The First Two Years: Cognitive Development

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Part II
Chapter Six

• The First Two Years Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor Intelligence Information
Processing Language What Develops in the First
Two Years?
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The First Two Years Cognitive Development

• Infant cognition
• cognition thinking
• thinking in a very broad sense includes
• language
• learning
• memory
• intelligence

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The First Two Years Cognitive Development

• Infants organize by the end of the first year
• sensations and perceptions
• sequence and direction
• the familiar and the strange
• objects and people
• events and experiences
• permanence and transiency
• cause and effect

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Sensorimotor Intelligence

• Piagets first stage
• infants learn through senses and motor actions

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Piaget and Research Methods

• Sensorimotor intelligence actually occurs earlier
  for most infants than Piaget predicted.
• Habituation, the process of getting used to a
  stimulus after repeated exposure.
• If a new object appears and the infant reacts, it
  is assumed they recognize the object as something
  different.

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Information Processing Theory

• a perspective that compares human thinking
  processes, by analogy, to computer analysis of
  data, including sensory input, connections,
  stored memories, and output

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Information Processing Theory

• Affordance
• an opportunity for perception and interaction
  that is offered by a person, place, or object in
  the environment
• Perception is the mental processing of
  information that arrives at the brain from the
  sensory organs

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Information Processing Theory

• Affordance
• two people can have discrepant perceptions of the
  same situation, not only interpreting it
  differently but actually observing it differently
• depending on
• past experiences
• current developmental level
• sensory awareness of opportunities
• immediate needs and motivation

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Information Processing Theory

• Information processing improves over the first
  year as infants become quicker to remember
• Experiences affect which affordances are
  perceived

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Information Processing Theory

• Sudden Drops
• the visual cliff, an apparatus to measure depth
  perception
• infants become interested in crossing the cliff
  about 8 months (having had experience falling)
• the cliff affords danger for older infants

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Information Processing Theory

• Movement and People
• dynamic perception
• primed to focus on movement and change
• a people preference
• a universal principle of infant perception, an
  innate attraction to other humans, which is
  evident in visual, auditory, tactile, and other
  preferences

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Information Processing Theory

• Memory
• Even very young infants can remember under the
  following circumstances
• experimental conditions are similar to real
  life
• motivation is high
• special measures are taken to aid memory
  retrieval

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Information Processing Theory

• A Little Older, a Little More Memory
• after about 6 months infants can retain
  information for longer periods of time with less
  training or reminding
• by the middle of the 2nd year toddlers can
  remember and reenact more complex sequences

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Information Processing Theory

• Memory is not one thing
• brain-imaging techniques reveal many distinct
  brain regions devoted to particular aspects of
  memory
• implicit memory is memory for routines and
  memories that remain hidden until particular
  stimulus bring them to mind
• explicit memory is memory that can be recalled on
  demand

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• The acquisition of language, its idiomatic
  phases, grammar rules, and exceptions, is the
  most impressive intellectual achievement of the
  young child.

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• The Universal Sequence
• Around the world children follow the same
  sequence of early language development

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Listening and Responding
• infants begin learning language before birth
• infants prefer speech over other sounds
• child-directed speech
• the high-pitched, simplified, and repetitive way
  adults speak to infants

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Babbling
• repeating certain syllables (e.g., da-da-da).
• all babies babble, even deaf babies (although
  later and less frequently).
• babbling is a way to communicate.

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• First Words
• usually around 1 year the average baby speaks, or
  signs a few words
• by 13 months spoken language increases very
  gradually
• 6 to 15 month-olds learn meaning rapidly and
  comprehend about 10 times as many words as they
  speak

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• The Naming Explosion
• a sudden increase in an infants vocabulary,
  especially in the number of nouns begins at about
  18 months
• vocabulary reaches about 50 expressed words at a
  rate of 50 to 100 per month, 21 month-olds saying
  twice as many as 18 month-olds

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Cultural Differences
• the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives show
  cultural influences.
• one explanation is the language itself (i.e.
  English, Chinese differ)
• another explanation is social context (toys and
  objects)
• every language has some concepts encoded in adult
  speech

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Sentences
• The first words soon take on nuances of tone,
  loudness, and cadence that are precursors of the
  first grammar, because a single word can convey
  many messages by the way it is spoken.

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Sentences
• Dada! Dada? and Dada.
• each is a holophrase, a single word that
  expresses a complete, meaningful thought.
• intonations varying in tone and pitch is
  extensive in babbling and again in holophrases at
  about 18 months

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Theories of Language Learning
• 2 year olds worldwide use language well
• bilingual children keep two languages separate
  and speak whatever language a listener
  understands

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Theories of Language Learning
• There are 3 theories of how infants learn
  language
• they are taught (view of B. F. Skinner)
• they teach themselves (view of Noam Chomsky)
• social impulses foster learning

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Theory One Infants Need to Be Taught
• 50 years ago the dominant learning theory in
  North America was behaviorism
• B. F. Skinner (1957) noticed that spontaneous
  babbling is usually reinforced a grinning mother
  appears, repeating, praising, giving attention to
  the infant
• Parents are expert teachers, other caregivers
  help
• Frequent repetitions instructive when linked to
  daily life

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Theory Two Infants Teach Themselves
• a contrary theory is that language learning is
  innate--adults need not teach it
• Norm Chomsky (1968,1980) felt that language is
  too complex to be mastered merely through
  step-by-step conditioning

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Theory Two Infants Teach Themselves
• universal grammar--all young children master
  basic language at about the same age
• Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
• a hypothesized mental structure that enables
  humans to learn language, including the basic
  aspects of grammar, vocabulary and intonation

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• Theory Three Social Impulses Foster Infant
  Language
• called social-pragmatic perceives the crucial
  starting point to be neither vocabulary
  reinforcement (behaviorism) nor innate
  connection (epigenetic), but rather the social
  reason for language communication
• Infants communicate in every way they can because
  humans are social beings and depend on one
  another for survival and joy

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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?
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Language What Develops in the First Two Years?

• A Hybrid Theory
• the integration of all three perspectives
• their model an emergentist coalition combing
  valid aspects of several theories about the
  emergence of language during infancy