Chapter 4

The Emergence of Thought and Language: Cognitive

Development in Infancy and Early Childhood

CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. The Onset of Thinking: Piaget’s Account
A. Basic Principles of Cognitive Development
1. According to Piaget, children understand the world with schemes, psychological
structures that organize experiences into mental categories of related events, objects, and
knowledge. These change constantly to adapt to children’s experiences.
2. Assimilation occurs when experiences are readily incorporated into existing schemes,
while accommodation occurs when schemes have to be modified. Assimilation and
accommodation occur to reestablish equilibrium, through a process called equilibration,
when the balance is upset (disequilibrium).
3. Cognitive development is divided into four stages: sensorimotor period, preoperational
period, concrete operational period, and formal operational period.
B. Sensorimotor Thinking (birth – 2 years)
1. This stage is characterized by schemes developed through changes in perceptual and
motor skills.
2. By 8 to 12 months, one scheme is used in the service of another; by 12 to 18 months,
infants experiment with schemes; and by 18 to 24 months, infants engage in symbolic
processing.
3. Object permanence is the understanding that objects exist independently of one’s self,
actions, and thoughts toward them. Infants develop a full understanding of object
permanence around 18 months.
4. By 18 months, infants begin to talk and gesture, which is evidence of the capacity to use
symbols. Now infants can begin to anticipate the consequences of mental, rather than just
physical, actions.
C. Preoperational Thinking (2 – 7 years)
1. Preoperational thinking is characterized by:
a) The use of mental symbols (i.e., language).
b) Egocentrism, the inability to see the world from another’s point of view.
Preoperational children simply do not comprehend that others differ in their ideas,
convictions, and emotions.
c) Animism, attributing life and lifelike properties to inanimate objects.
d) Centration, the inability to focus on more than one aspect of a task.
e) The inability to reverse mental operations (Example: when told that someone male has
a brother named Tim, and then asked if Tim has a brother, a preoperational thinker
will say “No”) and sometimes confusing appearance as reality. Children who are
preoperational thinkers believe an object’s appearance tells what the object is really
like.
D. Evaluating Piaget’s Theory
1. Several implications of Piaget’s theory can be used to foster cognitive development:
a) The teacher’s role is to create environments where children can discover for
themselves how the world works.
 b) Children profit from experience only when they can interpret this experience with
their current cognitive structures.
c) Cognitive growth can best be facilitated when teachers encourage children to look at
the consistency of their thinking and sort out those inconsistencies.
2. Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory:
a) Piaget’s theory underestimates cognitive competence in infants and young children
and overestimates cognitive competence in adolescents.
b) Piaget’s theory is vague with respect to processes and mechanisms of change.
c) Piaget’s stage model does not account for variability in children’s performance.
d) Piaget’s theory undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on
cognitive development.
E. Extending Piaget’s Account: Children’s Naïve Theories
1. Children’s theories are usually called naïve theories because unlike real scientific theories,
they are not created by specialists and are rarely evaluated by formal experimentation.
2. According to the core knowledge hypothesis, infants are born with knowledge of the
world and this knowledge is elaborated on based on experience.
3. Young children develop naïve theories concerning physics, psychology, and biology:
a) Naïve physics is used to assess children’s understanding of object permanence.
Infants rapidly create a reasonably accurate theory of some basic properties of objects,
a theory that helps them expect that objects will act in predictable ways.
b) Children’s naïve theories of biology have come to include many of the specific
properties associated with living things:
(1) Movement – children understand that animals can move themselves, but
inanimate objects can be moved only by other objects or by people.
(2) Growth – children understand that, from their first appearance, animals get
bigger and physically more complex, but that inanimate objects do not change
in this way.
(3) Internal parts – children know that the insides of animate objects contain
different materials than the insides of inanimate objects.
(4) .
(5) Illness – preschoolers believe that permanent illnesses are more likely to be
inherited from parents, but that temporary illnesses are more likely to be
transmitted through contact with other people.
(6) Healing – children understand that when injured, animate things heal by
regrowth, while inanimate things must be fixed by humans.
(7) Humanlike – children understand that robots are not humans, yet apply
humanlike traits to robots
c) Children’s theory of living things is rooted in teleological explanations – their belief
that living things and parts of living things exist for a purpose.
d) Young children’s theories of living things are also rooted in essentialism – their belief
that living things have an essence that provides identity, but can’t be seen.
II. Information Processing During Infancy and Early Childhood
A. General Principles of Information Processing
1. The view that mental development involves changes in mental hardware and software.
Mental hardware refers to mental and neural structures that are built in and that allow the
mind to operate, while mental software refers to mental programs that are the basis for
performing particular tasks.
B. Attention
1. Attention is a process that determines which sensory information receives additional
cognitive processing.
 a) Compared to older children, preschoolers are less able to pay attention to task-relevant
information.
b) Children’s attention can be improved through pretend play.
2. Orienting response occurs when individuals fix their eyes on a strong or unfamiliar
stimulus and a change in heart rate and brainwave activity occurs.
3. Habituation is the diminished response to a stimulus as it becomes familiar.
C. Learning
1. Classical conditioning is a form of learning that involves pairing a neutral stimulus and a
response that was originally produced by another stimulus. Through classical conditioning,
infants learn that a stimulus is a signal for what will happen next.
2. Operant conditioning focuses on the relation between the consequences of behavior and
the likelihood that the behavior will recur.
3. Imitation involves watching how others behave and replicating the same behavior.
D. Memory
1. Carolyn Rovee-Coller’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; and a cue can serve to drudge up a memory that seems to have been forgotten.
2. Memory improves in older infants and toddlers. Preschool children can recall more of what
they experience and remember it longer.
3. These improvements in memory can be traced, in part, to growth in the brain regions that
support memory.
4. Autobiographical memory emerges in the preschool years. Improved language skills
contribute to autobiographical memory. Children’s autobiographical memories are richer
when parents talk about past events in detail and encourage their children to participate in
these conversations. The difference in early memories can be traced to cultural differences
in parent–child conversational styles.
E. Preschoolers as Eyewitnesses
1. Research on children’s autobiographical memory has played a central role in cases of
suspected child abuse.
2. When young children are questioned repeatedly, they often have trouble distinguishing
what they experienced from what others may suggest they have experienced. This can be
minimized by following several guidelines when interviewing children:
a) Interview children as soon as possible after the event.
b) Encourage children to tell the truth, say “I don't know,” and correct interviewers.
c) Avoid nonverbal cues and selectively reinforcing responses that are consistent with
allegations.
d) Ask children to describe the event in their own words, ask open-ended questions, and
minimize the use of specific questions.
e) Start the interview by discussing a neutral event.
f) Ask questions to consider alternative explanations.
F. Learning Number Skills
1. Infants are able to distinguish small quantities (less than 4), and can perform simple
addition and subtraction.
G. Learning to Count
1. By 3 years of age, youngsters can count small sets of objects, and in so doing, adhere to the
principles of one-to-one, stable order, and cardinality.
2. Learning to count to larger numbers involves learning rules about unit and decade name.
III. Mind and Culture: Vygotsky’s Theory
A. Vygotsky believed that development is an apprenticeship in which children advance when they
collaborate with others who are more skilled. The social nature of cognitive development is
captured in the concept of intersubjectivity, which refers to mutual, shared understanding
 among participants in an activity. Through guided participation, cognitive growth results from
children’s involvement in structured activities with others who are more skilled than they.
B. The Zone of Proximal Development
1. The difference between what children can do with assistance and what they can do alone
defines the zone of proximal development, an idea that follows from his basic premise
that cognition first develops in a social setting before children become more independent.
C. Scaffolding
1. Control of cognitive skills is most readily transferred from others to the child through
scaffolding, a teaching style in which teachers let children take on more of a task as they
master its different components. The defining characteristic of scaffolding is to give help,
but no more than is needed.
2. Mothers in different cultures accomplish scaffolding in different ways.
D. Private Speech
1. Private speech is one way that children help regulate their own behavior and it represents
an intermediate step in the transfer of control of thinking from others to the self. Children
often talk to themselves, particularly when the task is difficult or after they have made a
mistake.
IV. Language
A. The Road to Speech
1. A newborn’s left hemisphere is sensitive to language.
2. Babies prefer to listen to speech over complex nonspeech sounds.
3. Babies can distinguish consonant sounds as well as vowel sounds.

B. The Impact of Language Exposure

1. Not all languages use the same set of phonemes, so a distinction in one language may be
ignored in another.
2. Infants can even hear phonemes that are not used in their native language, but this ability is
lost by the first birthday.
C. Identifying Words
1. One of the biggest challenges for infants is identifying recurring patterns of sounds—
words.
2. Infants use many powerful tools to identify words in speech.
a) Infants pay more attention to words used repeatedly.
b) Infants identify the beginning of words by paying more attention to stressed syllables
than unstressed syllables.
c) Infants notice sounds that go together frequently.
d) Another way that infants identify words is through their emerging knowledge of how
sounds are used and their function in their native language.
e) Parents and caregivers often help infants master language sounds by talking in a
distinctive style.
3. Infant-directed speech refers to adults’ speech to infants that is slower and has greater
variation in pitch and loudness. Similar types of simple speech are used across cultures.
a) Infant-directed speech attracts infants’ attention more than adult-directed speech
because its slower pace and accentuated changes provide infants with more salient
language clues.
b) Infant-directed speech helps infants perceive fundamental sounds.
4. Steps to Speech
a) Language-based sounds don’t appear immediately.
b) At two months, infants begin to produce vowel-like sounds known as cooing.
 c) After cooing comes babbling, speech-like sound that has no meaning, which is a
precursor to real speech. Infants’ babbling is influenced by the characteristics of the
speech, such as intonation that they hear.
D. First Words and Many More
1. After a brief period in which children appear to understand others’ speech, but do not speak
themselves, most infants will begin to speak.
2. The onset of first words is triggered by the realization that words are symbols. Gestures are
also used as symbols. Soon after, vocabulary expands rapidly.
3. Most children learn meanings of words much too rapidly for them to consider all plausible
meanings systematically. This is referred to as fast mapping.
4. Joint attention and constraints on word names help children learn new words and match
words with the correct referent.
5. When children hear unfamiliar words embedded in sentences containing words they
already know, the other words and the overall sentence structure can be helpful clues to a
word’s meaning.
6. Children’s increased cognitive skills help them learn new words.
7. Infants and toddlers rely on a mixture of word-learning tools, but with age, they gradually
move away from attentional cues to language and social cues.
8. Rules for learning new words are not perfect, and children often make mistakes.
a) An underextension denotes a child’s meaning that is narrower than an adult’s
meaning.
b) Overextension denotes a child’s meaning that is broader.
9. Children’s vocabulary is stimulated by both heredity and experience.
a) Phonological memory, the ability to remember speech sounds briefly, is important in
children’s vocabulary growth.
b) The single most important factor in vocabulary growth is the child’s language
environment, with high-quality language environments producing the best learning.
10. Bilingualism
a) Bilingual children learn both languages simultaneously, slowly learning to distinguish
them.
b) Bilingual children have smaller vocabularies in each language but larger overall, have
a deeper understanding of the arbitrary nature of words as symbols, switch more
quickly between tasks, and inhibit inappropriate responses better.
11. Word-Learning Styles
a) Some youngsters use a referential style that emphasizes words as names and that
views language as an intellectual tool.
b) Other children use an expressive style that emphasizes phrases and views language as
a social tool.
12. Encouraging Language Growth
a) Actively involving children in language-related activities is key to language growth:
(1) The more parents speak to their children, the more rapidly words are learned.
(2) The larger the vocabulary used by parents around children, the larger the
child’s vocabulary.
(3) Parents can help children learn words by reading with them.
(4) Watching television can help word learning.
(5) Touchscreen tablets and smartphone apps increase language skills when they
require active engagement.
E. Speaking in Sentences: Grammatical Development
1. Soon after children speak, they create two-word sentences derived from their own
experiences.
2. Telegraphic speech includes only words directly relevant to meaning and nothing more.
 3. Moving from two-word to more complex sentences involves adding grammatical
morphemes:
a) Grammatical morphemes are words or word endings such as –ing, –ed, or –s.
b) Mastery of grammatical morphemes involves learning rules as well as the exceptions
to the rules. Simple relations are mastered prior to complex ones.
4. Overregularizations are rules that children apply to words that are exceptions to the rule.
5. How children acquire grammar:
a) The behaviorist answer is that children imitate the grammatical forms they hear.
b) The linguistic answer is that children are born with neural circuits in the brain that
allow them to infer the grammar of language they hear.
c) The cognitive answer is that children learn grammar through powerful cognitive skills
that help them rapidly detect speech patterns they hear in their environment.
d) According to the social interaction approach, language learning takes place in the
context of interaction between children and adults.
F. Communicating with Others
1. Parents encourage turn-taking even before infants talk, and later demonstrate both the
speaker and listener rules for their children. By age 2, children spontaneously take turns.
By age 3, children will prompt another to take their turn. Preschoolers will calibrate
messages depending on the audience.
2. Improvement in communication skill is a major accomplishment in language during the
first five years of life. By the time children are ready to enter kindergarten, they use
language with great proficiency and are able to communicate with growing skill.