Language, Cognitive, Social and
Physical Development
Development:
Why study?
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Child is father to the man
Analysis of complex system
Heredity --environment issues
Heritability = Vg/Vt (variance)
Why difficult? --right experiment
Role of culture & socialization:
Rosseau/Victor of Aveyron
Development: Basic Models
• Basic issue: heritability (nature-nurture
interactions)
• --no development: small adults!
• --progressive differentiation
• --instinct (maturation alone --> devel.)
• --readiness (maturation is a pre-req for
learning)
• --critical period (maturation is a pre-req but
opportunity disappears)
• --stages and waves
Physical and Brain Development
• At birth, the human brain weighs
approximately 350 grams.
• By the first year. the brain weighs
approximately 1000 grams.
• The adult brain weighs 1200-1400 grams.
In the beginning….—to approximately two weeks
Fig. 5-2, p. 123
Fig. 5-3, p. 123
Physical and Brain Development:
Synaptic Growth & Pruning
Physical Development
• In Utero:
– Zygote: conception-2 weeks
– Embryo: 2 weeks-2 months (8 weeks)
• Cell differentiation
– Fetus: 2 months to birth
• Functioning organ systems develop, early reflexes seen (e.g.
non-nutritive sucking)
• Infancy:
– Very slow development, comparatively
– Brain development takes off
– Spurts of growth throughout childhood (body and
brain)
Physical and Brain Development
• From birth:
– Reflexes:
• Grasping
• Rooting
• Foot flexing
– Sensory
• Discriminate high and low sounds, vowels, mother’s
voice
• Very near-sighted, but can discriminate brightness and
color and track moving objects
Physical Development:
(Progressive Differentiation)
• Gross motor skills
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7-8 months: sitting up
8-10 months: crawling
10-12 months: “cruising”
12-15 months: walking
2 years: hopping on one foot, kicking
4 years: jumping rope, balancing on one foot
• Fine motor skills
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1 month: reflexive grasp
4 months: reaching, hands at midline
6 months: reach precisely, grabs at objects
12-14 months: throwing objects
2 years: unscrewing jars
3 years: cutting with scissors, holding pencil
6 years: writing, drawing shapes
Physical/Attentional Development
• Brain:
– Making/pruning connections
• Attention
– Infants have little selective attention. If something is
interesting, they will look at it.
– Development of Prefrontal cortex (PFC)development of
attentional control
• 1-2 years: single-channeled attention: can concentrate on task, but
not external verbal/visual stimuli
• 2-3 years: still single-channeled, but with help can adjust focus
back and forth
• 3-4 years: single-channeled, but can adjust focus on their own
• 4-5: two-channeled, but short attention span
• 5-6: audio, visual, and manipulatory channels integrated
Child Language Development
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How do children get from being completely non-verbal to
being expert speakers? (Habituation and diary studies)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Can distinguish between vowel sounds (/a/ vs. /o/)- in utero
Can distinguish between all contrasts- from birth
Infant – mother “conversations shortly after birth!
Categorical perception of speech sounds (8-12 months)
Babbling: 6 months (front to back, then words back to front)
One word stage: ~1 year
Two word stage: ~2 years (vocab is about 50 words)
Then syntax & multiword utterances; gradually increase in complexity
…..But, as always, great variability
Language
• Once underway, children develop language
fast and effortlessly
200
Number of Words Said
1 year:
1 word
2 years: 300 words
150
3 years:
1000 words
4 years: 5000 words
100
50
0
10
12
14
16
Age in Months
18
20
22
5 years:
10000 words
18 years:
60000 words
The Innateness of Language
• Behaviorism: Language is learned like
everything else: Stimulus-response theory
– We say something, we receive feedback,
which encourages us to say it again
• BUT: We can say things we’ve never
heard; we can produce new structures.
• Chomsky: Language is innate to humans
– Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
– Universal Grammar
– Poverty of the Stimulus
Innateness of Language?
• Chomsky’s Solution
 Universal Grammar: all natural languages share a
common structure that arises from the way our brain is
designed to construct and process language.
• We have evolved specialized mechanisms for
language because communication is
advantageous
Problem - “Universal” structure could come from
the constraints of the environment and
communicative needs
Arguments for Innateness
• Semi-dedicated brain tissue (Broca's,
Wernicke's)
• Critical period
• Early start and early development + difficulty
of task (complexity of rules, 5000+ words by
age 5 + semi-complete set of rules
• Overgeneralization: not mimicry
• Syntactic uniqueness (numerous issues)
(many instances: wild chn. animals, no-input
lang. etc.)
• Poor teaching and poor examples (parsing
problem)
Arguments for Innateness
• Dedicated brain regions – Broca’s and
Wernicke’s areas
– Damage to Broca’s area, near the motor cortex, is associated with difficulties
in producing speech
– Damage to Wernicke’s area, which is near the auditory cortex, is linked to
difficulties with meaning
• FOXP2 gene
– Family missing the gene
show severe speech and
language impairments
The Critical Period
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• If language learning doesn’t occur before
a certain time, language will be impaired
(pre-puberty)
• Victor (+ Genie & others) examples of
experience impaired language acquisition
• Congenitally Deaf children of hearing
parents not exposed to ASL have great
trouble acquiring language
• Nicaraguan Sign Language!
Critical Period?
• Performance on a test of
English grammar by
adults originally from
Korea and China was
directly related to the
age at which they came
to the United States and
were exposed to English
• The scores of adults who
emigrated before the
age of 7 are
indistinguishable from
those of native English
speakers
The Nature of Feedback (Poverty of the
Stimulus)
1. Children get little or no direct instruction.
2. Children get little feedback and don’t listen to what they get -so why do they ever correct their errors?
3. Children hear many ungrammatical structures not identified as
such -- how do they come to learn these are wrong?
4. In some cultures adults don’t speak to children.
5. Children will make up a language if they are not given one -- deaf
children of hearing parents.
6. Some cost (simple vs. elaborated language) to low input.
Verb Learning
• Two types of past
tense verbs:
– Regular: talked, liked,
hated
– Irregular: ate, went,
was
• U-shaped curve of
language learning
– Early: correct usage
– Middle:
overgeneralization
– Late: correct usage
The Language Gene
• SLI: Specific Language Impairment:
Language is impaired without signs of
impairment in other areas (motor,
cognitive, etc.)
• The FOXP2 gene
– Members of the KE family with a corruption of
this gene had SLI; the others didn’t.
– The Language Gene?
The Language Gene
Cognitive Development
…and the Work of Jean Piaget
Important Concepts Within Piaget’s
Model
• Schemes: Mental model of the world that we
use to represent, organize, and interpret our
experiences.
• Assimilation: Integrating new experiences into
an existing scheme.
• Accommodation: Changing or modifying a
scheme in order to incorporate a new
experience.
Four Major Stages of Cognitive
Development
1.
2.
3.
4.
Sensorimotor (0-2 years)
Preoperational (2-7 years)
Concrete Operations (7-11 years)
Formal Operations (12+ years)
Sensorimotor Period
• From birth to ~2 yrs old
• Actions progress from simple
reflexes to deliberate
movements
• Object permanence – realize
object still exists even when
it can’t be perceived
• Internal representation –
ability to think about
objects/events not
immediately present
Preoperational Period
• From ~2 yrs to ~7 yrs
• Learn to use symbols, signs and language
• Egocentrism – cannot understand another person’s point
of view (but nursery school pics/code switching)
• Failure of conservation – do not yet understand that
quantity remains the same despite appearance
Concrete Operational Period
• From ~7 yrs to ~11 yrs
• Thinking becomes systematic, quantitative and
logical
• Success at all conservation tasks – number, solid
quantity, liquid quantity: fun experiments!
• Decentration of perception – ability to classify
objects in terms of more than one dimension
Formal Operational Period
• From ~11 yrs to adult
• Apply logical and systematic
thought to abstract problems
• Deductive reasoning – specific
conclusions based on general
hypotheses
• Inductive reasoning – make
generalizations based on
specific observations
• Handling multiple variables
simultaneously
Strengths of Piaget’s theory
• Good “feel” for what
children’s thinking is like
• Asks the right questions
• Covers broad age span
• Covers broad spectrum of
developments in children’s
thinking
• Surprising observations
• Interplay of content &
mechanism
Weaknesses of Piaget’s theory
• Underestimates
competence – children
succeed earlier than
predicted
• Can’t explain dissociations
– success or failure
depends on the way
concept is tested
• Sometimes, no discrete
stages - development
occurs somewhat
gradually or incrementally
Technique: Habituation
• Infants like to look at objects that are new and
interesting to them
• Procedure
– Familiarization: Object presented repeatedly until infants
no longer look at it much
– New object introduced
• Method: Infants look longer at new object—allows
testing of whether they perceive object as new or old
Kids sometimes smarter than you
think: Occluded rod experiment
• 4-month-old infants
familiarized with A, then
presented with either B or
C
• Results – Looked longer at
C than B
• Conclusions
– Broken rod more novel than
unbroken rod
– Rod in display A was
originally perceived as
unbroken
Kids sometimes smarter than you
think: Drawbridge experiment
• 4.5 month old infants
• Two conditions
– B is ‘possible’
– C is ‘impossible’
• Results – Looked longer at
C
• Conclusions
– Infants know box exists,
even when hidden
– 4.5 month olds understand
object permanence
Kids not always smarter than you
think: A-not-B experiment
• Experimenter hides toy under cover A
• 9-month-old infant successfully retrieves toy
• After several successful retrievals, experimenter then hides toy under
cover B
• Results - Child still searches under cover A, even though he/she
watched the toy being hidden
• Conclusions – 9 month olds do not understand object permanence
Information-Processing Theories
• Thinking = information processing
– Representation of information
– Processes - applied to representations
– Constraints - memory limits constrain representation
and processing
• Cognitive development = change in information
processing capability
– Precise analysis of change mechanisms
• Change produced through continuous selfmodification
– Outcomes of child’s actions change information
processing in the future
Memory representations & capacity
• Leg-string Infants
remembered that
kicking made mobile
move after 2
months
•Working memory span increases with age
Rehearsal as information processing
• Increase in rehearsal
speed leads to
increase in working
memory capacity
• Older children do
better on recall tests
because they use
rehearsal as a
memory strategy
Social Development
• This topic gets at the core of who and
what we are.
• First: Basic Theories of Development
– Behavioral: patterns of reward/punishment
-Cognitive: Growth in understanding (+
Piaget on moral development)
-Social learning theory (modeling & imitation
are central)-- Bobo
-Psychoanalytic theory & Attachment:
lmportance of childhood (child as the father
of the man)
Attachment & Importance of Childhood
(Psychoanalytic View)
• Harlow Work incl. therapist monkeys, but there
is need for therapy!
• Hospitalism: Spitz et at./orphanage -->
retarded adult
• Ainsworth work: a solid base from which to
explore the world….sometimes!
Attachment Styles
• Secure - Uses caregiver as a secure base for exploration.
Upset by departure of parent but easily calmed when
they return and can continue to play.
• Resistant – Does not use parent as a secure base, often
stays close to them. Upset when they leave but not
comforted by their return.
• Avoidant – Little affect while playing. No visible stress
upon parents departure, ignores them on return. Treats
the stranger similarly to the caregiver.
• Disorganized – no clear attachment patter. Show freezing
or repetitive behavior.
Attachment
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O60TYAIgC4
Work of Harlow
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdycJQi4Q
A Wild Children (Genie + Victor)
Strange Situation Results
Middle class kids:
• 60% secure
• 15% anxious/resistant
• 10% anxious avoidant
• 15% disorganized
• But is it causal? unclear. (Could be due to child's
temperament?)
Moral Development: Kohlberg
A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was
one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form
of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently
discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist
was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He
paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose
of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to
everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get
together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the
druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper
or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the
drug and I'm going to make money from it.” So Heinz got
desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for
his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal
the drug for his wife? Why or why not
Moral Thought-->Moral Action?
Arrestees During the Free Speech Movement
level
1 2 3 4 5 6
% arrested M 0 60 18 6 41 75
"
F 0 33* 9 12 57 86*
____
* = small n
Need for Achievement (McClelland)
• A. the measure: Murray TAT
• B. the finding: varying amounts of nAch
• C. predicts performance (goals people set, rate
of advancement of mngr)
• D. childrearing aspects: expectations for
independence
• E. societal implications/findings: electrical power
and other things
• F. 30 countries and KWH corr.= .53 (corr. with
1925, not 1950)
• G. class differences
Child Rearing Styles
• Autocratic (authoritarian), authoritative,permissive,
uninvolved
• Affects anger, withdrawnness, independence
• Class differences: external vs.. internal control
( cog. diss. theory --minimum external control)-forbidden toy exper. Lepper Green & Nisbett
Child Rearing Strategies
• Long term vs. short term
• Most important task you will face….and
there’s no instruction manual!
Major Influences on Soc. Dev.
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Maturational
Attachment
Parenting Style
Social learning
Identification
Lesson of Wild Child