Chapter 4:

The Emergence of Thought and

Language: Cognitive Development in
Infancy and Early Childhood

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 Icebreaker: Brainstorm

As a class, discuss the following ideas related to cognitive development.

• How do you think children learn about the world? Is it different for babies than it is for toddlers
or older children?
• What leads to children thinking the mistaken things they think about the world, like that
inanimate objects have feelings or that their favorite fictional characters are real?
• What about language—how do you learn to talk?

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 Chapter Objectives

4.1 Describe Piaget’s foundational concepts as well as his sensorimotor and preoperational
stages
4.2 Describe the processes of attention and memory in infancy and toddlerhood
4.3 Describe Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective
4.4 Identify major language milestones occurring in infancy and toddlerhood

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 4.1: Piaget's Account

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 Key Questions 1.1

• According to Piaget, how do schemes, assimilation, and accommodation provide the

foundation for cognitive development throughout the life span?
• How does thinking become more advanced as infants progress through the sensorimotor
stage?
• What are the distinguishing characteristics of thinking during the preoperational stage?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of Piaget’s theory?
• How have contemporary researchers extended Piaget’s theory?

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 Basic Principles of Cognitive Development

• Children are active scientists or explorers of their world

• Children make sense of the world through schemes—mental categories of related events,
objects, and knowledge
• Children adapt by refining their schemes and adding new ones
• Schemes change from physical to functional, conceptual, and abstract as the child
develops

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 Assimilation and Accommodation

• Assimilation: fitting new experiences into existing schemes

• Required to benefit from experience
• Accommodation: modifying schemes as a result of new experiences
• Allows for dealing with completely new data or experiences
• Equilibration: inadequate schemes are reorganized or replaced with more advanced and
mature schemes
• Equilibrium: balance between assimilation and accommodation
• Disequilibrium: experience of conflict between new information and existing concepts
• Occurs three times during development, resulting in four qualitatively different stages of
cognitive development

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 Periods of Cognitive Development

• Sensorimotor period (Birth–2 years)

• Infancy
• Preoperational period (2–7 years)
• Preschool and early elementary school
• Concrete operational period (7–11 years)
• Middle and late elementary school
• Formal operational period (11 years and up)
• Adolescence and adulthood

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 Sensorimotor Thinking

• Deliberate, means–ends behavior begins around 8 months of age

• Object permanence: knowing an object still exists even if not in view
• Begins about 8 months, but not fully understood until 18 months, according to Piaget
• Using symbols, such as words and gestures, occurs with most toddlers by 18–24 months of
age
• Can also anticipate consequences of actions, instead of needing to experience them

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 Preoperational Thinking

• Egocentrism
• Difficulty seeing world from another’s perspective
• Animism
• Crediting inanimate objects with life and lifelike properties
• Centration
• Concentrating on only one facet of a problem to the neglect of other facets
• Interferes with conservation
• Appearance is reality
• Assuming that an object is really what it appears to be (e.g., thinking that Shrek is a real
ogre)

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 Think, Pair, and Share Activity: Animism

Students should find a partner for this activity

It is very common for children to think of inanimate objects as alive in some way, as Piaget
pointed out
• Did you or a child you knew ever have a particular favorite inanimate object, like a stuffed
animal, that you/they treated as a living creature?
• What kinds of things made it clear that animism was happening?
• Do you remember when that stopped being the case and it wasn't "alive" anymore?

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 Conservation

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 Evaluating Piaget’s Theory

Guidelines for fostering cognitive development:

• Create environments where children can actively discover how the world works
• Children profit from experience only when they can interpret this experience with their
current cognitive structures
• Help children actively discover inconsistencies in their thinking

Criticisms:
• Underestimates infants’ and young children’s cognitive ability; overestimates adolescents’
cognitive ability
• Vague about mechanisms/processes of change
• Does not account for variability in children’s performance
• Undervalues the sociocultural environment’s influence on cognitive development

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 Extending Piaget’s Account: Children’s Naïve
Theories

• Children develop specialized theories about much narrower areas than Piaget suggested
• Core knowledge hypothesis
• Infants understand these properties earlier
• Naïve physics
• Naïve biology
• Four-year-olds understand specific properties of living things
• Teleological explanations; Essentialism

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4.2: Information Processing During
Infancy and Early Childhood

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 Key Questions 1.2

• What is the basis of the information-processing approach?

• How well do young children pay attention?
• What kinds of learning take place during infancy?
• Do infants and preschool children remember?
• What do infants and preschoolers know about numbers?

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 General Principles of Information Processing

• The view that mental development involves changes in mental hardware and software
• Mental hardware: mental and neural structures enabling the mind to operate
• Mental software: mental programs allowing for performance of specific tasks

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 Attention

• Attention: when sensory information receives additional cognitive processing

• Compared to older children, preschoolers are less able to pay attention to task-relevant
information
• Children’s attention can be improved through pretend play

• Orienting response: emotional and physical reactions to unfamiliar stimulus

• Alerts infant to new or dangerous stimuli
• Habituation: lessened reactions to a stimulus after repeated presentations

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 Learning

• Classical conditioning is when an initially “neutral” stimulus (e.g., a bell) becomes able to
elicit a response (e.g., salivation) that previously was caused only by another stimulus (e.g.,
food)
• Infants are capable of this conditioning regarding feeding or other pleasant events
• Operant conditioning is when a behavior’s consequences make this behavior’s future
occurrence more likely (reinforcement) or less likely (punishment)
• Giving a toy to a friend results in praise, so you give a friend a toy again in the future
(reinforcement)
• Giving a toy to a friend results in being yelled at, so you do not give a toy in the
future (punishment)
• Imitation is learning a new behavior by observing others
• Older infants imitate, but do 2- to 3-week-olds? (controversial)

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 Memory (1 of 2)

• Rovee-Collier’s experiments reveal that three important features of memory exist in infants:
• an event from the past is remembered
• over time, the event can no longer be recalled
• a cue can serve to reactivate a memory that seems to have been forgotten
• Age-related improvements in memory can be traced, in part, to growth in the brain regions
that support memory
• Hippocampus and amygdala develop early; six-month-olds can store new information
• Frontal cortex develops in second year; toddlers begin retrieving information from long-
term memory

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 Memory (2 of 2)

• Autobiographical memory in preschoolers

• Exists for significant events in one’s past
• Appears as a sense of self emerges
• Children’s autobiographical memories are richer when parents talk about past events
• Preschoolers as eyewitnesses
• Quite vulnerable to suggestion and leading questions
• Children’s accuracy of recall improves when:
• Interviewed very soon after event
• Encouraged to tell the truth and that it’s okay to say “I don’t know”
• Nonverbal cues avoided by interviewer
• Asked questions allowing for alternate explanations of the event

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 Think, Pair, and Share Activity: Autobiographical
Memory
Find a partner in your class for this activity

• Discuss your earliest memory with your partner. What’s the first thing you remember from
childhood?
• Why do you think you remember it?
• Do you think you remember what happened accurately?

• If you aren’t comfortable sharing your own first memory, that’s okay! Instead, you can talk
about what sorts of memories you think kids remember the most clearly, based on what you
learned in this section

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 Learning Number Skills

• Infants are able to distinguish small quantities

• Five-month-olds have basic number skills
• Preschoolers have mastered three principles when applied to five or fewer objects:
• One-to-one principle
• Stable-order principle
• Cardinality principle
• Five-year-olds use these principles regarding nine or fewer objects

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4.3: Mind and Culture: Vygotsky's
Theory

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 Key Questions 1.3

• What is the zone of proximal development? How does it help explain how children accomplish
more when they collaborate with others?
• Why is scaffolding a particularly effective way of teaching youngsters new concepts and skills?
• When and why do children talk to themselves as they solve problems?

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 Mind and Culture: Vygotsky’s Theory

• Intersubjectivity: all participants having a mutual, shared understanding of an activity (e.g.,

game rules)
• Guided participation: cognition develops via structured activities with more skilled others
• Apprenticeship: the process during which a skilled master teaches a skill or task to a less
skilled “apprentice” such as a child
• Promotes cognitive development
• Zone of proximal development: The difference between what children can do with or
without assistance
• Providing learning experiences within this zone maximizes achievement
• Scaffolding: Giving just enough assistance to match the learner’s needs
• Students do not learn as well when told everything to do, nor when left alone to discover
for themselves

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 Private Speech

• Private speech: “Talking” to oneself to self-guide and self-regulate behavior

• Speech is audible, but isn’t directed at others, nor is it intended for others to hear
• Later becomes internalized as inner speech
• In its most mature form, inner speech is unintelligible to all but the thinker and it does
not resemble spoken language

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 Discussion Activity: Private Speech

As a class, discuss the concept of private speech

Vygotsky thought that in its mature form, private speech became a sort of inner monologue,
only understood by the thinker
• Do you agree or disagree with his assessment? Why?
• Do you talk to yourself out loud, even now? If so, when do you do it the most?

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 4.4: Language

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 Key Questions 1.4

• When do infants first hear and make speech sounds?

• When do children start to talk? How do they learn word meanings?
• How do young children learn grammar?
• How well do youngsters communicate?

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 The Road to Speech

• The left hemisphere of a newborn’s brain is sensitive to language

• Babies prefer to listen to speech over complex nonspeech sounds
• Babies can distinguish consonant sounds as well as vowel sounds
• Infants can even hear phonemes that are not used in their native language
• This ability is lost by the first birthday

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 Identifying Words

• Infants use many powerful tools to identify words in speech:

• Infants pay more attention to words used repeatedly
• Infants pay more attention to stressed syllables than unstressed syllables
• Infants notice sounds that go together frequently
• Parents and caregivers help infants master language sounds

• Infant-directed speech: Refers to adults’ speech to infants (slower, with greater variation in
pitch and loudness); this is not baby talk
• Similar types of simple speech are used across cultures
• It attracts infants’ attention more than adult-directed speech
• Infant-directed speech helps infants perceive fundamental sounds

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 Steps to Speech

• At 2 months, infants begin cooing

• Around 6 months, toddlers begin babbling
• Babbling is a proven precursor to speech
• At 8–11 months, children incorporate
intonation or changes in pitch typical of the
language they hear

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 The Grand Insight: Words as Symbols

• Before 12 months, infants use symbols in areas other than language

• For example, using gesturing, infants will point, wave, or smack their lips to convey
messages
• By 12–18 months, children learn that words are symbols for objects, actions, and properties

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 First Words and Many More
• Early on, children appear to understand others’ speech, but do not speak themselves
• Around 1 year, children use their first words
• Usually consonant-vowel pairs, such as “dada” or “wawa”
• By 2 years, children have a vocabulary of a few hundred words
• By age 6, children know around 10,000 words
• At approximately 18 months, children begin experiencing an explosive rate of word learning
• Fast mapping: rapid connection of new words to their exact referents
• Children actually know the object to which a new word refers instead of thinking about all
possible referents

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 Discussion Activity: First Words

As a class, discuss your first words (or those of children you know). Those who are comfortable
can share with the rest of the class.

• Look out for patterns in the first words:

• Are they consonant and vowel pairs?
• Do they describe something that’s important to the child, or are they completely random?

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 Factors Contributing to Rapid Learning

• Joint attention
• Constraints on word names
• Sentence cues
• Cognitive factors
• Shift from attentional cues to language and social cues
• Naming errors
• Underextension is using a term too narrowly, like when children think only their family
dog is called a dog.
• Overextension is using a term too broadly, like when children call all cats Nellie because
that is their cat's name.

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 Individual Differences in Word Learning

• Huge individual differences: vocabulary ranges from 25 to 250 words at 18 months

• This is because children’s vocabulary is:
• Greater for those with better phonological memory (the ability to remember speech
sounds briefly)
• Greater for those exposed to a richer language environment

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 Language: Bilingualism

• When compared with monolingual children, bilingual children show:

• Somewhat smaller vocabularies for each language
• Greater total vocabulary
• Better understanding of words’ arbitrary symbolic nature
• Greater skill at switching across tasks
• Better ability to inhibit inappropriate responses

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 Language: Word Learning Styles

• Two distinct styles of word learning, but most children blend them
• Referential style: intellectual emphasis
• Vocabularies consist mainly of words naming objects, persons, or actions
• Vocabularies consist of few social interaction words or question words
• Expressive style: social emphasis
• Vocabularies include social interaction and question words plus naming words

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 Language: Encouraging Language Growth

• Parents can assist in learning language by:

• Speaking to children frequently
• Naming objects, reading to children, asking questions about vocabulary
• Providing TV programs that emphasize new word learning, storytelling, and inquiry
• Touchscreen tablets and smartphone apps increase language skills when they require
active engagement

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Speaking in Sentences: Grammatical Development

• Around 18 months: two- and three-word sentences based on simple formulas (e.g., actor +
action)
• Reflect telegraphic speech
• Exclude grammatical morphemes
• By preschool, show growing knowledge of grammatical rules instead of simple memory
• Reflect overregularization errors

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 Language: How Do Children Acquire Grammar?

• Linguistic answer: innate neural mechanisms guide the learning of grammar

• Cognitive answer: detection of patterns and irregularities, and creation of rules
• Social-interaction answer: eclectic integration of behavioral, linguistic, and cognitive solutions,
plus accurate communication

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 Communicating with Others

• Effective communication requires:

• Making sure to speak in language the listener understands
• Calibrating messages depending on the audience
• Paying attention while listening
• Taking turns as speaker and listener
• Before 2 years: conversational turn-taking encouraged and often modeled by parents
• After 2 years: spontaneous turn-taking common between children and adults

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 Major Milestones of Language Development

Table 4.2 Major Milestones of Language Development

AGE MILESTONES

Babies hear phonemes from birth. They begin to coo between 2 and 4 months, then
Birth to 1 year
begin to babble at about 6 months.

About the first birthday Babies begin to talk and to gesture, showing they have begun to use symbols.

Vocabulary expands rapidly (due to fast mapping), particularly at about 18 months. Two-
1–3 years word sentences emerge in telegraphic speech at about 18 months, and more complex
sentences are evident by 3 years. Turn-taking is evident in communication by 2 years.

Vocabulary continues to expand; grammatical morphemes are added; and children

3–5 years begin to adjust their speech to listeners, but as listeners, they often ignore problems in
messages they receive.

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 Self-Assessment

• Students should work individually on this assessment and should write down their responses.
• Language development is a huge part of cognitive development, but it can be tricky to grasp
all of the different terms that are related to it
• Students, please write down the following terms and provide your own explanations based on
what you’ve learned in this chapter (all terms relate to how grammar is acquired):
• Linguistic answer
• Cognitive answer
• Social-interaction answer
• Faculty may either collect these to look them over or go over responses as a group to ensure
that all students are clear on these concepts and how they relate to language learning.

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 Summary

Now that the lesson has ended, you should have learned how to:
• Describe Piaget’s foundational concepts as well as his sensorimotor and preoperational stages
• Describe the processes of attention and memory in infancy and toddlerhood
• Describe Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective
• Identify major language milestones occurring in infancy and toddlerhood

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duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part. 47