may lack the appropriate morphology or contain some
once again direct their attention to pitch and thus other error.
regain some sensitivity. o Adult restates the child’s immature utterance in the
• Gestures form of a fully grammatical sentence.
o Symbolic gestures, such as blowing to mean “hot” or • Expanding
sniffing to mean “flower,” often emerge around the o Adding information to a child’s incomplete utterance.
same time that babies say their first words. • Labeling
o Gesture-word combinations serve as a signal that a o Naming objects that children seem interested in.
child is about to begin using multiword sentences.
o Gestures usually appear before children have a
vocabulary of 25 words and drop out when children
learn the word for the idea they were gesturing.
• First Words
o Linguistic Speech
▪ Verbal expression that conveys meaning.
o Holophrase
▪ An entire sentence expressed with one
word.
Example:
▪ “Daddy?” may mean “Where is
Daddy?”
• First Sentences
o Telegraphic Speech
▪ Early form of sentence use consisting of
only a few essential words.
Example:
▪ “Want juice” means “I want some
juice.”
o Syntax
▪ Rules for forming sentences in a particular
language.

Variations in Language Development

• Code Mixing
o Use of elements of two languages, sometimes in the
same utterance, by young children in households
where both languages are spoken.
• Code Switching
o Changing one’s speech to match the situation, as in
people who are bilingual.

Characteristics of Early Speech

• Young children understand grammatical relationships they
cannot yet express.
• Overregularization
o Occurs when children inappropriately apply a
syntactical rule.
Example:
▪ “Daddy goed to the store.”
• Underextending
o Babies use words in too narrow of a category.

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