Lifespan overheads chapter 5: cognitive development in infancy and toddlerhood
Chapter 5: cognitive development in infancy and
toddlerhood
Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory
Schemes: the child’s organized way of making sense of
experience. At first, schemes are motor action patterns.
changing schemes: organization and adaptation
organization: combining existing schemes into new and
more complex intellectual structures
adaptation: adjusting to the demands of the environment.
Adaptation occurs through 2 activities: assimilation and
accommodation.
 assimilation: the child tries to interpret new experiences
in terms of her existing models of the world
 accommodation: modifying existing structures so as to
account for new experiences
 equilibrium and disequilibrium
The Sensorimotor stage (birth – 2 yrs)
Substage 1 - reflexive schemes (birth to 1 month)
Substage 2 - primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
Substage 3 - secondary circular reactions (4-8 months)
Substage 4 - coordination of secondary circular reactions (8-12
months)
Substage 5 - tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months)
Substage 6 – mental representation
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Lifespan overheads chapter 5: cognitive development in infancy and toddlerhood
Recent research on sensorimotor development
 there is evidence that infants understand object permanence
as early as 3 ½ months of age!
 a grasp of the basic regularities of the physical world is
present within the first few months
 deferred imitation is present as early as 6 weeks of age
 At the end of the 2nd year, toddlers can imitate actions an
adult tried to do but didn’t do successfully
The Information Processing View
(1) Sensory register
(2) Working Memory (a.k.a. Short-Term Memory)
(3) Long-Term Memory
Attention:
 between 1 and 2 months of age, infants explore objects
and patterns more thoroughly
 get better at managing attention, taking in information
more quickly
 newborns take about 3-4 minutes to habituate to a novel
visual stimulus. But by 4-5 months, infants require as little
as 5 to 10 seconds to take in a complex visual stimulus
 capacity for sustained attention improves with age
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Memory:
 by 3 months infants remember a visual stimulus for 24
hours
 by the end of their 1st year, they remember it for several
days, and in the case of faces, a few weeks
 the mobile study
Categorization:
 7 to 12 month olds structure objects into adultlike
categories - foods, furniture, birds, mammals, vehicles,
kitchen utensils, etc.
 earliest categories are perceptual
 by end of 1st year, categories are becoming conceptual
 in their 2nd year, toddlers are active organizers
The Social Context of Early Social Development
Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory:
 emphasizes the social contexts that children are
embedded in, and how they affect their cognitive
structures
 by interacting with peers and adults kids come to
master activities and think in ways that have meaning
for their culture
 zone of proximal development: a range of tasks that the
child cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of
more skilled partners
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Individual Differences in early mental development
Infant intelligence tests:
 the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (1 month to 3
½ years): consists of 2 scales
(1) the mental scale, which includes turning to a
sound, looking for a fallen object, building a
tower of cubes, naming pictures
(2) the motor scale, assessing gross and fine
skills like grasping, sitting, drinking from a cup,
jumping
 computing intelligence scores (IQs):
 normal or bell curve
 norms: standards against which future test takers
can be compared.
 100 is average; 115 is at the 84th%ile; 130 is at the
98th %ile; 85 is at the 16th %ile; 70 is at the 2nd %ile
 many infant tests do not predict later intelligence well
 DQs (developmental quotients) instead of IQs
 One exception: if the baby is a very low scorer, this
does predict low scores later on
 the information processing view of infant intelligence:
speed of habituation & dishabituation to visual stimuli are
the best available predictors of intelligence from early
childhood into adolescence
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Early environment and mental development
 home environment: the Home Observation for
Measurement of the Environment (HOME)
 emotional and verbal responsiveness of
the parent to the child
 acceptance of the child
 organization of the physical environment
 appropriate play materials
 parental involvement with the child
 variety in daily stimulation of the child.
 family living conditions predict childrens’ IQ beyond
the contribution of parental IQ
Infant and Toddler child care:
 infants and young kids exposed to poor child care,
regardless of their own SES, score lower on cognitive and
social skills
 high-quality child care is associated with cognitive,
emotional, and social competence in middle childhood
and adolescence
 children most likely to have poor child care are those from
low-income and poverty-stricken families
Early Intervention for at-risk infants and toddlers
Children of poverty tend to show a gradual decline in IQ
scores, and achieve poorly when they reach school age.
Interventions:
 childcare/preschool programs with educational, nutritional,
and health services
 home-based interventions that teach the parents how to
stimulate the child's development
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 The more intense the intervention, the greater childrens’
later cognitive and academic performance
 e.g. the California Abecedarian Project of the 1970s:
early intervention had a large and lasting impact
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Language Development
kids say their first word around 12 months old
once words appear, language develops rapidly
between 1 ½ and 2 years, toddlers combine two words
by age 6, they have a vocabulary of about 10 000 words,
use elaborate sentences, are skilled conversationalists
Theories of language development:
The behaviourist perspective: imitation and reinforcement
are behind the learning of language
Skinner (1957): children learn to speak because they
are reinforced for it. We teach language by reinforcing
successive approximations of grammatical speech.
Problems with the empiricist viewpoint:
 a mother’s approval or disapproval depends on the
semantics of what the child says not it’s grammatical
correctness.
 a lot of first statements are things that adults and older
kids never say!
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The Nativist Perspective:
Noam Chomsky : the structure of language is too
complex to be taught by parents or discovered through
trial and error.
 language acquisition device (LAD): an innate
linguistic processor activated by verbal input
 language acquisition is natural and almost automatic,
as long as kids are exposed to linguistic data.
Support for this view:
- kids reach the same linguistic milestones at the same age
- language is species-specific
- we are “wired” to understand language.
- sensitive period: people who acquire a language after
puberty have to work a lot harder to do so, and are likely to
have a “foreign” accent when the speak it.
- children who were raised past puberty without exposure to
language cannot learn langauge in any comprehensive way
Problems with the Nativist approach:
- a lot of people question the existence of a LAD
- some adults DO learn new languages and speak
without an accent.
- how does an inborn language processor work? They
never say.
The Interactionist Perspective:
- kids are biologically prepared to learn language, but
there is an interrelationship between maturation and the
linguistic environment the kids are in.
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Getting ready to talk:
 cooing (2 montsh) and babbling (4 months)
 communicating:
 3-4 months, the baby starts turn-taking
 end of 1st year, use preverbal gestures to communicate
First words:
usually refer to important people, objects that move, familiar
actions, or outcomes of familiar actions
 by the end of the 2nd year, label emotions with words like
“happy, “sad”, and “mad”.
 Underextension and overextension
The 2-word utterance phase
 between 18 and 24 months, a spurt in vocabulary growth
takes place - kids will learn as many as 20 new words a
week!
 When vocabulary approaches 200 words, kids start
combining 2 words: telegraphic speech
Individual and Cultural Differences
 girls are slightly ahead of boys in early vocabulary growth
 the more words caregivers use, the more toddlers will pick
up
 the personality of the child is important too
Child-directed speech (CDS): a form of language made up
of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated
expression and very clear pronunciation, often with
repetition.
- from birth, children prefer to listen to CDS over
other kinds of adult talk
- promotes language learning in many ways: turntaking, zone of proximal development
Lifespan overheads chapter 5: cognitive development in infancy and toddlerhood
Milestones of language development in the 1st 2 years:
2 months:
cooing
4 months on: joint attention, babbling
7 months on: babbling includes sounds of mature spoken
languages
6-14 months: turn-taking
8-12 months: preverbal gestures
18-24 months: vocabulary expands to about 200 words
20-26 months: two-word sentences
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