 6.

Cognitive and Language Development

 Development: Changes in the pattern of biological, cognitive, and socioemotional
changes throughout the life span.
 Cognitive development: The Brain
 “Wired” brain determined by genes and “plastic” brain determined by experience
 Myelination: encasing many cells in the brain with a myelin sheath
 Increase in myelination can occur during adolescence
 Increase in the synaptic connections
 Connections used are strengthened, unused are replaced or disappear
 Lobes and language
 Prefrontal cortex (the highest region of frontal lobe)
 Higher-level thinking and self-regulation
 Attention, reasoning, and cognitive control (system 2)
 Coordinating other brain regions and other neural connections in problem solving
 Temporal lobes involved in language processing
 Parietal lobe involved in spatial location
 Brain development in adolescence
 Move from disparate and wide to fewer and selective neural connections
 Emotions, amygdala, prefrontal cortex
 Lateralization
 Specialization of functions in each hemisphere of the brain
 In most individuals, speech and grammar localized to the left hemisphere
 Contextual use of language is done by right hemisphere
 Reconfiguration of the hemisphere
 Piaget’s theory
How children construct the knowledge about world?
 Schemas: Actions or mental representations that organize knowledge
 Behavioral schemas (physical activities) in infancy such as sucking and grasping
 Mental schemas (cognitive activities) in childhood such as strategies and plans
 Assimilation
 incorporating new information into their existing schemas
 Accommodation
 when children adjust their schemas to fit new information and experiences
 Organization: Grouping isolated behaviors into a higher-order system
 Equlibration: Explains how children shift from one stage of thought to the next.
 occurs because of cognitive conflict or disequilibrium in the attempt to understand
world
 Stages:
The sensorimotor stage
 From birth to about 2 years of age
 Coordinating sensory experiences with motor actions
 Little more than reflexive actions to adapt to the world
The Preoperational stage
 Lasts from about 2 years to 7 years of age
 2 substages:
 Symbolic function substage
 between 2 and 4 years of age
 representing mentally an object that is not present
 expanded use of language and role play
 attempt to understand reality of the world
 Egocentrism: inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and other’s
perspective
 Intuitive thought substage
 starting at about 4 years of age to until about 7 years
 Primitive reasoning
 Centration and conservation
 Cannot perform operations: mental representations that are reversible
 Concrete operational stage
 about 7 to 11 years of age
 Using operations
 Logical reasoning replaces intuitive reasoning but in concrete situations, not abstract
 Seriation and transitivity
 Fourth operational stage
 about 11 to 15 years of age
 moving beyond reasoning about concrete objects and think in abstract. Idealistic,
and logical terms
 hypothetical-deductive reasoning
 Adolescent egocentrism: heightened self-consciousness
 Evaluation of Piaget’s theory
 Contributions
 The giver of numerous concepts!
 Active and constructive thinkers
 Criticisms
 Estimates of children’s competence:
 overestimation of children age related to conservation. Can emerge at age 3
 thinking in concrete operational ways can emerge later than Piaget thought
 Stages
 unitary structures of thought
 Training children to reason at higher level
 Culture and education
 Vygotsky’s theory
 Importance of socio-cultural context in children’s cognitive development
 Zone of proximal development (ZPD)
 Lower limit of the ZPD: Level of skill reached by the child working independently
 Upper limit of the ZPD: Acceptance of additional responsibility with the assistance of
an able instructor
 Scaffolding: Changing the level of support for learning
 Language and thought in Vyogotsky’s theory
 Language and thought develop independently initially, and then integrate
 Language influences thinking
 Use of speech by children
 Private speech to conduct social actions as well as strategize and making plans
 Transition from external speech to inner speech
 Language
  Form of communication- whether spoken, written, or signed- based on a system of
symbols and rules, generating infinite number of messages and meanings
 Adaptive functions of language
 Present form of human brain achieved 50,000 years ago
 Cavelike paintings 15,000 years ago
 Storing knowledge in written forms 3,000 years ago
 5,000 to 6,000 spoken languages
 Adaptation to societal environment and its complexity
 Properties of language
 Symbols and structure
 Representing objects
 Grammar: set of rules to indicate how symbols can be combined to create
meaningful units of communication
 Syntax: governing the order of words
 Meaning
 He is lying. He needs to pass the acid test.
 Generativity and displacement
 Language development
 Babbling stage
 Meaningless speech like sounds made by children from around the age of 3 months
through 1 year
 Increasingly the babbling takes the form of spoken language in the infant’s
environment
 Young infants can distinguish all 869 phonemes; gradually the ability declines
 Critical period in language development
 Case of Genie
 Production of language
 1 year old infants stop producing sounds
 Basic words start producing such as mama, dada
 Gradually, the ability increases to two-word combinations
 By the age of 2, an average child has a vocabulary of more than 50 words
 Display of telegraphic speech
 By age 3, plurals employed by adding s to nouns and ed to verbs
 By age 5, children acquire basic rules of language
 Language Acquisition
 Language: Byproduct of intelligence or specialized adaptation?
Evolution----Big brains----Intelligence----Language
 Study on normal intelligence people: In one study conducted on 16 of 30 people
over three generation showed severe language deficits despite normal intelligence.
 Study on people with mental retardation: William’s syndrome, affecting 1 in 20,000,
because of problems in chromosome 7.
 Noam Chomsky (1980) and Steven Pinker (1994) proposed that humans have a
language acquisition device.
We are biolgically prepared to learn language.
 Sensitive period for language learning
 Learning a second language: Adults are better at vocabulary but children are better
at pronunciation and grammar.
  2 is better than 4, 4 is better than 6, 13 is better than 16
 Learning theory approaches: Language as a learned skill
 Principles of reinforcement and conditioning
 Rewarded to make sounds approximating speech
 Less successful in determining language acquisition
 Incorrect language use is also rewarded

 Language and thought

 Language shapes thought
 Language shapes thought
 Lingustic-relativity hypothesis
 Supporters: American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf
 Let us take some examples:
Example 1: “ I saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd street”
Interpretations:
In Mian, language spoken in Papua New Guinea: The verb would reveal when the event
happened (just now, yesterday, or in the distant past).
In Hindi: the verb would reveal gender and the relation would be specific
In Mandarin: You have to specify the details of Uncle (maternal, paternal, blood or
marriage)
In Piraha, a language spoken in the Amazon: You cannot say “42nd” because there are no
words for exact numbers. Only words for “few” or “many”.
Example 2: The Kuuk Thaayore language spoken in Pormpurraw does not use relative spatial
terms such as left or right.
Psychological and cognitive impact of absolute cardinal directions
 Remarkably good at keeping track of position in unfamiliar territory
 East-west writing. Hence, influencing our concept of space.
Example 3: English speakers view future to be “ahead” and the past “behind” In Aymara,
language spoken in the Andes, speakers view past as “in front” and future “behind”. This
representation of time affects body language.
Example 4: Causality
 “We talk, therefore we think”: A cultural analysis
 Independent thinkers: Prevalent cultural viewpoint in United States
 Expression of individual
 Talking leads to thinking
 One of the important skills of man is debate by Homer
 Knowledge is within and discovered through verbal reasoning by Plato
 Analytical thinkers
 Silent thinkers: Prevalent cultural viewpoint in East Asians
 Introspection and silence
 Holistic thinkers
 Hypothesis: East Asians who tend to use holistic thinking would be negatively
affected by talking, but European Americans who tend to adopt analytical thinking
would not be negatively affected by talking
 Method:
 34 East Asian American and 41 European American participated
 Presented/given Raven’s Progressive Matrices
 Control condition: No thinking aloud
 Experimental condition: Thinking aloud
 Participants performance measured: accuracy and time taken
 Result: East Asian Americans performance impaired when talking whereas for
European Americans performance did not differ whether they were thinking aloud or
not.
 Thinking shapes/precedes language
 Traditional belief of Psychologists:
 Irrational, egocentric, and amoral
 Live in here and now
 No sense of cause and effect
 Cannot take the perspective of others
 No distinction between fact (reality) and fiction (fantasy)
 Emerging belief
 Children learn about the world in much the same way that scientists do…
 Use of ‘looking-time’ procedure
 Study by Baillargeon and Elizabeth Spelke found that children look longer at a toy
car appearing to pass through a solid wall than at events that fit with fundamental
physics.
 Repacholi (1996) conducted study on 18 months old showing that children can take
others perspective. Hence, not completely egocentric.
 Presented children a bowl of broccoli and a bowl of goldfish. Then tasted and made
either a disgusted face or a happy face.
 Then, put her hand out and asked “could you give me some?”.
 18-month old gave her broccoli if she liked it even though children themselves would
not have chosen it.
 Fei Xu (2008) showed 18 months old babies a box: 80 % white and 20 % red Ping-
Pong balls.
 Random selection: 5 ping-pong balls- 4 red and 1 white
 Surprise shown by babies by looking longer at this result than when she pulled out 4
white balls and one red.