Cognitive Development in Infancy and
Toddlerhood
Chapter 5
Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental
Theory
 Children move through 4 stages of cognitive development
between infancy and adolescence
 1st stage – sensorimotor stage: birth-2 years
 Initially “think” with their eyes, ears, and hands
 By the end, children can solve problems and represent their
experiences in speech and gesture
Piaget’s Theory: Schemes
 Psychological structures
 Organized ways of making sense of experience
 Change with age
 1st – schemes are action-based sensorimotor patterns
 Ex: a 6 month old drops objects in a rigid way, letting go of a rattle or
teething ring and watching with interest
 Later move to “thinking before acting” pattern – creative and
deliberate
 Ex. 18 month old, “dropping scheme” becomes more deliberate and
creative, tossing toys down stairs, throwing them in the air, bouncing
them off walls
Building Schemes
 2 processes account for changes in schemes, adaptation and
organization
 Adaptation – involves building schemes through direct
interaction with the environment
 Assimilation – use current schemes to interpret the external
world
 Ex. When dropping objects, baby is assimilating them to his sensorimotor
“dropping scheme”
 Accommodation – create new schemes or adjust old ones
after noticing that the current ways of thinking do not capture
the environment completely
 Ex. When a baby drops objects in different ways, it modifies its dropping
scheme to take account of the varied properties of objects
Linking Schemes
 Organization –new schemes are rearranged and linked
with other schemes to create an interconnected cognitive
system
 Internal process, apart from direct contact with the
environment
 Ex. Baby will eventually relate “dropping” to “throwing” and to
its developing understanding of “nearness” and “farness”
The Sensorimotor Stage
 Circular reaction – stumbling onto a new experience caused
by the baby’s own motor activity, then trying to repeat the event
again and again
 A sensorimotor response that first occurred by chance becomes
strengthened into a new scheme
 Provides basis for forming 1st schemes
 Ex. 2 month old accidentally makes a smacking noise after a feeding,
then tries to repeat the noise until it is a little expert at lip smacking
 Initially centers on the infant’s own body
 Then turns toward manipulation of objects
 In the second year is aimed at producing novel outcomes
Sensorimotor Substages
Reflexive Schemes
Birth –1 mo.
Newborn reflexes
Primary Circular
Reactions
1–4 months
Simple motor habits centered
around own body
Secondary Circular
Reactions
4–8 months
Repeat interesting effects in
surroundings
Coordination of
Secondary Circular
Reactions
8–12 months
Intentional, goal-directed behavior;
object permanence
Tertiary Circular
Reactions
12–18
months
Explore properties of objects
through novel actions
Mental
Representations
12 months –
2 years
Internal depictions of objects or
events; deferred imitation
Sensorimotor Substages
 1 – Reflexive schemes
 Babies suck, grasp, and look in much the same way no matter what
experiences they encounter
 Ex. 2 week old laying in bed next to her father, begins sucking on his arm
 2 – Primary circular reactions
 Repeat chance behaviors largely motivated by basic needs
 Ex. 1 month old will open its mouth differently for a nipple than for a spoon
 3 – Secondary circular reactions
 Try to repeat interesting events in the surrounding environment that are
caused by their own actions
 Ex. 4 month old accidentally knocks a toy hanging in front of her producing
a fascinating swinging motion and attempts to repeat this effect
Sensorimotor Substages
 4 – Coordination of secondary circular reactions
 Combine schemes into new, more complex action sequences
 Intentional or goal directed behavior – coordinating schemes
deliberately to solve simple problems
 Object permanence – understanding that objects continue to exist
when out of sight
 Ex. Mother shows 11 month old a toy, then hides it under a blanket
 Infant coordinates two schemes, “pushing” the blanket aside and “grasping” the
toy
 Still make the A-not-B search error
 If they reach several times for an object in 1st hiding place (A), then see it moved
to a 2nd hiding place (B), they still search for it in the first hiding place (A)
Sensorimotor Substages
 5 – Teritary circular reactions
 Toddlers repeat behaviors with variation or experiment
 Ex. 16 month old figures out how to fit a shape through a hole
in a container by turning and twisting it until it falls through
 Ex. 18 month old figures out how to use a stick to get toys that
are out of reach
Sensorimotor Substages
 6 – Mental representations
 Ability to create internal depictions of information that the mind can
manipulate
 Images – mental pictures of objects, people, and spaces
 Concepts – categories in which similar objects or events are grouped
together
 Arrive at solutions suddenly rather than through trial-and-error, like
they are experimenting with actions inside their heads
 Ex. 19 month old bumps his new push toy against a wall, pauses for a
moment as if “thinking,” then immediately turns the toy in a new direction
 Deferred imitation – ability to remember and copy the behavior
of models who are not present
 Make-believe play – acting out everyday and imaginary activities
Follow-Up Research
 Many studies show that infants display certain understandings earlier
than Piaget believed
 Ex. Even newborns try to explore and control the external world
 Violation-of-expectation method
 Used to explore what infants know about hidden objects and other
aspects of physical reality
 Can habituate babies to a physical event (expose them to the event until
their looking declines)
 Familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge will be tested
 Can also show babies an expected event (one that follows physical laws) and
an unexpected event (a variation of the first event that violates physical
laws)
 Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is
“surprised” by a deviation from physical reality and therefore, is aware of that
aspect of the physical world
Object Permanence
 Infants young as 2.5 to 3.5 months old show indications of object permanence, Piaget
believed this didn’t occur until 8-12 months
 look longer at the unexpected event
 Suggests that they had some awareness that an object moved behind the screen would
continue to exist
Object Permanence
 Investigators measuring ERP brain-wave activity of 6 month
olds found brain-wave patterns the same as those of adults
told to sustain a mental image of an object
Deferred Imitation
 Piaget: said doesn’t occur until 18 months
 Newer research
 6 weeks old – facial imitation
 Infants who watched an unfamiliar adult’s facial expression imitated it when exposed
to the same adult making a neutral expression the next day
 6-9 months – copy actions with objects
 Infants who watched an adult perform specific actions with a puppet, reenacted those
actions a day later when given the puppet
 12-14 months – imitate rationally
 Infer others’ intentions
 More likely to imitate purposeful behaviors than accidental behaviors
 18 months – imitate intended but not completed actions
 Ex. 18 month old watches mother try to pour cereal into a bowl but she misses and
spills some on the counter, the child then starts picking up the cereal and dropping it
into the bowl, indicating he knew what her intentions were
Problem Solving
 Develop intentional action sequences around 7-8 months
 Piaget was right!
 BUT… representational skills soon permit more effective
problem solving than Piaget’s theory suggests
 10-12 months – solve problems by analogy
 Can take a solution strategy from one problem and apply it to
other relevant problems
 Ex. 11 month old uses a stick to knock down a toy that is out of
reach. Later, she uses her toy rake to knock her juice bottle off
the table.
Evaluation of Sensorimotor Stage
Develop when • Object search
• A-not-B
Piaget
• Make-believe play
suggested
• Object permanence
Develop earlier • Deferred imitation
than Piaget
• Categorization
suggested
• Problem solving by analogy
Some suggest infants are born with core knowledge in
several domains of thought
Alternative Explanations
 Most researchers now believe infants have some built-in
cognitive equipment for making sense of experience
 But there is intense disagreement over the extent of this initial
understanding
 Some researchers believe babies’ cognitive starting point is
limited to a set of biases for attending to certain information
and general-purpose techniques for analyzing perceptual
information
 Others support the core knowledge perspective
 Acknowledges that experience is essential for children to
extend their initial knowledge but does not identify which
experiences are most important
Core Knowledge Perspective
 Babies are born with a set of innate knowledge systems, or core domains
of thought, that support early, rapid development
 Argues that infants could not make sense of the complex stimulation
around them without having been genetically “set up” to do so
 Acknowledges that experience is essential for children to extend their
initial knowledge but does not identify which experiences are most
important
 In the first few months of life infants already have some physical knowledge
 Awareness of basic object properties such as permanence, solidity, and
gravity
 An inherited foundation of linguistic knowledge enables rapid language
acquisition
 Infants’ early orientation toward people initiates rapid development of
psychological knowledge
 Understanding of mental states, intentions, emotions, desires, and beliefs
Information Processing
 Contrasts Piaget’s unified theory of cognitive development
 Focuses on various aspects of thinking, including attention,
memory, categorization skills, and problem solving
 Remember the flow charts for problem solving?
Structure of the Information-Processing
System
 Assumes that we hold information in 3 parts of the mental system
 Sensory register, working or short-term memory, and long-term
memory
 Assumes we use mental strategies to operate on information so
that we will retain it, use it efficiently, and adapt it to changing
circumstances
 Believe the basic structure of the system remains similar
throughout life
 But, capacity (amount of information that can be retained and
processed at once) and the speed of processing information increases,
making more complex forms of thinking possible with age
Structure of the Information-Processing
System
 Sensory register – where information enters, sights and sounds are
represented directly and stored briefly
 Working, or short-term memory – 2nd part of the mind, where we
actively apply mental strategies as we “work” on a limited amount of
information
 As we connect separate pieces of information into a single representation, we
make more room in working memory for more information
 The central executive, a special part of working memory, is the conscious,
reflective part of our mental system
 Decides what to attend to and coordinates incoming information with information already
in the system
 Long-term memory – 3rd and largest storage area, our permanent
knowledge base, unlimited
 The longer we hold information in working memory, the more likely it will be
transferred to long-term memory
 Retrieval – getting information back from the system, aided by categorization
(like a library arranged by subject)
Attention
 Infants gradually attend to more aspects of the environment,
taking in information more quickly
 Ex. Newborns require 3-4 minutes to habituate and recover to
novel visual stimuli
 By 4-5 months old habituation to complex visual stimulus takes about 5-
10 seconds
 With the transition to toddlerhood, sustained attention
improves
 Ability to keep attention focused
 Ex. A toddler who stacks blocks or puts them in a container
must sustain attention long enough to reach the goal
Memory
 Retention of visual events increases dramatically over infancy and
toddlerhood
 3 month olds – remember habituated action for 1 week
 6 month olds - remember habituated action for 2 weeks
 Continues to increase with age
 Recognition – noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to
one previously experienced
 Simplest form of memory: all babies have to do is indicate that a new
stimulus is identical or similar to a previous one
 Recall – more challenging because it involves remembering
something not present
 Emerges by 12 months of age
 Indicated by ability to find hidden objects and imitate others’ actions
long after observing the behavior
Categorization
 Even young infants can categorize
 Grouping similar objects and events into a single representation
 Helps infants learn and remember new information
 Earliest categories are perceptual
 Based on appearance (shape, size, color, and other physical properties)
 By end of 1st year of life are conceptual
 Based on common functions (food items, furniture, animals, plants, vehicles, kitchen
utensils and spatial location)
 In the 2nd year toddlers become active categorizers
 Play behaviors (such as touching and sorting) reveal the meaning they have attached
to categories
 Ex. 14 month olds shown a rabbit and a motorcycle usually offer a drink only to the
rabbit, indicating they understand that certain actions are appropriate for some
categories but not for others
 Exploration of objects and expanding knowledge of the world, as well as advancing
vocabulary, contribute to the capacity to group objects by functions and behaviors
Evaluation of Information-Processing
Findings
 Emphasized the continuity of human thinking from infancy into
adulthood
 Challenging Piaget’s stage view of early cognitive development
 Ex. If 3 month olds can remember events over a period of time and can
categorize stimuli, then they must have some ability to mentally represent
their experiences
 Piaget believed mental representation did not occur until 18 months
 Major strength: analyzing cognition into its components
 Also its major weakness: hasn’t yet put these components together into a
comprehensive theory
 How to overcome this weakness
 Combine Piaget’s theory with the information-processing approach
 Apply a dynamic systems view
 Analyze each cognitive attainment to see how it results from a complex system of
prior accomplishments and the child’s current goals
Social Context of Early Cognitive
Development
 Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory: complex mental activities are
based in social interaction
 Through joint activities with more mature members of their society,
children master activities and think in ways that are meaningful in
their specific culture
 Zone of proximal development – a range of tasks that a child
cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of more skilled
partners
 Ex. Adult introduces child to a new activity the child is capable of
mastering but is challenging enough that the child cannot do it alone
 As the adult guides and supports, the child joins in the interaction and picks
up mental strategies
 As the child’s competence increases, the adult steps back, permitting the
child to take more responsibility for the task
Social Context of Early Cognitive
Development
 Vygotsky’s idea have been applied mostly to older children,
who are more skilled in language and social communication
 Recently, these ideas have been extended into infancy and
toddlerhood
 Babies are equipped with capacities that ensure that caregivers
will interact with them
 Then adults adjust the environment and their communication in
ways that promote learning adapted to their cultural
circumstances
 Vygotsky shows how cultural variations in social experiences
affect the development of mental strategies
Individual Differences in Early Mental
Development
 Mental tests measure cognitive products that reflect mental
development and predict future performance
 Contrasts cognitive theories which are concerned with the
process of development
 Goal of mental tests: measure behaviors that reflect
development and arrive at scores that predict future
performance
 Such as later intelligence, school achievement, and adult
vocational success
Infant and Toddler Intelligence Tests
 Challenging because babies cannot answer questions or
follow directions
 Simply present stimuli and observe the babies’ responses
 Most tests emphasize perceptual and motor responses
 Some new tests focus on early language, cognition, and social
behavior
Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler
Development
 Used with children from 1 month to 3.5 years old
 Most recent edition: Baley-III, 3 main subtests
 Cognitive scale
 Includes items regarding attention to familiar and unfamiliar objects, looking for a fallen object,
and pretend play
 Language scale
 Assesses understanding and expression of language
 Ex. Recognition of objects and people, following simple directions, and naming objects and
pictures
 Motor scale
 Includes gross and fine motor skills, such as grasping, sitting, stacking blocks, and climbing stairs
 2 additional scales depend on parental report
 Social-emotional scale: asks caregivers about behaviors such as ease of calming, social
responsiveness, and imitation in play
 Adaptive behavior scale: asks about adaptation to the demands of daily life, including
communication, self-control, following rules, and getting along with others
Computing Intelligence Test Scores
 Intelligence tests for infants, children, and adults are scored in
much the same way
 Intelligence Quotient (IQ) – indicates the extent to which the
raw score (# of items passed) deviates from the typical
performance of same-aged individuals
 To make this comparison possible test designers engage in
standardization
 Standardization – giving the test to a large, representative sample
and using the results as the standard for interpreting scores
 Within the standardization sample, results at each age level form a
normal distribution
 Normal distribution – a bell-shaped curve in which most scores
fall near the mean, or average, with progressively fewer towards the
extremes
Computing Intelligence Test Scores
 When intelligence tests are
standardized, the mean IQ
is set at 100
 An individual’s IQ is higher
or lower than 100 by an
amount that reflects how
much his or her test
performance deviates from
the standardization-sample
mean
 IQ offers a way of finding
out whether an individual
is ahead, behind, or on
time in mental
development compared
with others of the same age
Predicting Later Performance from
Infant Tests
 Infant tests are poor predictors of later intelligence
 Infants and toddlers easily become distracted, fatigued, or bored
during testing, so their scores often do not reflect their true abilities
 However, Bayley-III cognitive and language scales are good
predictors of pre-school mental test performance
 Because items on infant tests do not tap the same dimensions of
intelligence measured at older ages, they are labeled
developmental quotients, or DQs (not to be confused with
Dairy Queen)
 Infant test scores are somewhat better at making long-term
predictions for extremely low-scoring babies
 Thus are largely used to help identify babies who are at-risk for
developmental problems
Early Environment and Mental
Development
 Home environment
 Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment
(HOME) – checklist for gathering information about the quality of
children’s home lives through observation and parental interviews
 Regardless of SES and ethnicity an organized, simulating physical
setting and parental affection, involvement, and encouragement of
new skills repeatedly predict better language and IQ scores in
toddlerhood and early childhood
 Especially the extent to which parents talk to infants and toddlers
 When parents interact intrusively, bombarding young children
with instructions, infants and toddlers are likely to play
immaturely and do poorly on mental tests
Infant and Toddler Child
Care
 Today, more than 60% of U.S. mothers with a child under
age 2 are employed
 Quality of child care for infants and toddlers has an impact
on development of cognitive and social skills regardless of
SES or ethnicity
 Poor-quality child care: score lower on measures of cognitive
and social skills
 Good child care:
 can reduce the negative impact of a stressed, poverty-stricken home life
 can sustain the benefits of growing up in an economically advantaged
family
Infant and Toddler Child care
 Many U.S children from low-income families have
inadequate child care
 Worst child care: middle-SES families
 Especially likely to place children in for-profit centers where
quality tends to be the lowest
 Low-SES children more often attend publicly subsidized,
nonprofit centers, which have smaller group sizes and better
child-teacher ratios
Signs of Developmentally Appropriate
Infant and Toddler Child Care

Physical setting
 Environment is clean, in good repair, well-lit, and well-ventilated, not overcrowded

Toys and equipment
 Appropriate for infants and toddlers, stored on low shelves within easy reach; cribs, high-chairs, infant
seats, and child-sized tables and chairs are available

Caregiver-child ratio
 No greater than one to three for infants and one to six for toddlers; staffing is consistent, so infants and
toddlers can form relationships with particular caregivers

Daily activities
 Times for active play, quiet play, naps, snacks, and meals; schedule is flexible rather than rigid

Interactions among adults and children
 Caregivers respond promptly to infants’ and toddlers’ distress; hold, talk to, sing to, and read to them

Caregiver qualifications
 Some training in child development, first aid, and safety

Relationships with parents
 Parents welcome anytime; caregivers talk frequently with parents

Licensing and accreditation
 Licensed by the state
Early Intervention for At-Risk Infants
and Toddlers
 Studies indicate that poverty-stricken children are likely to show
gradual declines in intelligence test scores and to achieve poorly
when they reach school age
 Due to stressful home environment that undermines children’s ability
to learn and that increase their likelihood of remaining poor
throughout their lives
 Center based – children attend an organized child-care or
preschool program where they receive educational, nutritional,
and health services, and parents receive child-rearing and other
social-service supports
 Home based – skilled adult visits the home and works with
parents, teaching them how to stimulate young children’s
development
Early Intervention for At-Risk Infants
and Toddlers
 Children participating in interventions, both center and home based,
score higher than untreated controls on mental tests by age 2
 The earlier and longer the intervention, the better the cognitive and
academic performance in childhood and adolescence
 In one research project, the treatment group of children who
participated in year-round full time child care program showed
greater academic achievements throughout the school years as well as
higher rates of college enrollment
 Sad reality: without some form of early intervention, many children
born into economically disadvantaged families will not reach their
potential
Language Development
 In the 1950s researchers did not take seriously the idea that
very young children might be able to figure out important
properties of language
 As a result the first two theories of language development
were extreme views
 Behaviorism – regards language development as entirely due to
environmental influences
 Nativism – assumes that children are “pre-wired” to master the
intricate rules of their language
Behaviorist Perspective
 B.F. Skinner proposed that language, like all behaviors, is
acquired through operant conditioning
 When parents reinforce their baby’s sounds that most sound like
words
 Ex. Baby babbles “book-a-book-a-dook-a-nook-a”
 While baby is babbling, parents show it a book and say “book”
 Soon after, baby will say “book-aaa” when it sees a book
 Imitation combines with reinforcement to promote language
development
 But, both are viewed as supporting language rather than fully
explaining it
Nativist Perspective
 Linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory regards young childrens’ language skill
as innate
 Children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD)
containing a set of rules common to all languages
 Permits children to understand and speak whichever language they hear in a
rule-oriented fashion, as soon as they learn enough words
 Nativist perspective is consistent with evidence that childhood is a
sensitive period for language acquisition
 Challenges to Nativism suggest that it is not a complete account of
language acquisition
 Children do not acquire language as quickly as nativist theory suggests
 They refine grammatical forms more gradually than Chomsky assumed
 For most people, language is housed largely in the left hemisphere of the
cerebral cortex, but language areas in the cortex also develop as children
acquire language
Interactionist Perspective
 Emphasizes interactions between inner capacities and environmental
influences
 Some interactionists apply information-processing theory to language
development
 Believe that children use powerful general cognitive capacities to make sense
of their complex language environment
 Other interactionists emphasize that children’s social skills and language
experiences are centrally involved in language development
 An active child, well-endowed for making sense of language, strives to
communicate
 In doing so, the child cues her caregivers to provide appropriate language
experiences, which help relate the content and structure of language to its
social meaning
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfOlPK2P_G8
Getting Ready to Talk
 Cooing and babbling
 Around 2 months – babies begin to make vowel-like noises (called cooing)
 Around 6 months – babbling appears: infants repeat consonant-vowel
combinations in long strings
 Ex. “bababababa” or “nanananana”
 By around 7 months – babbling includes many sounds common in spoken
languages
 By 10 months – babbling reflects the sound and intonation patterns of the
infant’s language community
 Babies everywhere, even those who are deaf, start babbling at about the
same age and produce a similar range of early sounds
 But for speech to develop further, infants must be able to hear human
speech and if a deaf infant is not exposed to sign-language babbling will
stop entirely
 Deaf infants exposed to sign-language from birth babble with their hands
Getting Ready to Talk
 Becoming a communicator
 At birth, infants initiate interaction through eye contact and end it by
looking away
 Preparation for some aspects of conversational behavior
 By 4 months – infants start to display joint attention: gazing in the
same direction adults are looking in
 Joint attention becomes more accurate around 10-11 months
 Adults also follow the baby’s gaze and label what is seen
 Around 4-6 months – caregiver-infant interaction begins to include
give-and-take, as in pat-a-cake and peek-a-boo games
 At the end of the 1st year infants use preverbal gestures to influence the
behavior of others
 Parents responsiveness teaches them that using language leads to desired
results
 Ex. Pointing at the refrigerator when hungry, mother then feeds the child
First Words
 2nd half of the 1st year – infants begin to understand word
meanings
 Utter 1st words around 1 year
 This achievement builds on the sensorimotor foundations
Piaget described and on categories that children form during
the 1st 2 years
 Usually they refer to important people (“mama,” “dada”),
animals (“doggie,” “kitty”), objects that move (“ball,” “car”),
foods (“milk,” “apple”), familiar actions (“bye-bye,” “more”), or
outcomes of familiar actions (“wet,” “hot”)
 In their 1st 50 words, toddlers rarely name things that just sit
there, like “table” or “vase”
First Words
 When toddlers first learn words, they often apply them too narrowly, an
error called underextention
 Ex. 16 month old only uses the word “doggie” to refer to her stuffed dog
 As vocabulary expands, a more common error is overextention –
applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is
appropriate
 Ex. Using the word “car” for buses, trains, trucks, and fire engines
 Overextentions reflect toddlers’ sensitivity to categories, as in use of “car”
for all wheeled objects
 Overextentions illustrate the distinction between language production (the
words children use) and language comprehension (the words they
understand)
 At all ages language comprehension develops before language
production
 Ex. A 2 year old who refers to trucks, trains, and bikes as “car” may look at or
point to these objects correctly when given their names
The 2-Word Utterance Phase
 Young toddlers add 2 to 3 words per week to their spoken vocabularies
 But between 18 and 24 months, children may add 1 to 2 words per day
 Once toddlers can produce about 200 words, they begin to form 2-word
utterances called telegraphic speech
 “go car,” “mommy shoe,” “door open”
 2-word speech consists largely of simple formulas
 “more + X,” “eat + X” with different words inserted in the X position
 Toddlers rarely make gross grammatical errors
 Saying “chair my” instead of “my chair”
 Word-order regularities are usually copies of adult word-pairings
 ex. “would you like some more sandwich,” toddler will learn to repeat “more
sandwich”
 Indicates toddlers first acquire “concrete pieces of language” from frequent word
parings they hear and they gradually generalize from those pieces to construct
word order and other grammatical rules
Individual Differences
 On average, children produce 1st word around their 1st birthday
 But the range is large, from 8-18 months
 Studies show that girls are slightly ahead of boys in early vocabulary growth
 Personality is also a factor, with shy toddlers slightly behind their agemates
 Shy toddlers often wait until they understand a great deal before trying to speak,
but once they do speak their vocabularies increase rapidly
 The more words caregivers use the more children learn
 2 distinct styles of early language learning
 Referential style – vocabularies consist mainly of words that refer to objects
(most common style)
 Expressive style – learn to produce many more pronouns and social formulas
(“thank you”)
 Because they believe words are for talking about people’s feelings and needs
Supporting Early Language
 Infants
 Respond to coos and babbles with speech sounds and words
 Encourages experimentation with sounds that can later be blended into
first words
 Provides experience with turn-taking pattern of human conversation
 Establish joint attention and comment on what child sees
 Predicts earlier onset of language and faster vocabulary development
 Play social games, such as pat-a-cake and peekaboo
 Provides experience with turn-taking pattern of human conversation
Supporting Early Language
 Toddlers
 Engage in joint make-believe play
 Promotes all aspects of conversational dialogue
 Engage in frequent conversations
 Predicts faster early language development and academic success during
school years
 Read to child often, engaging them in dialogues about picture
books
 Provides exposure to many aspects of language including vocabulary,
grammar, communication skills, and information about written symbols
and story structures
Supporting Early Language
 Adults also unconsciously support early language learning
through child-directed speech (CDS)
 CDS – form of communication made up of short sentences
with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation,
distinct pauses between speech segments, and repetition of new
words in a variety of contexts
 Fosters development of joint attention, turn-taking, and
caregivers’ sensitivity to toddlers’ preverbal gestures
 Ex. Toddler: “go car”
Mother: “Yes, time to go in the car. Where is your jacket?”
Toddler: [looks around, walks to the closet.] “Dacket!”
Mother: “There’s that jacket! [helps toddler the jacket] On it goes! Let’s zip up.
[Zips up the jacket]