【Psychology】Chapter 11— Section Review/Main Points
* All the following abstractions are excerpted from <Psychology>, Peter O. Gray, 5th edition
Chapter 11 — The Development of Thought and Language.
Section 1 — How Infants Learn About the Physical World
Infants actively explore their physical world and know some of its core principles.
— Exploring the World Around Them
Infants prefer novel stimuli, as demonstrated by the fact that they look longer at them. This reliable tendency is used to study infant perception and memory.
Infants exhibit a strong drive to control their environment; they become upset when control is taken away from them.
By 5 or 6 months, independent of adult encouragement, infants examine objects with their hands and eyes, focusing on the objects' unique properties.
From 6 to 12 months of age, infants use their observations of adults to guide their own exploration. They mimic adults' actions, look where adults are looking, and use adults' emotional expressions to identify danger or safety.
— Knowledge of Core Physical Principles
Infants' knowledge of core physical principles is revealed by the fact that they look longer at physically impossible events than at physically possible events. Such research indicates that infants as young as 2.5 to 4 months old know some core principles.
Search tasks that involve manual reaching (such as Piaget's simple hiding problem) appear to show later development of even the rudimentary concept of object permanence, perhaps because such tasks require the infant to form a plan to obtain the hidden object.
Experience with self-produced locomotion, either by crawling or by using a walker, promotes the ability to solve manual search problems.
Section 2 — Two Classic Theories of Cognitive Development: Piaget's and Vygotsky's
Two classic theories focus on interaction with the environment — but different aspects of it.
— Piaget: The Child as Little Scientist
Piaget believed that cognitive development occurs through the child's actions on the physical environment, which promote the development of schemes — mantel blueprints for actions.
Piaget held that mental growth involves assimilation (fitting new experiences into existing schemes) and accommodation (modifying those schemes to fit with new experiences).
Operational schemes — schemes for reversible actions — are particularly important to cognitive development, according to Piaget.
Piaget described four successive stages of cognitive development (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete-operational, and formal-operational stages), each employing an increasingly sophisticated type of scheme.
— Vygotsky: The Child as Apprentice
Vygotsky considered the child's interaction with the social and cultural environment to be the key to cognitive development, leading to internalization of symbols, ideas, and ways of thinking.
Vygotsky, unlike Piaget, saw language as crucial to mental development, with words serving not only as a means of communication but later as the building blocks of verbal thought. Private, noncommunicative speech provides evidence of this.
Through dialog and collaboration with more competent others, the child learns to do something socially before being able to do it individually. This social learning takes place within the child's zone of proximal development.
Section 3 — Development of the Mind's Information-Processing Capacities
The information-processing approach considers the development of separate mental components and processes.
— Long-Term Memory
Children show a capacity for implicit memory in early infancy; but we cannot assess explicit memory capacity until the child develops sufficient language skills.
Semantic memory is in evidence as soon as a child begins to use words, at about 10 to 12 months.
Episodic memory apparently requires that the child encode personal experiences verbally, which begins to happen with some regularity at about age 3.
— Working Memory
The capacity of working memory increases as the child grows older, reaching adult levels at about age 15.
There is a parallel increase in processing speed over the same period, which may actually be the basis for the increase in capacity.
Faster processing may result in part from brain maturation.
— Acquiring Specific Rules
Cognitive development also involves the acquisition of rules and strategies for solving particular types of problems.
Siegler found that children's solutions to balance-beam problems were based on specific rules, which could be ranked by complexity and effectiveness.
Siegler also found that feedback on the problems could help children advance only to the next level of rule.
Section 4 — Children's Understanding of Minds
Children begin quite early to understand not only physical reality but also the mind.
— Using Mental Constructs
Young children seem to automatically divide entities into two classes — those that move on their own and those that do not — and ascribe psychological characteristics to the former.
Well before the age of 3, children use such mental constructs apperception, emotion, and desire to explain people's behavior.
The understanding that beliefs can be false — that is, not congruent with reality — takes longer to develop, appearing at about 4.
— Make-Believe
Children everywhere engage in make-believe play; even toddlers can distinguish between reality and pretense.
Pretend play, especially role-playing, and the knowledge that pretense is not reality may provide a foundation for the later understanding of false beliefs.
Experience with make-believe may also help children to develop the ability to reason on the basis of hypothetical or counterfactual premises.
Section 5 — The Nature of Language and Children's Early Linguistic Abilities
Children rapidly acquire the complex tools of language beginning in infancy.
— Linguistic Universals
All languages include a set of symbols called morphemes, which are a language's smallest meaningful units; morphemes are arbitrary and discrete.
All languages are hierarchically structured, with sentences at the top of the hierarchy and phonemes (elementary vowel and consonant sounds) at the bottom.
Every language has a grammar — a set of rules that specify the permissible ways to combine units at one level of the hierarchy to create a unit at the next higher level.
A person's knowledge of grammar of his or her language is generally more implicit than explicit.
— The Course of Language Development
Babies under 6 months can distinguish any two phonemes of any language, but after 6 months they retain only the ability to hear distinctions that represent different phonemes in their native language.
Infants coo and later babble as a form of vocal play that helps to prepare the vocal musculature for speech. By 8 months, their babbling starts to mimic their native language.
The first recognizable words appear at about 10 to 12 months; vocabulary growth accelerates soon after and continues for years, aided by innate biases and knowledge of grammar, though children sometimes over- or under-extend words.
Children first combine words at about 18 to 24 months, demonstrating knowledge of word-order rules. Knowledge of other grammatical rules is demonstrated in overgeneralization of them (such as saying deers or goed).
Section 6 — Internal and External Supports for Language Development
Inborn mechanisms and the social context jointly support children's acquisition of language.
— Innate Mechanisms for Language Acquisition
Chomsky hypothesized the existence of an innate language-acquisition device (LAD), consisting of a universal grammar and mechanisms that guide native-language learning.
The reality of the LAD is supported by children's imposition of grammatical rules to create creole languages and, in Nicaragua, a sign language.
The Lad appears to function most effectively in the first 10 years of life. Children deprived of language during that period do not fully learn language later.
— External Support for Language Acquisition
The social context provides children with a language-acquisition support system (LASS).
Caregivers often assist language acquisition by speaking mothers and by being responsive to early linguistic efforts.
Children acquire language at roughly the same rate everywhere, despite wide cross-cultural variation in the LASS.
— Language Learning by Apes
Washoe, a chimpanzee, successfully learned some American Sign Language, inspiring other ape-language studies.
Kanzi, a bonobo that has learned to use lexigrams and gestures to express meaning, understands at least 500 English words and uses word order to interpret meaning.
Successful efforts like those involving Washoe and Kanzi have not used systematic training but rather immersion in an environment rich with linguistic communication, like those that children experience.
Apes are much better at acquiring vocabulary than grammar.