Early Childhood Cognition

Language

Theories, Foundations and Development

Theories

Theories

• Learning theorists (Skinner)

• Nativist theorists (Chomsky)

• Interactionists (Tomasello)

Theories, cont’d

• Traditional Debate Between Behaviorists (Skinner) and Nativists (Chomsky)

– Is language acquired through reinforcement and principles of operant conditioning?

– Is there is a universal, innate grammatical structure?

Theories, cont’d

• Contemporary views based on an old idea

• Vygotsky

– complex cognitive abilities like language emerge first in the context of social interaction, secondly at the individual level

– Mature members of culture scaffold development

Theories, cont’d

• Bruner applies the Vygotskian insights

– Children first learn about language in the highly organized play routines of early infancy

– Infants already making perceptual distinctions and categories

– Language consists of learning how to express communicatively about a world that is already organized in a non-linguistic way

Theoretical Issues to be Explained

• Reference – How does the human child come to derive

meaning from abstract sounds

• Grammar and Recursion– How does the child come to apply grammatical

rules without being explicitly taught these rules

Foundations

Biological Foundations

• Categorical perception of speech sounds (Eimas, Werker, Kuhn research)

• Universal Categorical speech perception (Werker)

• Preference for infant directed speech (Werker and McLeod)

• Ability to imitate sounds of speech (Melzoff and Kuhn)

Evidence for Social Foundations

• Contingency

– Trevarthan • Primary and secondary intersubjectivity

– Bigelow• Contingency detected at 4 mos

• Preference for same level of contingency as Mothers

Evidence for Social FoundationsJoint Attention

• Tomasello– Joint Attention

• Tomasello & Farrar (83)

• Baldwin – Gaze following

• Baldwin (91)

• Callaghan – Joint Attention and visual symbols

• Callaghan and Rankin (02)

Evidence for Social FoundationsIntentional Understanding

• Understanding that actions are goal-directed– Woodward – Baldwin

• Understanding that actions are intentional – Meltzoff– Tomasello

• Understanding communicative intentions– Tomasello

Evidence for Social FoundationsIntentional Understanding

• Growth of intentionality (9-24 mos)– Both members of the dyad interact with the

intention to influence the other

• Greater flexibility of attentional capacity (12 mos)– Moving from dyadic to triadic interactions

• Ability to use symbols (12-36 mos)– Crossing the divide between the perceptual world

to the conceptual world

Evidence for Social FoundationsSharing

• Topic Sharing– First communications occur in dyad around 4-6

mos (primary intersubjectivity)– At 5-6 mos infant develops the manual skills to

explore objects and directs attention to objects more than people: attn to mom at 6 wks is 70%, at 26 wks is 30% (Fogel)

– At 9-10 mos infant begins to be able to coordinate attention to objects with a communicative partner (secondary intersubjectivity or joint attention)

Developmental Progression

Precursors to Verbal Communication• Gestures

– Pointing-for-self • Prior to 9 months

– Pointing-for-others• 9 months

– Symbolic pointing and other gestures• 1 to 2 years

• deceases as verbal language increases

Early Milestones of Language Production

• 2 m Social smile, cooing• 4 m Laughs, squeals, yells• 7 m Canonical babbling• 9 m comprehends a word• 11 m Variegated babbling, comprehends 10 words• 12 m pointing, gesturing• 13 m produces first word, comprehends 50 words• 15 m produces 10 words• 20 m produces 50 words• 21 m produces word combinations

Systems of Language• Phonemes (the sounds of language)

– Categorical perception at birth• complete mastery takes years (e.g., b vs. v etc)

• Words (meaning units)– Morphemes are the meaning units of language

• e.g., cat vs. dog, cat vs. cats, • acquisition helped by adults taking referential stance toward language

with infants and children• Using language to communicate meaning = symbolic communication

• Phrases (complex meaning units)– More complex meaning carried

• combine words by 21 mos

• Syntax (meaning through order)– Word order denotes meaning

• overgeneralizations indicating rule based learning begin in 2nd yr

Vocabulary Development• Basic task is acquiring word meaning and

refining the precise meaning of words

• Earliest wds names for objects child can act on like ball vs stove (Nelson), or wds referring to change of state like ‘allgone’

• Joint attention facilitates acquisition of novel nouns (Tomasello research)

• Research suggests understanding intentions helps to disambiguate meaning of action words such as verbs (Tomasello & Akhtar)

Vocabulary Development, cont’d

• Fast mapping occurs around 18 mos when children acquire up to to 10 new words per day after only a single exposure– Fast mapping occurs mostly for wds referring

to objects child knows a lot about (cup), actions they perform (run, spill), or modifiers that are distinctive (big, hot)

Vocabulary Development, cont’d• Constraints on Meaning Acquisition in Infancy

– Principle of mutual exclusivity :Markman (92) suggests children avoid applying more than one label to same object

• Evidence that children will accept more than one label, they are flexible (Mervis et al, 94)

– Whole Object : Researchers suggest children restrict novel words to whole objects rather than parts

• Evidence that children ‘s language is related to their perceptual organization and categorization of the world, basic level words acquired first (Rosch & Mervis, 76)

Vocabulary Development, cont’d• Children show creative construction of language in

their overgeneralizations (Snoopy for all dogs) and undergeneralizations (dog only for their dog) invention of words (crayoner), and metaphoric use of words (‘Daddy’s growling’ - for snoring)

• Tomasello argues that the constraints view doesn’t fit with the view that children actively attempt to derive and create meaning in the ongoing richness of communication with others. They acquire words in contexts that they know a lot about and this helps them to disambiguate the meaning of words.

Development of Grammar

• Chomskian view is that grammar and syntax are innately programmed in the LAD

• Bruner suggests that the social context of language explains the rapid acquisition of language LASS

• Issue is how children come to be sensitive to the changes in nuance of meaning that are coded in word order (syntax) and inflections (plural, tense, prepositions etc)

Development of Grammar, cont’d

• Early English grammar conforms to subj-verb-obj common order

• Inflections acquired in order of conceptual difficulty, complex constructions acquired throughout childhood

• At 3.5 yrs children produce creative word orders and inflections indicating that they have a ‘theory’ of grammar

Facilitation of Early Language

• Social interaction with skilled speakers consistently found to facilitate

• Helping to clarify what child means helps, correcting errors does not (little evidence)

• Feedback on grammar given through expansions and recastings

• Not enough cross-cultural research to determine whether these scaffoldings are universal, which would suggest they are necessary, or merely a help

Language Sample

• C. My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.

• M. Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?• C. Yes.• M. What did you say she did?• C. She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.• M. Did you say she held them tightly?• C. No, she holded them loosely.

Conclusions

• Language and Thought– Thinking changes dramatically once language is

acquired (Environmental-Learning)

– Language reflects, but does not cause, conceptual understanding (Piagetian)

– There is an interdependence of language and thought, as well as modularity of language (Nativists)

– Independent early in development, interdependent later (Cultural-Context)

Conclusions, cont’d

• To understand language and the essential problem of reference we need to consider social context

• The development of grammar relies on both biological (LAD) predispositions and social (LASS) supports

• There is much refinement of language beyond the preschool period