Psikologi Anak
Pertemuan 4 - 5
Cognition and Language
Cognitive Developmental Approaches : Piaget
Piaget observed own 3 children; believed six processes used in
constructing knowledge
• Schemes – Actions or mental representations that organize knowledge
– Behavioral schemes: physical activities characterizing infancy
– Mental schemes: cognitive activities develop in childhood
• Assimilation — incorporate new information into existing knowledge
schemes; operates in very young infants
• Accommodation — adjust schemes to fit new information and
experiences; operates in very young infants
• Organization – Grouping isolated behaviors into a higher order; grouping
items into categories
• Equilibrium and equilibration – mechanisms proposed to explain how
children shift from one stage of thought to the next
– Disequilibrium — shift occurs as children experience cognitive conflict
– Equilibration — they resolve conflict through assimilation and accommodation, to
reach a new balance or equilibrium of thought
Stages of Development
Piaget’s theory unifies experiences and biology to explain cognitive development
• Motivation is internal search for equilibrium
• Four stages of development…progressively advanced and qualitatively
different
• Each stage is discontinuous from and more advanced than another.
Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive
Development
• Social contexts; minds are shaped by cultural
context in which they live
• Tools are provided by society
• Children actively construct their knowledge
and understanding through social interactions
The Zone of Proximal Development
• Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
– Tasks too difficult for children to master alone but that
can be mastered with guidance and assistance from
more-skilled person
Student can work
with the assistance
of an instructor
ZPD
Student can work
independently
• Scaffolding
– Changing level of support over course of a teaching
session to fit child’s current performance level
Vygotsky: Language and Thought
• Believed young children use language to plan,
guide, and monitor behavior
• Language and thought initially develop
independently, then merge
• Private speech: language of self-regulation
– Self talk (3 to 7 years of age)
– Inner talk: child’s thoughts
Information-Processing Approach
Focuses on ways people process information
about their world
– Manipulate information
– Monitor it
– Create strategies to deal with it
– Effectiveness involves attention, memory, thinking
Simplified model of information processing
Mechanisms of Change
Encoding
Mechanism by which
information gets into memory
Automaticity
Ability to process information
with little or no effort
Strategy
Construction
Discovering new procedure for
processing information
Metacognition
Cognition about cognition, or
“knowing about knowing”
Attention
focusing mental resources
Sustained
Attention
State of readiness to detect and
respond to small changes
occurring at random times in
environment; also called vigilance
Selective
Attention
Focusing on specific aspect of
experience that is relevant while
ignoring others
Divided
Attention
Concentrating on more than one
activity at a time
Infancy
• Newborns can detect
contours and fixate
• 4-month-olds have
selective attention
• Processes closely linked
to attention
– Habituation: decreased
responsiveness to
stimulus after repeated
presentations
– Dishabituation: recovery
of a habituated response
after change in stimulation
Childhood and
adolescence
• Most research on selective
attention
• Cognitive control of
attention shows changes
– Preschooler attends to
external salient stimuli
– Child of 6 to 7 attentive to
relevant information
– Ability to shift attention
increases with age; allows
for more complex task
involvement
Memory
retention of information over time
Process of memory
Infancy
• First Memories
– Rovee-Collier infant memory experiments
• Implicit memory: memory without conscious
recollection; skills and routine done automatically
• Explicit memory: conscious memory of facts and
experiences; doesn’t appear until after 6 months
• Infantile Amnesia
– Adults recall little or none of first three years
– Also called childhood amnesia
– Due to immaturity of prefrontal lobes in brain; play
important role in memory of events
Childhood Memory
• Considerable improvement after infancy
• Short-term memory — memory span for up to 15
to 30 seconds without rehearsal
• Working memory — kind of mental workbench for
manipulating and assembling information
– Make decisions, solve problems
– Comprehend written and spoken language
• Long-term memory — relatively permanent and
unlimited type of memory
Working Memory Model
Activities to improve
information processing
• Rehearsal — repetition
• Organizing — trying to
group related information
• Imagery — creating
mental images
• Elaboration — engaging in
more extensive processing
of information
Thinking
Manipulating and transforming information in memory
• Reason, reflect, evaluate to make decisions
• Concepts — categories that group things
– Perceptual categorization: as young as 3 mos
– Categorization increases in second year; infants differentiate more
• Critical thinking: grasping deeper meaning of ideas
Involves:
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Ask what, how, and why
Examine facts and determine evidence
Recognize one or more explanations exist
Compare various answers, select the best
Evaluate before accepting as truth
Speculate beyond what is known
Metacognition
Knowledge about when and where to use particular strategies
• Theory of mind—thoughts about how mental processes work
Child’s theory of mind
– Ages 2 to 3 — begin to understand
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Perceptions
Desires
Emotions
– Age 5 — realization of false beliefs
– Middle and late childhood — mind seen as active constructor of knowledge
• Metamemory—knowledge about memory
– Limited in children
– Preschoolers have
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Inflated opinion of memories
•
Little appreciation for importance of memory cues
– Understanding of memory abilities and skill in evaluating performance
improves considerably by 11 to 12 years of age
– Adolescents more likely than children to manage and monitor thinking
Intelligence
thinking skills and the ability to solve problems and to adapt
and learn from everyday experiences
• Theories of Multiple Intelligences
– Factor approaches
• Spearman’s two factors theory
• Thurstone’s 7 primary mental abilities: verbal comprehension,
number ability, word fluency, spatial visualization, associative
memory, reasoning, and perceptual speed
– Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence: verbal,
mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, musical,
interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic
– Sternberg’s triarchic theory : analytical, creative, and
practical
• Emotional intelligence
Intelligence
• Genetic and environmental influence
• Development of intelligence
– Test of infant intelligence: Gesell’s and Bayley
scales of infant development, Fagan test of infant
intelligence
• Stability and change in intelligence through
adolescence
Language
a form of communication that is based on a system of symbols
• Infinite Generativity
– The ability to produce an endless number of
meaningful sentences using a finite set of words and
rules.
• Language’s rule systems
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Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics
Pragmatics
How Language Develops – Infancy
• Babbling and Other Vocalizations
– The purpose of early communications is to attract
attention from caregivers and others in the environment.
• The first year sequence of sounds and gestures: crying,
cooing, babbling, gestures
• Recognizing Language Sounds
– Long before they learn words, infants make fine
distinctions among the sounds of language.
– From birth to about 6 months of age, infants recognize
when sounds change despite the language that is being
spoken.
– By about 6 months of age, infants have started to
specialize in the speech sounds of their native language.
How Language Develops – Infancy
• First Words
– First understanding of words between 8 to 12 months.
– Spoken vocabulary begins when the infant utters its first word,
usually at about 10 to 15 months of age.
– The average 18-month-old speaks about 50 words; children
speak about 200 words by 2 years of age.
– Overextension is the tendency to apply a word to objects that
are not related to, or are inappropriate for, the word’s meaning;
underextension is the tendency to apply a word too narrowly.
• Two-Word Utterances
– By the time children are 18 to 24 months of age, they usually
utter two-word statements.
– Telegraphic speech is the use of short and precise words
without grammatical markers to communicate.
How Language Develops –
Early Childhood
• Between ages 2 and 3 years, children quickly
move into three-, four-, and five-word
combinations, and transition from simple
sentences/single ideas to complex sentences.
• As children go through their early childhood
years, their grasp of the rule systems that
govern language increases.
How Language Develops –
Early Childhood
• Understanding syntax
• Advances in Semantics
– As children move beyond the two-word stage, their
knowledge of meanings also rapidly advances.
– The speaking vocabulary of a 6-year-old ranges from 8,000
to 14,000 words.
• Advances in Pragmatics
– Displacement: At about 3 years of age children improve
their ability to talk about things that are not physically
present.
– At about 4 years of age, children develop a remarkable
sensitivity to the needs of others in conversation, and
begin to use the article “the”; by 5 they sometimes use the
article “a.”
– Around age 4 or 5, they change their speech style to suit
the situation.
How Language Develops –
Middle and late childhood
• Vocabulary and Grammar
– Children become less tied to the actions and
perceptual dimensions associated with words;
more analytical in their approach to the words.
– Metalinguistic awareness, the knowledge of
language that allows children “to think about their
language, understand what words
How Language Develops –
Middle and late childhood
• Reading
– Children who enter elementary school with a small
vocabulary are at risk for developing reading
problems.
– Reading skills develop over many years and require a
prior ability to use language to talk about things that
are not present; learning what a word is; and learning
how to recognize and talk about sounds.
– Alphabetic principle: Letters represent sounds in the
language.
• Whole-language vs. Basic-skills-and-phonetics
approach
How Language Develops
• Bilingualism
– Bilingualism, the ability to speak two languages, has a
positive effect on children's cognitive development.
• Bilingual children perform better than their singlelanguage peers on tests of control of attention, concept
formation, analytical reasoning, cognitive flexibility, and
cognitive complexity (Bialystok, 1999, 2001).
• They also have better formal language skills.
• Learning a second language, and learning correct
pronunciation of the language, is easier for children
than for adolescents or adults.
Biological Influences
• Linguist Noam Chomsky (1957) believes humans
are biologically prewired to learn language at a
certain time and in a certain way.
• Children are prepared by nature with the ability
to detect the sounds of language and to detect
and follow language rules.
• Brain
– Aphasia: A language disorder, resulting from brain damage, that
involves a loss of the ability to use words.
– Broca’s area: An area of the brain’s left frontal lobe that directs
the muscle movements involved in speech production.
– Wernicke’s area: An area of the temporal lobe in the brain’s left
hemisphere that is involved in language comprehension.
Biological and Environmental
Influences
• Is There a Critical Period for Learning
Language?
– Critical Period
• A fixed time period in which certain experiences can
have a long-lasting effect on development; beyond this
period, learning is difficult or impossible.
• Young children’s proficiency in language does not seem
to involve a biologically salient critical period that older
children and adults have passed.
Environmental Influences
• The Behavioral View
– Language represents chains of responses acquired through
reinforcement.
– Language is a complex, learned skill.
– Criticisms: Children learn the syntax of their native language even if
they aren’t reinforced; there is an extensive orderliness of language
not explained by the behaviorist view.
• Interaction with people: The support and involvement of caregivers
and teachers facilitate a child’s language learning.
• The quantity of talk that parents direct to their children is linked
with the child’s vocabulary growth.
– The quantity of talk is linked to the family’s socioeconomic status.
• Child-Directed Speech
– The kind of speech often used by adults to talk to babies and young
children—in a higher pitch than normal and with simple words and
sentences.
Biological and Environmental
Influences
• Strategies to enhance the child’s acquisition of
language include:
– Recasting: Rephrasing something the child has
said.
– Expanding: Restating, in a linguistically
sophisticated form, something the child has said.
– Labeling: Identifying the names of objects.
• Encouragement, not drill and practice, is the
key to language development.