CHAPTER FIVE

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Canada Inc. 5 - 1

CHAPTER FIVE

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY


I. COGNITIVE CHANGES

• Changes in cognitive skills over the first 2 years are highly consistent across environments

• Two-year-olds are still a long way from cognitive maturity, but they have taken several important steps toward that goal

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A. Piaget’s View of the First 2 Years

• Sensorimotor stage: – Piaget’s first stage of development, in which infants

use information from their senses and motor actions to learn about the world

– Primary, secondary and tertiary circular reactions: the infant progressively gains experience of himself and his surroundings

– By age 18-24 mo., the infant has the beginnings of mental representation

– Refer to Table 5.1 (next slide)(continued)

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Substages of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage


Piaget’s View of the First 2 Years (continued)

• Object permanence: the understanding that objects continue to exist when they can’t be seen– 2 months – rudimentary expectations shown by

surprise when an object disappears– 6 – 8 months – looking for a partially hidden

object– 8 – 12 months – reaching for or searching for a toy

that is hidden

(continued)

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Piaget’s View of the First 2 Years (continued)

• Imitation– 2 months – can imitate actions they can see

themselves make– 8 – 12 months – can imitate other people’s facial

expressions– 1 year – imitation of any action that wasn’t in the

child’s repertoire begins– 18 months – deferred imitation (a child’s imitation

of some action at a later time) begins

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B. Challenges to Piaget’s View

• Piaget underestimated the cognitive capacity of infants

• He may have wrongly equated the infant’s lack of physical ability with lack of cognitive understanding

• Object permanence occurs much earlier, and is more complex, than he predicted

(continued)

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Challenges to Piaget’s View (continued)

• Object Permanence– Babies as young as 4 months show clear signs of

object permanence (Baillargeon et al, Rosander & von Hofsten)

– Most 5 month-olds look to the other side of a screen when a moving object disappears behind it which indicates that they hold some kind of representation of the hidden object in mind

(continued)

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Challenges to Piaget’s View (continued)

• Imitation– Piaget’s proposed sequence of imitation skill has

been supported• Imitation of a hand movement starts at 1 – 2 months• Imitation of 2-part actions starts around 15-18 months

– Imitation of facial gestures and deferred imitation occur earlier than Piaget proposed

– Infants learn through modeling– Many more skills than Piaget thought may be

inborn

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Spelke’s Violation of Expectancy Procedure

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C. Alternative Approaches• Object Concept: an infant’s understanding of

the nature of objects and how they behave– 3 month old infants displayed a knowledge of objects

and how they behave that is much more sophisticated than previously thought

– This ability may be innate, or it may be that the strategies for learning are innate

– Another controversy is whether infants understand the concepts being demonstrated (such as the support required to keep an object stable) or are only responding to the novelty of the situation

(continued)

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Baillargeon’s Learning Strategies Research


Alternative Approaches (continued)

• Object Individuation: the process by which an infant differentiates and recognizes distinct objects based on their mental images of objects in the environment– 4 month olds can individuate based on spatio-temporal

information– 10 month olds can individuate based on an object’s property

information– 9 to 12 month olds can individuate based on the kind of

object• Understanding of objects seems to develop gradually over

the first 3 years


II. Learning, Memory, and Intelligence

• Learning denotes the permanent changes in behaviour that result from experience

• Babies show evidence of learning from their first moments, and they organize their interactions with the forces in their environment


A. Conditioning and Modeling• Research evidence (Gunther) supports the presence of classical

conditioning– babies who felt smothered by the left breast learned to refuse

the left breast• Research evidence (Moon & Fifer) supports the presence of

operant conditioning– sounds of mother’s voice or heartbeat, sweet liquids increased

the sucking response and head turning– The mother’s voice is an effective reinforcer for all babies

• Research evidence (Provasi et al.; Hauf et al.) supports the presence of observational learning– Learn from watching others and prefer to watch others play with

same objects as infants previously played with


B. Schematic Learning• The organization of experiences into expectancies, or

“known” combinations• Categories – By 7 months infants actively use categories to process

information– Cannot process levels of categories

• Superordinates (higher level categories) contain lower level categories

• Babies respond differently to animals and furniture but not to dogs and birds

• Hierarchical categories appear by 2 years but are not well developed until about age 5


C. Memory• Infants appear to remember some auditory stimuli they

hear while asleep• Rovee-Collier showed that 3 month old infants can

remember specific objects and their own actions with those objects as long as a week

• Young infants are more cognitively sophisticated than Piaget supposed, while supporting his view of systematic gains in memory

• Early infant memory is strongly tied to context


D. Measuring Intelligence in Infancy• While difficult to measure, it’s useful to try to identify children

who require special interventions• The Bayley Scales of Infant Development measure primarily

sensory and motor skills, and address cognitive and language development but can also be helpful in identifying infants and toddlers with serious developmental delays

• Such tools are not predictive of later IQ or school performance

• Habituation tasks appear to have high potential as measures of infant intelligence

• Fagan’s Test of Infant Intelligence can be used with those with problems such as cerebral palsy

• Fagan’s Test is moderately predictive of infants’ IQ and academic achievement at 21 years of age


III. The Beginnings of Language

• Many important developments precede the use of a child’s first words at about 12 months of age


A. Theoretical Perspectives


B. Influences on Language Development

• Infant-directed speech (IDS) is the simplified, higher-pitched speech that adults use with infants and young children– Babies as young as a few days old prefer this to adult-

directed speech– Helps infants identify the sounds in their mothers’

speech that are specific to the language they are learning

(continued)


Influences on Language Development (continued)

• Children’s experiences in the earliest years influence language

• Being read to often is one of the most critical experiences

• Children whose parents talk to them often develop richer vocabularies and more complex sentences

• Poverty influences a substantial gap in vocabulary by age 4 and widens over the school years


C. Early Milestones of Language Development

• Cooing vowel sounds appear at about one month, usually to signal pleasure

• Babbling, with vowel and consonant sounds, develops at about 6 months

• Babbling is related to the beginning of language production

• Intonational patterns are used(continued)


Early Milestones of Language Development (continued)

• Babbling initially incorporates all sounds, but gradually only those heard in spoken language are used

• Gesture-sound combinations emerge at about 10 months

• Receptive language consists of about 20-30 words by 9 or 10 months

• A language’s patterns and word stresses can help babies identify words


D. The First Words

• Expressive language– The ability to produce words– 12 months — babies begin to say first words– Words are learned slowly in context with specific

situations and many cues

(continued)


The First Words (continued)

• Holophrases – Combining a single word with gestures to make a complete

thought– Used between 12 and 18 months

• Naming Explosion– Occurs between 16 and 24 months– 16 months old – 50 words in vocabulary– 24 months old – 320 words– Vocabulary grows in spurts– In English, most words are names for things or people

(nouns)


Vocabulary Growth in Infants


E. The First Sentences

• Sentences appear when there is a threshold of 100 to 200 words at 18 – 24 months

• Sentences are short, generally 2 or 3 words, and simple– Brown coined the term “telegraphic speech”

• Sentences follow rules• Understanding this speech usually requires

the listener to know the context


Meaning in Early Sentences


F. Individual Differences in Language Development

• Differences in Rate– There is a wide range of normal variation– More than half those who talk late eventually

catch up– Those who do not catch up also have receptive

language problems, and may have other cognitive problems

– These children should receive professional help for diagnosis and treatment

(continued)


Differences in Rate


Individual Differences in Language Development (continued)

• Differences in Style– Expressive style • Early vocabulary linked to social relationships rather

than objects

– Referential style• Early vocabulary made up of names of things or people• Often advanced in understanding adult language


Some Differences Between Expressive and Referential Styles in Early Language


G. Language Development Across Cultures

• Cooing, babbling, first words, holophrases, and telegraphic speech are typically found in all languages at similar ages

• The use of specific word order in early sentences is not the same.

• Particular inflections are learned in highly varying order

CHAPTER FIVE

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