UNIT 3: Infancy

Reflexes
• Reflex: It is an inborn automatic response to a particular form of stimulation.
• Some reflexes have survival value. Example: Rooting reflex helps baby to find the
nipple and hence can be breastfed.
• Many reflexes help parents and infants establish gratifying interaction.
• It can also help parents to comfort the baby because they permit infants to control
distress and amount of stimulation.

Reflexes and Development of motor skills

• Few reflexes form the basis of complex motor skills which develop later. Eg: Tonic
neck reflex- prepares the baby for voluntary reaching.
• Tonic reflex may encourage them to combine vision with arm movements and
eventually reach for objects.
 • The stepping reflex looks like primitive walking response. It appears in a wide range
of situations- newborn baby in a position where its feet is touching the ground , wall
or any surface.
• The baby alters its leg movements because moving both the legs at the same time
takes more effort.
• When stepping is exercised regularly, babies develop more spontaneous stepping
movements and gain muscle strength. This helps them to walk several weeks earlier.
States of Arousal
States of Arousal Duration Signs
Regular or NREM Sleep 8-9 Hrs • The baby is fully rested
• Little or no body activity
• Eyelids are closed
• Face is relaxed
• Breathing is slow and regular

Irregular or REM Sleep 8-9 Hrs • Gentle limb movements

• Occasional stirring and facial
grimacing occur
• Eyelids are closed
• Occasional rapid eye movement occur
• Breathing is irregular

Drowsiness Varies • Infant is either falling sleep or waking

up
• Body is less active compared to REM
sleep and more active compared to
NREM sleep
• The eyes open and close. When open
they have glazed look
• Breathing is even, but somewhat faster
than in regular sleep
Quiet Alertness 2-3 Hrs • Body is relatively inactive
• Eyes open and attentive
• Breathing is even

Waking activity and crying
1-4 Hrs • Frequent bursts of unconditional body
activity
• Breathing is very irregular
• Face may be relaxed or tensed and
wrinkled
• Crying may occur
 • Throughout day and night, newborn infants move in and out of five states of arousal.
• First Month:
a. States alternate frequently.
b. The most fleeting is quiet alertness. It moves quickly towards fussing and crying.
c. The newborn sleep about 16-18 hrs a day. This is because fetus tends to synchronize
periods of rest and activity with those of the mother.
d. The baby’s sleep is affected more by fullness-hunger rather than the darkness- light.
• Birth- 2Years
a. The organization of sleep and wakefulness changes substantially.
b. Average 2-year-old need 12-13 hours of sleep per day.
c. Periods of sleep and wakefulness become fewer but longer.
d. Sleep-wake pattern increasingly conforms to a circadian rhythm or 24 hour schedule.

PATTERNS OF GROWTH
Patterns Of Growth
• Cephalocaudal pattern Developmental sequence in which the earliest growth always
occurs at the top—the head—with physical growth in size, weight, and feature
differentiation gradually working from top to bottom( Eg: Shoulders, middle trunk
and so on). This same pattern occurs in the head area, because the top parts of the
head—the eyes and brain—grow faster than the lower parts, such as the jaw.
• Proximodistal pattern Developmental sequence in which growth starts at the center of
the body and moves toward the extremities. For example, infants control the muscles
of their trunk and arms before they control their hands and fingers, and they use their
whole hands before they can control several fingers.
HEIGHT AND WEIGHT
• Ninety-five percent of full-term newborns are 18 to 22 inches long and weigh between 5 and
10 pounds.
• In the first several days of life, most newborns lose 5 to 7 percent of their body weight before
they adjust to feeding by sucking, swallowing, and digesting.
• They grow rapidly, gaining an average of 5 to 6 ounces per week during the first month.
• Their weight is doubled by 4 months and tripled by 1 year.
• Infants grow about 1 inch per month during the first year.
• Growth slows considerably in the second year of life.
• By 2 years of age, infants weigh approximately 26 to 32 pounds, having gained a quarter to
half a pound per month during the second year to reach about one-fifth of their adult weight.
• At 2 years of age, infants average 32 to 35 inches in height, which is nearly half of their adult
height.
BRAIN
 • The infant that began as a single cell is estimated to have a brain that contains approximately
100 billion nerve cells, or neurons
• Extensive brain development continues after birth, through infancy and later.
• At birth, the newborn’s brain is about 25 percent of its adult weight and by second birthday,
the brain is about 75% of its adult weight.
• The brain areas do not mature uniformly.
Brain Mapping
• The forebrain region includes the cerebral cortex and several structures beneath it.
• The cerebral cortex covers the forebrain like a wrinkled cap.
• The brain has two halves, or hemispheres which are called as right and left hemispheres.
• Based on ridges and valleys in the cortex, scientists distinguish four main areas, called lobes,
in each hemisphere.
a. Frontal lobes are involved in voluntary movement, thinking, personality, and
intentionality or purpose.
b. Occipital lobes function in vision.
c. Temporal lobes have an active role in hearing, language processing, and memory.
d. Parietal lobes play important roles in registering spatial location, attention, and motor
control.
• At birth, the hemispheres of the cerebral cortex
already have started to specialize: Newborns
show greater electrical brain activity in the left
hemisphere than the right hemisphere when they
are listening to speech sounds.
• Within the brain, the type of nerve cells called
neurons send electrical and chemical signals,
communicating with each other.
• A neuron is a nerve cell that handles information
processing (see Figure 4.6). Extending from the
neuron’s cell body are two types of fibers known
as axons and dendrites.
• The axon carries signals away from the cell body
and dendrites carry signals toward it.
• The myelin sheath insulates axons and helps
electrical signals travel faster down the axon.
• Myelination also is involved in providing energy
to neurons and in communication.
• At the end of the axon are terminal buttons,
which release chemicals called neurotransmitters
into synapses, which are tiny gaps between
neurons’ fibers.
• Chemical interactions in synapses connect axons
and dendrites, allowing information to pass from
neuron to neuron.
• Neurons change in two very significant ways
during the first years of life. First, myelination,
the process of encasing axons with fat cells,
begins prenatally and continues after birth, even
into adolescence.
• Second, connectivity among neurons increases, creating new neural pathways.
 • New dendrites grow, connections among dendrites increase, and synaptic connections
between axons and dendrites.
• Myelination speeds up neural transmissions, the expansion of dendritic connections facilitates
the spreading of neural pathways in infant development.
• The peak of synaptic overproduction in the visual cortex occurs at about the fourth postnatal
month, followed by a gradual retraction until the middle to end of the preschool years.
• In the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain where higher level thinking and self-regulation
occur, the peak of overproduction takes place at about 1 year of age.
• Both heredity and environment are thought to influence the timing and course of synaptic
overproduction and subsequent retraction.
• Myelination for visual pathways occurs rapidly after birth and is completed in the first six
months. Auditory myelination is not completed until 4 or 5 years of age.
• The primary motor areas, develop earlier than others, such as the primary sensory areas.
• The frontal lobes are immature in the newborn.
• As neurons in the frontal lobes become myelinated and interconnected during the first year of
life, infants develop an ability to regulate their physiological states, such as sleep, and gain
more control over their reflexes.
• Cognitive skills that require deliberate thinking do not emerge until later in the first year.
• The prefrontal region of the frontal lobe has the most prolonged development of any brain
region, with changes detectable at least into emerging adulthood.
SLEEP
• The typical newborn sleeps approximately 18 hours a day, but newborns vary a lot in how
much they sleep.
• The range is from about 10 hours to about 21 hours a day.
• Infants 0 to 2 years of age slept an average of 12.8 hours out of the 24, within a range of
9.7 to 15.9 hours
• By 6 months of age the majority of infants slept through the night, awakening their
parents only once or twice a week.
• Surveys indicate that 20 to 30 percent of infants have diffi culty going to sleep at night
and staying asleep until morning.
• Parents’ emotional availability to infants in sleep contexts increases feelings of safety and
security, and consequently better-regulated infant sleep.
• Cultural variations influence infant sleeping patterns.
REM SLEEP
• In REM sleep, the eyes flutter beneath closed lids; in non-REM sleep, this type of eye
movement does not occur and sleep is more quiet.
• REM sleep usually appears about one hour after non-REM sleep. However, about half of an
infant’s sleep is REM sleep, and infants often begin their sleep cycle with REM sleep rather
than non-REM sleep.
• A much greater amount of time is taken up by REM sleep in infancy than at any other point in
the life span.
• By the time infants reach 3 months of age, the percentage of time they spend in REM sleep
falls to about 40 percent, and REM sleep no longer begins their sleep cycle.
• The large amount of REM sleep may provide infants with added self-stimulation, since they
spend less time awake than do older children. REM sleep also might promote the brain’s
development in infancy.
SIDS Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is a condition that occurs when infants stop
breathing, usually during the night, and die suddenly without any apparent reason. SIDS continues
 to be a leading cause of infant death in the United States, with nearly 3,000 infant deaths annually
attributed to SIDS. Risk of SIDS is highest at 2 to 4 months of age. Researchers have found that
SIDS does indeed decrease when infants sleep on their backs rather than their stomachs or sides.
Among the reasons given for prone sleeping being a risk factor for SIDS are that it impairs the
infant’s arousal from sleep and restricts the infant’s ability to swallow effectively.
In addition to sleeping in a prone position, researchers have found that the following factors are
linked to SIDS:
• SIDS occurs more often in infants with abnormal brain stem functioning involving the
neurotransmitter serotonin
• Heart arrhythmias are estimated to occur in as many as 15 percent of SIDS cases, and two recent
studies found that gene mutations were linked to the occurrence of these arrhythmias
• Six percent of infants with sleep apnea, a temporary cessation of breathing in which the airway
is completely blocked, usually for 10 seconds or longer, die of SIDS
• Two reviews concluded that breast feeding is linked to a lower incidence of SIDS
• Low birth weight infants are 5 to 10 times more likely to die of SIDS than are their normal-
weight counterparts
• SIDS is more likely to occur in infants who do not use a pacifier when they go to sleep than in
those who do use a pacifier
• Infants whose siblings have died of SIDS are two to four times as likely to die of it.
• African American and Eskimo infants are four to six times as likely as all others to die of SIDS
• SIDS is more common in lower socioeconomic groups
• SIDS is more common in infants who are passively exposed to cigarette smoke
• SIDS is more common when infants and parents share the same bed.
• SIDS is more common if infants sleep in soft bedding.
• SIDS is less common when infants sleep in a bedroom with a fan.
Sleep and Cognitive Development
The link between infant sleep and children’s cognitive functioning likely occurs because of sleep’s
role in brain maturation and memory consolidation, which may improve daytime alertness and
learning. Another recent study found that poor sleep consolidation in infancy was associated with
language delays in early childhood.

NUTRITION
Nutritional Needs and Eating Behaviour

 Nutritionists recommend that infants consume approximately 50 calories per day for each
pound they weigh—more than twice an adult’s requirement per pound.
 As infants’ motor skills improve, they change from using suck-and-swallow movements with
breast milk or formula to chew-and-swallow movements with semisolid and then more
complex food.
 They transition from being fed by others toward self-feeding.
  By the end of the first year of life, children can sit independently, can chew and swallow a
range of textures, are learning to feed themselves, and are making the transition to the family
diet and meal patterns.
 Caregivers play very important roles in infants’ early development of eating patterns.
 Caregivers who are not sensitive to developmental changes in infants’ nutritional needs,
neglectful caregivers, and conditions of poverty can contribute to the development of eating
problems in infants.
 A recent study found that low maternal sensitivity when infants were 15 and 24 months of age
was linked to a higher risk of obesity in adolescence.
Breast milk Vs Bottle Feeding
Outcomes for the Child
 Gastrointestinal infections- Breast-fed infants have fewer gastroin-testinal infections.
 Respiratory tract infections-Breast-fed infants have fewer infections of the lower respiratory
tract.
• Allergies-A research review by the American Academy of Pediatrics indicated that there is no
evidence that breast feeding reduces the risk of allergies in children.
• Asthma- The research review by the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that exclusive
breast feeding for three months protects against wheezing in babies, but whether it prevents
asthma in older children is unclear.
•Breast-fed infants are less likely to develop this middle ear infection.
•Overweight and obesity. Consistent evidence indicates that breast-fed infants are less likely to
become overweight or obese in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
• Diabetes. Breast-fed infants are less likely to develop type 1 diabetes in childhood (Ping &
Hagopian, 2006) and type 2 diabetes in adulthood.
• SIDS- Breast-fed infants are less likely to experience SIDS
Malnutrition in Infancy

 Early weaning of infants from breast milk to inadequate sources of nutrients, such as
unsuitable and unsanitary cow’s milk formula, can cause protein defi ciency and
malnutrition in infants.
 Breast feeding is more optimal for mothers and infants in developing countries, except for
mothers who have or are suspected of having HIV/AIDS.
 Two life-threatening conditions that can result from malnutrition are marasmus and
kwashiorkor.
 Marasmus is caused by a severe protein-calorie deficiency and results in a wasting away
of body tissues in the infant’s first year. The infant becomes grossly underweight and his
or her muscles atrophy.
 Kwashiorkor A condition caused by severe protein deficiency in which the child’s
abdomen and feet become swollen with water; usually appears between 1 and 3 years of
age.
 Children with kwashiorkor sometimes appear to be well fed even though they are not
because the disease can cause the child’s abdomen and feet to swell with water.
 Kwashiorkor causes a child’s vital organs to collect the nutrients that are present and
deprive other parts of the body of them. The child’s hair also becomes thin, brittle, and
colorless, and the child’s behavior often becomes listless.
  Even if it is not fatal, severe and lengthy malnutrition is detrimental to physical,
cognitive, and social development.
THE MOTOR DEVELOPMENT
The Sequence of Motor Development

 Gross-motor development refers to control over actions that help infants get around in the
environment, such as crawling, standing, and walking.
 Fine-motor development has to do with smaller movements, such as reaching and grasping.
 Many influences—both internal and external to the child—join together to influence the vast
transformations in motor competencies of the first two years.
 The dynamic systems perspective, introduced in Chapter 1 (see page 30), helps us understand
how motor development takes place.
 According to dynamic systems theory of motor development, mastery of motor skills involves
acquiring increasingly complex systems of action. When motor skills work as a system,
separate abilities blend together, each cooperating with others to produce more effective ways
of exploring and controlling the environment.
 Each new skill is a joint product of the following factors:
(1) central nervous system development,
(2) the body’s movement capacities,
(3) the goals the child has in mind,
(4) environmental supports for the skill.
 In the early weeks of life, brain and body growth are especially important as infants achieve
control over the head, shoulders, and upper torso.
 Later, the baby’s goals (getting a toy or crossing the room) and environmental supports
(parental encouragement, objects in the infant’s everyday setting) play a greater role.
Milestones
Fine-Motor Development: Reaching and Grasping

 Reaching and grasping, like many other motor skills, start out as gross, diffuse activity and
move toward mastery of fine movements.
 Newborns will actively work to bring their hands into their field of vision: In a dimly lit
room, they keep their hand within a narrow beam of light, moving the hand when the light
beam moves.
 Newborns also make poorly coordinated swipes, called prereaching, toward an object in front
of them, but because of poor arm and hand control they rarely contact the object.
 Like newborn reflexes, prereaching drops out around 7 weeks of age, when babies improve in
eye movements involved in tracking and fixating on objects, which are essential for accurate
reaching.
 At about 3 to 4 months- develop the necessary eye, head, and shoulder control, reaching
reappears as purposeful, forward arm movements in the presence of a nearby toy and
gradually improves in accuracy.
 By 5 to 6 months, infants reach for an object in a room that has been darkened during the
reach by switching off the lights—a skill that improves over the next few months.
 Reaching improves as depth perception advances and as infants gain greater control of body
posture and arm and hand movements.
 Once infants can reach, they modify their grasp. The newborn’s grasp reflex is replaced by
the ulnar grasp, a clumsy motion in which the baby’s fingers close against the palm.
 Infants use the thumb and index finger in a well-coordinated pincer grasp. Then the ability to
manipulate objects greatly expands.

SENSORY AND PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

To reach for and manipulate objects, maintain balance, or move across various surfaces, infants must
continually coordinate their motor behavior with perceptual information. Acting and perceiving are
not separate aspects of experience. Instead, motor activity is a vital means for exploring and learning
about the world, and improved perception brings about more effective motor activity.
Sensation occurs when information interacts with sensory receptors—the eyes, ears, tongue, nostrils,
and skin.
Perception is the interpretation of what is sensed. The air waves that contact the ears might be
interpreted as noise or as musical sounds.
VISUAL PERCEPTION
Psychologist William James, called the newborn’s perceptual world a “blooming, buzzing confusion.”

 At birth, the nerves and muscles and lens of the eye are still developing. As a result, newborns
cannot see small things that are far away.
 A newborn can see at 20 feet what a normal adult can see at 240 feet.
 By 6 months of age, though, on average vision is 20/40.
 Infants show an interest in human faces soon after birth.
 From 3 to 9 months of age, infants gradually began focusing their attention more on the faces
in the animated fi lm and less on salient background stimuli.
  Infants are more likely to recognize faces to which they have been exposed and are less likely
to recognize faces to which they have not been exposed. This phenomenon is called
perceptual narrowing.
Color Vision:

 By 8 weeks, and possibly as early as 4 weeks, infants can discriminate some colors.
 By 4 months of age, they have color preferences
Perceptual Constancy: Some perceptual accomplishments are especially intriguing because they
indicate that the infant’s perception goes beyond the information provided by the sense. This is the
case in perceptual constancy, in which sensory stimulation is changing but perception of the physical
world remains constant.
Size constancy is the recognition that an object remains the same even though the retinal image
of the object changes as you move toward or away from the object. The farther away from us an
object is, the smaller its image is on our eyes. Thus, the size of an object on the retina is not suffi cient
to tell us its actual size.
Shape constancy is the recognition that an object remains the same shape even though its
orientation to us changes. Look around the room you are in right now. You likely see objects of
varying shapes, such as tables and chairs.
HEARING

 The featus has the ability to hear.

 The fetus can also recognize the mother’s voice,

The kind of hearing that takes place during infancy:

 Loudness: Immediately after birth, infants cannot hear soft sounds quite as well as adults
can; a stimulus must be louder to be heard by a newborn than by an adult. By three
months of age, infants’ perception of sounds improve, although some aspects of loudness
perception do not reach adult levels until 5 to 10 years of age
 Pitch:Infants are also less sensitive to the pitch of a sound than adults are. Pitch is the
perception of the frequency of a sound.
 Infants:are less sensitive to low-pitched sounds and are more likely to hear high-pitched
sounds. Infants are less sensitive to low-pitched sounds and are more likely to hear high-
pitched sounds. By 2 years of age, infants have considerably improved their ability to
distinguish sounds of different pitch.
 Localization: Even newborns can determine the general location from which a sound is
coming, but by 6 months of age, they are more profi cient at localizing sounds or
detecting their origins. Their ability to localize sounds continues to improve during the
second year
Touch

 Newborns do respond to touch. A touch to the cheek produces a turning of the head; a touch
to the lips produces sucking movements.
 Newborns can also feel pain.
 The newly circumcised newborn drifts into a deep sleep, which seems to serve as a coping
mechanism.
  An investigation by Megan Gunnar and her colleagues (1987) found that newborn infant
males cried intensely during circumcision
 Like adults, they relax their facial muscles in response to sweetness, purse their lips when the
taste is sour, and show a distinct archlike mouth opening when it is bitter.
 These reactions are important for survival: The food that best supports the infant’s early
growth is the sweet-tasting milk of the mother’s breast. Not until 4 months do babies prefer a
salty taste to plain water, a change that may prepare them to accept solid foods

Smell

 Newborns can differentiate odors

 The expressions on their faces seem to indicate that they like the way vanilla and strawberry
smell but do not like the way rotten eggs and fish smell
 In one investigation, 6-day-old infants who were breast fed showed a clear preference for
smelling their mother’s breast pad rather than a clean breast pad.
 During pregnancy, the amniotic fluid is rich in tastes and smells that vary with the mother’s
diet—early experiences that influence newborns’ preferences.
 Although smell is less well-developed in humans, traces of its survival value remain.
 At 4 days of age, breastfed babies prefer the smell of their own mother’s breast to that of an
unfamiliar lactating woman.
 Newborns’ dual attraction to the odors of their mother and of breast milk helps them locate an
appropriate food source and, in the process, distinguish their caregiver from other people.

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Cognitive processes
Schemes: As the infant or child seeks to construct an understanding of the world, the developing
brain creates schemes. These are actions or mental representations that organize knowledge. A baby’s
schemes are structured by simple actions that can be performed on objects, such as sucking, looking,
and grasping.
Assimilation and Accommodation: Assimilation occurs when children use their existing schemes to
deal with new information or experiences. Accommodation occurs when children adjust their schemes
to take new information and experiences into account.
Example: Learning the word car by the baby to identify the family vehicle and thinking that all the
vehicles on the road are cars is assimilation. The child soon learns to distinguish that not all vehicles
are called cars and learns to categorize it. This is accommodation.
Organization: To make sense out of their world, children cognitively organize their experiences.
Organization in Piaget’s theory is the grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order
system. Continual refinement of this organization is an inherent part of development.
Equilibration: A mechanism that Piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of
thought to the next.
THE SENSORIMOTOR STAGE

 The sensorimotor stage lasts from birth to about 2 years of age.

 In this stage, infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory
experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with physical, motoric actions—hence the term
“sensorimotor.”
Substages

1) Simple reflexes
 The first sensorimotor substage, corresponds to the first month after birth.
 In this substage, sensation and action are coordinated primarily through reflexive
behaviors, such as rooting and sucking.
 Soon the infant produces behaviors that resemble reflexes in the absence of the usual
stimulus for the reflex. For example, a newborn will suck a nipple or bottle only when
it is placed directly in the baby’s mouth or touched to the lips.
 But soon the infant might suck when a bottle or nipple is only nearby. Even in the
first month of life, the infant is initiating action and actively structuring experiences.
2) First habits and primary circular reactions
 This is the second sensorimotor substage, which develops between 1 and 4 months of
age. In this substage, the infant coordinates sensationand two types of schemes: habits
and primary circular reactions.
 A habit is a scheme based on a reflex that has become completely separated from its
eliciting stimulus. For example, infants in substage 1 suck when bottles are put to
their lips or when they see a bottle. Infants in substage 2 might suck even when no
bottle is present. A circular reaction is a repetitive action.

3) Primary circular reaction

 It is a scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event that initially occurred by
chance. For example, suppose an infant accidentally sucks his fingers when they are
placed near his mouth. Later, he searches for his fingers to suck them again, but the
fingers do not cooperate because the infant cannot coordinate visual and manual
actions.
 Habits and circular reactions are stereotyped—that is, the infant repeats them the
same way each time.
 During this substage, the infant’s own body remains the infant’s center of attention.
There is no outward pull by environmental events.
4) Secondary circular reactions
 It is the third sensorimotor substage, which develops between 4 and 8 months of age.
In this substage, the infant becomes more object-oriented, moving beyond
preoccupation with the self.
 The infant’s schemes are not intentional or goal-directed, but they are repeated
because of their consequences.
 By chance, an infant might shake a rattle. The infant repeats this action for the sake
of its fascination. This is a secondary circular reaction: an action repeated because of
its consequences.
 The infant also imitates some simple actions, such as the baby talk or burbling of
adults, and some physical gestures.
 However, the baby imitates only actions that he or she is already able to produce.
5) Coordination of secondary circular reactions
 Develops between 8 and 12 months of age.
 To progress into this substage the infant must coordinate vision and touch, eye and
hand. Actions become more outwardly directed.
  Significant changes during this substage involve the coordination of schemes and
intentionality.
 Infants readily combine and recombine previously learned schemes in a coordinated
way. They might look at an object and grasp it simultaneously, or they might visually
inspect a toy, such as a rattle, and finger it simultaneously, exploring it tactilely.
 Actions are even more outwardly directed than before. Related to this coordination is
the second achievement—the presence of intentionality. For example, infants might
manipulate a stick to bring a desired toy within reach, or they might knock over one
block to reach and play with another one.
6) Internalization of schemes
 Develops between 18 and 24 months of age.
 In this substage, the infant develops the ability to use primitive symbols. For Piaget, a
symbol is an internalized sensory image or word that represents an event.
 Primitive symbols permit the infant to think about concrete events without directly
acting them out or perceiving them.
 Moreover, symbols allow the infant to manipulate and transform the represented
events in simple ways.
Object Permanence
Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen,
heard, or touched. Acquiring the sense of object permanence is one of the infant’s most important
accomplishments, according to Piaget. The principal way that object permanence is studied is by
watching an infant’s reaction when an interesting object disappears. If infants search for the object, it
is assumed that they believe it continues to exist. Object permanence is just one of the basic concepts
that babies develop about the physical world. To Piaget, children, even infants, are much like little
scientists, examining the world to see how it works.
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Language is a form of communication—whether spoken, written, or signed—that is based on a
system of symbols. Language consists of the words used by a community and the rules for varying
and combining them.
Infinite generativity is the ability to produce an endless number of meaningful sentences using a
finite set of words and rules. Rules describe the way language works. Let’s explore what these rules
involve.
LANGUAGE’S RULE SYSTEMS

1) Phonology: Phonology is the sound system of the language, including the sounds that are
used and how they may be combined. Phonology provides a basis for constructing a large and
expandable set of words out of two or three dozen phonemes. A phoneme is the basic unit of
sound in a language; it is the smallest unit of sound that affects meaning
2) Morphology: Morphology refers to the units of meaning involved in word formation. A
morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning; it is a word or a part of a word that cannot be broken
into smaller meaningful parts. Every word in the English language is made up of one or more
morphemes. Some words consist of a single morpheme
3) Syntax: Involves the way words are combined to form acceptable phrases and sentences. If
someone says to you, “Bob slugged Tom” or “Bob was slugged by Tom,” you know who did
the slugging and who was slugged in each case because you have a syntactic understanding of
these sentence structures.
 4) Semantics: Refers to the meaning of words and sentences. Every word has a set of semantic
features, which are required attributes related to meaning.
5) Pragmatics: A final set of language rules involves pragmatics, the appropriate use of
language in different contexts. Pragmatics covers a lot of territory. When you take turns
speaking in a discussion or use a question to convey a command

HOW LANGUAGE DEVELOPS

Recognizing Language Sounds
Long before they begin to learn words, infants can make fi ne distinctions among the sounds of the
language. research has demonstrated that from birth up to about 6 months of age, infants are “citizens
of the world”: They recognize when sounds change most of the time, no matter what language the
syllables come from. But over the next six months, infants get even better at perceiving the changes in
sounds from their “own” language. in the second half of the first year, infants begin to segment the
continuous stream of speech they encounter into words. And as infants extract an increasing number
of potential word forms from the speech stream they hear, they begin to associate these with concrete,
perceptually available objects in their world.

Babbling and Other Vocalizations

Long before infants speak recognizable words, they produce several vocalizations. The functions of
these early vocalizations are to practice making sounds, to communicate, and to attract attention.
Babies’ sounds go through the following sequence during the first year:
• Crying: Babies cry even at birth. Crying can signal distress, different types of cries signal different
things.
• Cooing: Babies first coo at about 2 to 4 months. These are gurgling sounds that are made in the back
of the throat and usually express pleasure during interaction with the caregiver.
• Babbling: In the middle of the first year, babies babble—that is, they produce strings of consonant-
vowel combinations, such as “ba, ba, ba, ba.”
Gestures

 Infants start using gestures, such as showing and pointing, at about 7 to 15 months of age with
a mean age of approximately 11 to 12 months.
 They may wave bye-bye, nod to mean “yes,” show an empty cup to ask for more milk and
point to a dog to draw attention to it.
 Some early gestures are symbolic, as when an infant smacks her lips to indicate food/drink.
 Pointing is regarded by language experts as an important index of the social aspects of
language, and it follows this developmental sequence: from pointing without checking on
adult gaze to pointing while looking back and forth between an object and the adult.
 Lack of pointing is a significant indicator of problems in the infant’s communication system.
For example, failure to engage in pointing characterizes many autistic children. The ability to
use the pointing gesture effectively improves in the second year of life as advances in other
aspects of language communication occur.
First Words
  A child’s first words include those that name important people (dada), familiar animals
(kitty), vehicles (car), toys (ball), food (milk), body parts (eye), clothes (hat), household
items.
 Infants understand their first words earlier than they speak them.
 On the average, infants understand about 50 words at about 13 months, but they can’t say this
many words until about 18 months.
 The infant’s spoken vocabulary rapidly increases after the first word is spoken.
 The average 18-month-old can speak about 50 words, but most 2-year-olds can speak about
200 words. This rapid increase in vocabulary that begins at approximately 18 months is called
the vocabulary spurt.
 Like the timing of a child’s first word, the timing of the vocabulary spurt varies.
 Cross-linguistic differences occur in word learning. This cross-linguistic difference reflects
the greater use of verbs in the language input to children in these Asian languages.
 Children sometimes overextend or underextend the meanings of the words they use.
Overextension is the tendency to apply a word to objects that are inappropriate for the word’s
meaning.
 Underextension is the tendency to apply a word too narrowly; it occurs when children fail to
use a word to name a relevant event or object.

Two-Word Utterances
By the time children are 18 to 24 months of age, they usually speak in two-word utterances. To
convey meaning with just two words, the child relies heavily on gesture, tone, and context.
• Identifi cation: “See doggie.”
• Location: “Book there.”
• Repetition: “More milk.”
• Negation: “Not wolf.”
• Possession: “My candy.”
• Attribution: “Big car.”
Telegraphic speech is the use of short and precise words without grammatical markers such as
articles, auxiliary verbs, and other connectives. Telegraphic speech is not limited to two words.
“Mommy give ice cream” and “Mommy give Tommy ice cream” also are examples of telegraphic
speech.
SOCIOEMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
in infancy, emotions play important roles in
(1) Communication with others
(2) Behavioural organization.
Through emotions, infants communicate important aspects of their lives such as joy, sadness, interest,
and fear. Psychologists classify the broad range of emotions in many ways, but almost all
classifications designate an emotion as either positive or negative.
Early Emotions
A leading expert on infant emotional development, Michael Lewis, distinguishes between primary
emotions and self-conscious emotions.
Primary emotions are present in humans and other animals; these emotions appear in the first 6
months of the human infant’s development. Primary emotions include surprise, interest, joy, anger,
sadness, fear, and disgust.
Self-conscious emotions require self-awareness that involves consciousness and a sense of “me.”
Self-conscious emotions include jealousy, empathy, embarrassment, pride, shame, and guilt, most of
these occurring for the fi rst time at some point in the second half of the first year through the second
year.
Crying
It is the most important mechanism newborns have for communicating with their world. The first cry
verifies that the baby’s lungs have filled with air.
Babies have at least three types of cries:
• Basic cry. A rhythmic pattern that usually consists of a cry, followed by a briefer silence, then a
shorter whistle that is somewhat higher in pitch than the main cry, then another brief rest before the
next cry. Some infancy experts believe that hunger is one of the conditions that incites the basic cry.
• Anger cry. A variation of the basic cry in which more excess air is forced through the vocal cords.
• Pain cry. A sudden long, initial loud cry followed by breath holding; no preliminary moaning is
present. The pain cry is stimulated by a high-intensity stimulus.
Smiling is a key social signal and a very important aspect of positive social interaction in developing
a new social skill.
Two types of smiling can be distinguished in infants:
• Reflexive smile. A smile that does not occur in response to external stimuli and appears during the
first month after birth, usually during sleep.
• Social smile. A smile that occurs in response to an external stimulus, typically a face in the case of
the young infant. Social smiling occurs as early as 2 months of age.
Fear
One of a baby’s earliest emotions is fear, which typically first appears at about 6 months of age and
peaks at about 18 months. However, abused and neglected infants can show fear as early as 3 months.
The most frequent expression of an infant’s fear involves stranger anxiety, in which an infant shows a
fear and wariness of strangers. By age 9 months, the fear of strangers is often more intense, reaching a
peak toward the end of the first year of life and then decreasing thereafter.
TEMPERAMENT
Temperament Involves individual differences in behavioral styles, emotions, and characteristic ways
of responding.
Chess and Thomas’ Classification Psychiatrists Alexander Chess and Stella Thomas identified
three basic types, or clusters, of temperament:
• An easy child is generally in a positive mood, quickly establishes regular routines in infancy, and
adapts easily to new experiences.
• A difficult child reacts negatively and cries frequently, engages in irregular daily routines, and is
slow to accept change.
• A slow-to-warm-up child has a low activity level, is somewhat negative, and displays a low
intensity of mood.
PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
Emotions and temperament form key aspects of personality, the enduring personal characteristics of
individuals.
Trust: According to Erik Erikson (1968), the first year of life is characterized by the trustversus-
mistrust stage of development. Following a life of regularity, warmth, and protection in the mother’s
womb, the infant faces a world that is less secure. Erikson proposed that infants learn trust when they
are cared for in a consistent, warm manner. If the infant is not well fed and kept warm on a consistent
basis, a sense of mistrust is likely to develop.
Developing Sense of Self: Studying the development of a sense of self in infancy is difficult mainly
because infants cannot verbally express their thoughts and impressions. They also cannot understand
complex instructions from researchers. Physical self-recognition (recognizing themselves in the
mirror) may be a more important marker of self-recognition in Western than non–Western cultures.
Late in the second year and early in the third year, toddlers show other emerging forms of self-
awareness that reflect a sense of “me”. They label their internal experiences such as emotions; they
monitor themselves, as when a toddler says, “do it myself”; and they declare that things are theirs.
Independence: Erik Erikson (1968) stressed that independence is an important issue in the second
year of life. Erikson describes the second stage of development as the stage of autonomy versus
shame and doubt. Autonomy builds as the infant’s mental and motor abilities develop. At this point in
development, not only can infants walk, but they can also climb, open and close, drop, push and pull,
and hold and let go. Infants feel pride in these new accomplishments and want to do everything
themselves. It is important for parents to recognize the motivation of toddlers to do what they are
capable of doing at their own pace.
ATTACHMENT AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
Attachment is a close emotional bond between two people. There is no shortage of theories about
infant attachment. Freud emphasized that infants become attached to the person or object that
provides oral satisfaction. For most infants, this is the mother, since she is most likely to feed the
infant.
Physical comfort also plays a role in Erik Erikson’s view of the infant’s development. Physical
comfort and sensitive care, according to Erikson (1968), are key to establishing a basic sense of trust
in infants. The infant’s sense of trust, in turn, is the foundation for attachment and sets the stage for a
lifelong expectation that the world will be a good and pleasant place to be.
Attachment does not emerge suddenly but rather develops in a series of phases, moving from a baby’s
general preference for human beings to a partnership with primary caregivers.
Following are four such phases based on Bowlby’s conceptualization of attachment:

 Phase 1: From birth to 2 months. Infants instinctively direct their attachment to human
figures. Strangers, siblings, and parents are equally likely to elicit smiling or crying from the
infant.
 Phase 2: From 2 to 7 months. Attachment becomes focused on one figure, usually the
primary caregiver, as the baby gradually learns to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar people.
 Phase 3: From 7 to 24 months. Specific attachments develop. With increased locomotor
skills, babies actively seek contact with regular caregivers, such as the mother or father.
 Phase 4: From 24 months on. Children become aware of others’ feelings, goals, and plans
and begin to take these into account in forming their own actions.