Chapter 6 Outline (Second Half)
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Intelligence
Active Intelligence:
- Piaget discovered that children are active learners.
- He called the intelligence of infants sensorimotor intelligence, when babies think by using their senses and motor skills.
Six Stages of Infant Cognition:
- Stage 1: Reflexes — sucking, grasping, staring, listening.
_ Adaption in two ways: Assimilation and Accommodation
- Stage 2: Assimilating and coordinating reflexes, sucking a nipple differently than sucking a pacifier.
- Stage 3: Making interesting sights last, actively responding to people and objects.
_ Vocalization increases a great deal
→ Infants become more aware of people and objects and develop ways to interact.
- Stage 4: Becoming more deliberate and purposeful in responding to people and objects.
_ Goal Directed Behavior is used in which the infants tries to make events occur.
- Stage 5: New means through active experimentation of the things around them.
_ Toddlers become "little scientists" in order to see. (They get into everything.)
- Stage 6: Using mental combinations to think through things and no longer resorting to trial-and-error experiments.
_ Toddlers begin to solve problems using mental combinations (intellectual experimentation). This allows them to pretend using a technique called deferred imitation.
Language Development
First Noises and Gestures:
- Newborns prefer hearing speech over other sounds, prefer baby talk, and listen more intently to their own mothers.
Babbling:
- Repeating certain syllables such as "ma-ma", "da-da", or "ba-ba".
- Babbling is universal.
- Deaf and hearing babies babble, but deaf babies stop the oral babbling and begin gesturing when the hearing baby lowers the amount of gesturing and begins babbling more.
First Words and Sentences:
- Once vocabulary reaches 50 words, they learn about 100 or more words each month.
_ Learn naming words (dog, cat, cup) North Americans tend to be more referential.
_ Learn words used in social interaction (please, want, go) Japanese children tend to be more expressive.
- Underextension is a common inaccuracy, using a word more narrowly than it is applied.
- Overextension is the opposite of underextension, where a word used to describe something round will be carried over to describe everything that is round.
- Holophrase is a single word that expresses a complete thought.
Adults and Babies Teach Each Other
Two Theories: Nurture versus Nature:
- The quality and quantity of parents’ talking to their child affects the child’s rate of language development
- The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) enables children to derive rules of grammar that they use everyday.
Social Interaction:
- The social context is framed by the adult’s teaching ability along with the child’s learning ability.
_ the combination of these two are what achieve the language explosion seen in children.
- Baby talk is used to catch and keep the infant’s attention.
_ difficult sounds are avoided; "L" and "R" are dropped
→ hard to say words are made into simpler words by adding a "y" at the end
→ baby talk facilitates early language learning
- Early speech is never idle conversation