Chapter 6
Cognitive Development in Infancy
PageLearning Objectives / 90
Key Terms and Concepts / 90
Chapter Outline / 91
Lecture Suggestions / 95
Malnutrition, Poverty, and Intellectual Development
/ 95The Language Acquisition Debate
/ 96Infantile Amnesia
/ 97Class Activities / 98
Supplemental Reading List / 99
Prentice Hall PowerPoints available online / 100
Multimedia Ideas / 100
Handouts / 102
Learning Objectives
After reading Chapter 6, students will know:
- Outline Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
- Describe the six substages of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development.
- Evaluate what we can learn about children in non-Western cultures from Piaget’s theories.
- Explain how infants process information and learn about their world.
- Describe the capabilities and duration of infant memory.
- Explain how we measure infant intelligence, and discuss how it relates to adult intelligence.
- Describe the processes by which children learn to use language.
- Describe the formal characteristics that must be mastered as linguistic competence is developed.
- Outline the development of prelinguistic and linguistic communication.
- Compare the nativist and interactionist approaches to language development.
- Explain how children influence the language that adults use to address them.
· Explain how infant-directed speech is similar and different across cultures.
Key Terms and Concepts
101
scheme
assimilation
accommodation
sensorimotor stage (of cognitive development)
circular reaction
goal-directed behavior
object permanence
mental representation
deferred imitation
information-processing approaches
memory
infantile amnesia
developmental quotient
Bayley Scales of Infant Development
visual recognition memory
cross-modal transference
language
prelinguistic communication
babbling
holophrases
telegraphic speech
underextension
overextension
referential style
expressive style
learning theory approach
nativist approach
language-acquisition device (LAD)
infant-directed speech
101
Chapter Outline
I. Piaget’s Approach to Cognitive Development:
A. Knowledge is the product of direct motor behavior in infants.
1. All children pass through a series of universal stages in a fixed order.
a. Sensorimotor
b. Preoperational
c. Concrete operations
d. Formal operations
2. Both quantity and quality of knowledge increase.
3. Focus is on change in understanding that occurs as child moves through stages.
4. Development through stages occurs with physical maturation and experience with environment.
5. Children understand the world by developing organized patterns of sensorimotor functioning referred to as Schemes that adapt and change with mental development.
6. Two principles underlie children’s understanding of the world:
a. Assimilation is when people understand an experience in terms of their current stage of cognitive development and way of thinking.
b. Accommodation is a change in existing ways of thinking that occur in response to encounters with new stimuli or events.
7. According to Piaget, all children pass gradually through the four major stages of cognitive development and various substages when they are at an appropriate level of maturation and are exposed to relevant types of experiences.
a. In the Piagetian view, children’s understanding grows through assimilation of their experiences into their current way of thinking or through accommodation of their current way of thinking to their experiences.
b. By the end of the sixth substage of the sensorimotor period, infants are beginning to engage in symbolic thought.
B. The Sensorimotor Stage (birth until 2) is comprised of six substages.
1. Substage 1: simple reflexes
a. First month
b. Various reflexes determine the infant’s interaction with world.
2. Substage 2: first habits and primary circular reactions
a. 1–4 months
b. Coordination of actions
c. Primary circular reactions are the infants repeating of interesting or enjoyable actions on his or her body.
d. A Circular Reaction permits the construction of cognitive schemes through the repetition of a motor event.
3. Substage 3: secondary circular reactions
a. 4–8 months
b. Begins to act on world (e.g., rattles rattle)
c. Secondary circular reactions are repeated actions meant to bring about a desirable consequence on the outside world.
d. Vocalization increases and imitation begins.
4. Substage 4: coordination of secondary circular reactions
a. 8–12 months
b. Employs Goal-Directed Behavior where several schemes are combined and coordinated to generate a single act to solve a problem.
c. Can anticipate upcoming event
d. Development of Object Permanence, the realization that people and objects exist even when they cannot be seen.
5. Substage 5: tertiary circular reactions
a. 12–18 months
b. Tertiary circular reactions are the deliberate variation of actions to bring desirable consequences.
6. Substage 6: beginnings of thought
a. 18–24 months
b. Capacity for Mental Representation, an internal image of a past event or object, or symbolic thought
(1) Permits child to understand causality
(2) Child gains ability to pretend and Deferred Imitation, in which a person who is no longer present is imitated later after children have witnessed such scenes.
C. Most developmentalists agree that Piaget’s descriptions of how cognitive development proceeds during infancy are accurate.
1. Piaget was a master observer and studies show that children do learn about the world by acting on objects in their environment.
2. However, specific aspects of Piaget’s theory have been criticized.
a. Some developmentalists question the stage concept, thinking development is more continuous.
b. Developmental researcher Robert Siegler suggests that cognitive development proceeds not in stages, but in “waves,” ebbing and flowing of cognitive approaches that children use.
3. Piaget’s notion that development is grounded in activity ignores the importance of infant’s sensory and perceptual abilities.
4. Recent work shows object permanence may occur as early as 3½ months.
5. Imitation may occur earlier than Piaget suggested.
6. Some development is universal, and some appears to be subject to cultural variations.
7. Piaget’s influence has been enormous, and he remains a towering influence and pioneer in the field of child development.
II. Information-Processing Approaches seek to identify the way that individuals take in, use, and store information.
A. The three basic aspects of information processing are encoding, storage and retrieval.
1. Encoding is the process by which information is initially recorded in a usable format.
2. Storage refers to the maintenance of material saved in memory.
3. Retrieval is the process by which information stored in memory is located, brought into awareness, and used.
4. Automatization is the degree to which an activity requires attention.
a. Encoding, storage, and retrieval may become automatic.
b. Automatic processes require little, if any, attention.
c. Helps prime children to process information in certain ways.
d. Provides benefit of efficient processing, allowing for concentration on other mental problems.
e. Automatization can backfire in that certain situations that actually require controlled processing.
5. Without being aware of it, infants and children develop an understanding of concepts, categorization of objects, events, or people that share common properties.
6. Information-processing approaches to the study of cognitive development seek to learn how individuals receive, organize, store, and retrieve information. Such approaches differ from Piaget’s by considering quantitative changes in children’s abilities to process information.
a. Infants have memory capabilities from their earliest days, although the accuracy of infant memories is a matter of debate.
B. Memory is the process by which information is initially encoded, stored, and retrieved.
1. The ability to habituate to stimuli implies the presence of memory.
2. Infant’s memories improve with age, and are influenced by environmental “cues.”
3. Research suggests that memory during infancy is dependent upon the hippocampus and that at a later age involves additional structures of the brain.
4. Research supports the notion of Infantile Amnesia, the lack of memory for experiences that occurred prior to three years of age.
a. Although memories are stored from early infancy, they cannot be easily retrieved.
b. Early memories are susceptible to interference from later events.
c. Recall of memories is sensitive to environmental context.
d. The question of how well memories formed during infancy are retained in adulthood remains not fully answered, but research suggests that it is possible for memories to remain intact from a very young age, if subsequent information does not interfere with them.
5. Studies of the neurological basis of memory that come from advances in brain scan technology, as well as studies of adults with brain damage, suggest that they are two separate systems involved with long-term memory.
a. Explicit memory is memory that is conscious and can be recalled intentionally.
b. Implicit memory is memory that is recalled unconsciously, and consists mainly of motor skills, habits, and activities that can be remembered without conscious cognitive effort.
C. Infant intelligence, like adult intelligence, is difficult to define. Traditional measures of infant intelligence, such as Gesell’s developmental quotient and the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, focus on average behavior observed at particular ages in large numbers of children.
1. Arnold Gesell formulated the Developmental Quotient (DQ), an overall developmental score that relates to performance in four domains and is the earliest measure of infant development based on hundreds of babies. It compared their performance at different ages to learn what behaviors were common to a certain age.
a. Motor skills
b. Language use
c. Adaptive behavior
d. Personal-social
2. Bayley Scales of Infant Development are a measure that evaluates an infant’s development from 2 to 30 months.
a. Mental Scale
(1) Senses
(2) Perception
(3) Memory
(4) Learning
(5) Problem solving
(6) Language
b. Motor Scale
(1) Gross motor skills
(2) Fine motor skills
3. These normative scales are useful in identifying infants who are significantly behind their peers but are not good at predicting future behavior.
4. Contemporary approaches to infant intelligence, information- processing approaches, suggest that the speed with which infants process information correlate most strongly with later intelligence as measured by IQ tests administered during adulthood.
a. Visual-Recognition Memory is a measure of memory and recognition of a stimulus that has been previously seen.
b. Cross-Modal Transference is the ability to identify a stimulus that has previously only been experienced through one sense using another sense.
c. These measures correlate moderately well with later measures of intelligence based in IQ scores, but the correlation is only moderate in strength.
5. Information-processing approaches to assessing intelligence rely on variations in the speed and quality with which infants process information.
III. Language is the systematic, meaningful arrangement of symbols, and provides the basis for communication.
A. Language is closely tied to the way infants think and how they understand the world.
1. Several formal characteristics of a language must be mastered as linguistic competence develops.
a. Phonology – basic units of sound in a language.
b. Morphemes – smallest language unit conveying meaning.
c. Semantics – rules for the meanings of words and sentences.
2. Linguistic comprehension is the understanding of speech.
3. Linguistic production is the use of language to communicate.
4. Comprehension precedes production.
5. Infants show Prelinguistic Communication through sounds, facial expressions, gestures, imitations, and other non-linguistic means.
a. Babbling is when infants make speech-like but meaningless sounds at about 2–3 months continuing to about 1 year.
b. Babbling is a universal phenomenon.
c. Even deaf infants exposed to sign language babble with their hands.
d. Babbling begins with easy sounds (b-p) and proceeds to more complex sounds (d-t).
e. By age 6 months, babbling differs according to the language to which the infant is exposed.
6. First words are generally spoken between 10–14 months.
a. First words are typically Holophrases, one-word utterances that depend on the particular context in which they are used to determine meaning.
b. By 15 months the average child has a vocabulary of 10 words.
c. Vocabulary spurt occurs between 16 and 24 months when a child’s vocabulary increases from 50 to 400 words.
d. Two word phrases begin to emerge approximately 8 to 12 months after the first word is spoken.
(1) Important because it not only provides labels for things, but indicates the relations between them.
7. By 18 months, infants are linking words in sentences using Telegraphic Speech where words not critical to the message are left out.
a. Underextension, using words too restrictively, is common.
b. Overextension, using words too broadly, is very common.
c. A Referential Style is when language is used primarily to label objects.
d. An Expressive Style is when language is used primarily to express feelings and needs.
B. Linguists are divided on how to explain the origins of language.
1. According to the Learning Theory Approach, language acquisition follows the basic laws of reinforcement and conditioning.
2. The Nativist Approach, championed by the linguist Noam Chomsky, argues that there is a genetically determined mechanism that directs the development of language. The learning theory approach to language acquisition assumes that adults and children use basic behavioral processes—such as conditioning, reinforcement, and shaping—in language learning. A different approach proposed by Chomsky holds that humans are genetically endowed with a language-acquisition device, which permits them to detect and use the principles of universal grammar that underlie all languages.
a. Chomsky suggests that all the world’s languages share a similar underlying structure, called Universal Grammar.
b. In this view, the human brain is wired with a neural system called the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which permits the understanding of language structure and provides a set of strategies and techniques for learning particular characteristics of language.
3. The Interactionist Perspective argues that language development is produced through a combination of genetically determined predispositions and environmental events.
C. Adult language is influenced by the children to whom it is addressed. Infant-directed speech takes on characteristics, surprisingly invariant across cultures, that make it appealing to infants and probably encourage language development.
1. Pitch of voice becomes higher.
2. Intonation may be more varied or singsong.
3. Frequent repetition of words.
4. Restricted topics.
5. Typically only used during first year.
6. Infants seem more receptive to infant-directed speech than regular speech.
7. Infant-directed speech is used across a variety of cultures.
8. Use of infant-directed speech is related to the early appearance of words.