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Cognitive
Development During
The First Three Years
Lecture: Chapter 7
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Guideposts for Study
 1. How do infants learn, and how long
can they remember?
 2. Can infants' and toddlers' intelligence
be measured, and how can it be
improved?
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Guideposts for Study
 3. How did Piaget describe infants' and
toddlers' cognitive development, and how
have his claims stood up?
 4. How can we measure infants' ability to
process information, and how does this
ability relate to future intelligence?
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Guideposts for Study
 5. When do babies begin to think about
characteristics of the physical world?
 6. What can brain research reveal about
the development of cognitive skills?
 7. How does social interaction with
adults advance cognitive competence?
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Guideposts for Study
 8. How do babies develop language?
 9. What influences contribute to linguistic
progress?
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Studying Cognitive Development
 1. Behaviorist Approach
 Studies the basic mechanics of learning
 2. Psychometric Approach
 Measures individual differences in quantity of
intelligence using intelligence test
 3. Piagetian Approach
 Looks at changes, or stages, in the quality of
cognitive functioning
 4. Social-Contextual Approach
 Study how cultural context affects early social
interactions that may promote cognitive competence
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IQ
 Intelligence Quotient
 Goals of psychometric testing are to measure
the factors that thought to make up intelligence
(ie. Comprehension, reasoning) and from the
results, predict future performance (ie. School
achievement)
 Fairly reliable for school-aged children but not
always accurate or reliable for infants and
toddlers
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2. Psychometric Approach:
Developmental And Intelligence Testing
 Measures quantitatively the factors that
are thought to make up intelligence
 Binet developed tests to identify children
who could not handle academic work and
needed special training
 Bayley Scales of Infant Development
 Standardized test of infants’ mental and motor
development between the ages of 1m to 31/2yrs.
Table 7-1: Sample Tasks
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Early Intervention

Developmental Priming Mechanisms

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Aspects of the home environment that pave the
way for ‘normal’ development and help make
children ready for school
Encouragement to explore
Mentoring in basic cognitive & social skills
Celebration of accomplishments
Guidance in practicing & expanding skills
Protection from inappropriate punishment
Stimulation of language
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Early Intervention con’t
 Early Years report
 Demonstrates how intervention in the first 3 years
can influence developmental gains more than at any
other time in the lifespan (Table 7-2)
 Most effective early intervention:
 Start early and continue throughout the preschool
years
 Highly time-intensive
 Provide direct educational experiences
 Comprehensive (health, family, counseling etc.)
 Tailored to individual differences and needs
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Question?
 Identify six developmental priming
mechanisms and summarize the
findings about the value of early
intervention.
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3. Piagetian Approach:
Sensorimotor Stage
 Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2yrs)
 first stage in cognitive development,
during which infants learn about their world
through sensory and motor activity
 Change from creatures who respond
primarily through reflexes and random
behaviour into goal-oriented toddlers
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 Circular reactions:
 infants learn to
reproduce
pleasurable or
interesting events
originally discovered
by chance
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Object Permanence
 Understanding that a person or object
still exists when out of sight (ie.
peekaboo)
 This realization allows a child to
understand that when their parent leaves
the room they still exist
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Imitation
 Visible imitation
 Imitation with parts of one’s body that one
can see
 Invisible imitation
 Using parts of the body that a baby cannot
see (ie. mouth), develops around 9 months
 Deferred imitation
 Imitate an act they saw sometime before
(18-24 months)
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4. Social-Contextual Approach:
Learning From Interactions With
Caregivers
 Researchers influenced by Vygotsky's
sociocultural theory study how cultural context
affects early social interactions that may
promote cognitive competence
 Cultural context influences way caregivers
contribute to cognitive development
 The ways adults involve themselves in
children’s learning in one culture may be no
better or worse than in another (adult activities
vs play)
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Social-Contextual Approach
 Guided participation
 Participation of an adult in a child’s activity in
a manner that helps to structure the activity
and to bring the child’s understanding of it
closer to that of the adult
 Example: Guatemalan town – mothers
sewing and weaving, India accompanied
mothers to work in the fields, U.S. interacted
with mother in the context of child’s play
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Sequence of Early Language
Development
 Prelinguistic speech: Utterance of
sounds that are not words
 crying, cooing, babbling
 Gestures: (9-13 months)
 pointing, social gestures (waving),
symbolic gestures (blowing=hot)
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Sequence of Language
Development con’t
 First Words: (10-14 months says 1st word)
 “ouchy”, “dada”
 Most common: “bow-wow”=dog, “bye-bye”
 Holophrase – single word that conveys a complete
thought
 First Sentences: (18-24 months)
 Telegraphic speech – early form of sentence
consisting of only a few essential words
 Omission of functional words (is, the)
 “Damma Deep”=grandma is sweeping the floor
 By age 3 speech is fluent, longer, and more complex
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Language Development
 Characteristics of Early Speech
 Children simplify language
 Children understand grammatical
relationships they cannot yet express
 Children underextend (restricting its meaning
to one object) and overextend word
meanings (everything that looks similar is the
same)
 Children overregularize rules (“I thinked”
instead of “I thought”)
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 Can you…
 Trace the typical sequence of milestones in
early language development, pointing out
the influence of the language babies hear
around them?
 Describe five ways in which early speech
differs from adult speech?
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Language Development
 Classic Theories of Language
Acquisition: The Nature-Nurture Debate
 Skinner (1957) maintained that language
learning, like other learning, is based on
experience: children learn language
through operant conditioning
 Observation, imitation, and reinforcement
contribute to language
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Language Development
 Classic Theories of Language
Acquisition: The Nature-Nurture Debate
 Chomsky suggested an inborn language
acquisition device (LAD) that programs
children's brains to analyze the language
they hear and to figure out its rules: nativism
 Most developmentalists today believe that
language acquisition depends on an
intertwining of nature and nurture
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Language Development
 Social Interaction: The Role of Parents
and Caregivers
 Prelinguistic period
 Vocabulary development
 Child-Directed Speech (CDS)
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Language Development
 Preparing For Literacy: The Benefits of
Reading Aloud
 Early readers are generally those whose
parents read to them frequently when they
were very young
 Children read to using a dialogic, or
shared, reading style show better
language, comprehension, and prereading
skills
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 Can you…
 Assess the arguments for and against the
value of child-directed speech (CDS)?
 Tell why reading aloud to children at an
early age is beneficial?
 Describe an effective way of reading aloud
to infants and toddlers?