Chapter 6Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood

Theories of Cognitive DevelopmentJean Piaget: Children construct their own knowledge in response to their environment, and they learn to do this on their own.Sensorimotor Stage: Piagets first stage of development, which lasts from birth to about the end of the second year; infants in this stage use the senses and motor abilities to understand the world.

Key question 1: How do Piaget, Vygotsky, and information-processing theorists explain how infants and toddlers learn?

Schemas: organized patterns of thought that are continually being modified through assimilation and accommodationAssimilation: a part of adaptation in which children interpret their experiences in terms of existing cognitive structuresAccommodation: a part of adaptation in which children change existing cognitive structures or create new ones to account for new experiencesPiaget

Substages of Sensorimotor Development

Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions (8-12 months)Readily combine previously learned schemes in a coordinated wayintentionalityLook at an object and grasp it simultaneouslyThey now use movements to reach goals and accomplish simple feats.

Internalization of Schemes (18-24 months)Transition to Pre- OperationalThinking becomes SymbolicInfants can begin to use primitive symbolsDevelopment of Representational ThoughtDeferred Imitation

Language Development

Critical Period for LanguageIn the first 6 months children are citizens of the world. They hear all the sounds that the human voice can make.After 6 months babies begin to lose the ability to hear all soundsAfter 6 months they begin to concentrate on on only the sounds that they hear in their environment

First WordsFirst words happen about 12 monthsVocabulary explosion at about 18 monthsChildren understand much more than they can speak

The Language Areas of the BrainBrocas area: an area in the front of the left hemisphere of the brain thought to be partially responsible for speech productionWernickes area: an area in the brain thought to be partially responsible for language processing and comprehension

The Nativist Approach: proposes that humans are biologically predisposed to learn a language.Language acquisition device (LAD): a hypothetical brain mechanism proposed to explain human acquisition of the syntactic structure of language

Noam Chomsky

Acquiring LanguageNewborn infants are able to discriminate and categorize a variety of characteristics of the human voice and patterns of speech.Cooing: At about 2 months, they produce one-syllable vowel sounds.Babbling: By 6 months, consonants are added and repetitive syllables mimicking human speech are produced.

The Role of Experience in LanguageAt birth, infants exhibit a universal capacity to detect phonetic differences in the worlds languages; experience alters this capacity, so that by 1 year of age, the infant is no longer universally prepared for all languages.