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Development. Language ~ Social. Why Study Development?. “One great blooming, buzzing confusion” – William James (Learning is amazing!!) The child is the father of the man One way to understand human cognition is start at the beginning
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Development Language ~ Social
Why Study Development? • “One great blooming, buzzing confusion” – William James (Learning is amazing!!) • The child is the father of the man • One way to understand human cognition is start at the beginning • Help our understanding of children and the learning process
Themes of Developmental Psych • Themes to keep in mind throughout material • Nature vs. Nurture • Nativist vs. Empiricist • Models of Development • No development (little adults) • Maturation • Readiness • Stages • Waves • Critical periods
Side note: How do you test infants? • Habituation • Procedure: Expose baby to stimulus until he/she no longer attends at it • Test: Introduce new stimulus • If baby looks longer at new image, it’s perceived as new.
Language • Humans have it (almost ubiquitously), animals don’t • Incredibly difficult to learn • Speech sounds are highly variable: • different speakers • different rates • different genders • accents • different intonation patterns • Speech stream is continuous: the “segmentation problem”
Incredibly difficult to learn • Speech stream is continuous: the “segmentation problem”
Language Children develop language fast and effortlessly 1 year: 1 word 2 years: 300 words 3 years: 1000 words 4 years: 5000 words 5 years: 10000 words 18 years: 60000 words
Critical Period? Sometime between age 5 and puberty, language acquisition becomes much more difficult • “Wild Children” (such as Genie) have difficult time acquiring language in adolescence • Congenitally deaf children of hearing parents not exposed to sign language show increased impairments with age • Language capabilities of bilingual adults who acquired their second language at different ages
Critical Period? Performance on a test of English grammar by adults originally from Korea and China was directly related to the age at which they came to the United States and were exposed to English The scores of adults who emigrated before the age of 7 are indistinguishablefrom those of native English speakers
Language Development • Skinner (Behaviorism) – stimulus/response model of language • Noam Chomsky – “Skinner’s work can be regarded, in effect, as a reductio ad absurdum of behaviorist assumptions” • Endless new combinations of words • Children learn rapidly without formal instruction • “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
Innateness of Language? • Chomsky’s Solution Universal Grammar: all natural languages share a common structure that arises from the way our brain is designed to construct and process language. • We have evolved specialized mechanisms for language because communication is advantageous Problem - “Universal” structure could come from the constraints of the environment and communicative needs
Arguments for Innateness Fast mapping / mutual exclusivity
Arguments for Innateness • Dedicated brain regions – Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas • Damage to Broca’s area, near the motor cortex, is associated with difficulties in producing speech • Damage to Wernicke’s area, which is near the auditory cortex, is linked to difficulties with meaning • FOXP2 gene • Family missing the gene showsevere speech and language impairments
General Mechanisms • We evolved general cognitive/social mechanisms that support the development of language • Mechanisms not specific to language • Language is the byproduct of genetic traits being selected for • Word learning constraints – could be result of cognitive constraints
General Mechanisms • Statistical Learning pre-tty-ba-by < 5 % ~93%
General Mechanisms How quickly could you pick out a word from a stream of speech like the one shown here? It takes 8-month-old infants only 2 minutes
Social word learning - That’s a blicket! Wow, a blicket!” Children only assigned the word “blicket” to a toy if the speaker is looking at the toy
Alternative explanation for brain localization – Interactive Specialization (Mark Johnson) Brain regions become specialized through the dynamic interplay between between input and systems • Congenitally blind children show language activation in visual areas and not in typical language areas till much later (Rebecca Saxe)
Social Development Standing on the shoulders of giants
Social Development “most, if not all, of the species-unique cognitive skills of human beings are not due to a unique biological inheritance directly, but rather result from a variety of historical and ontogenetic processes that are set into motion by the one uniquely human, biologically, inherited, cognitive capacity” - Michael Tomasello Ratchet Effect – knowledge shared and built upon
Social Development • Vygotsky Children are social beings, intertwined with other people who are eager to help them gain skills and understanding • Humans are seen as unique because of their inclination to teach each other and to learn from each other • Cognitive development occurs in social interactions • Zone of Proximal Development
Imitation Blind imitation – mimicked behavior Imitation proper – imitated behavior with attention to outcome (goal of behavior) Goal emulation – imitation with the completion of unfulfilled goal
Imitation of use for novel objects (Meltzoff) • Imitation proper – by 14 months – infants repeat action of touching forehead to a box until it lights up (understand the goal of imitated action) • Goal emulation – by 18 months infants are completing the attemptedaction of adults
Theory of Mind – the understanding that we have a mind (intentions, desires, knowledge, beliefs) and that other people have a mind of their own (2-5 yrs)
Evidence for understanding theory of mind/ other’s intentions as early as 5-7 months
Attachment: infant forms a relationship with caregiver and uses them as a secure base to explore the world • Ainsworth: Strange situation
Attachment Styles Secure - Uses caregiver as a secure base for exploration. Upset by departure of parent but easily calmed when they return and can continue to play. Resistant – Does not use parent as a secure base, often stays close to them. Upset when they leave but not comforted by their return. Avoidant – Little affect while playing. No visible stress upon parents departure, ignores them on return. Treats the stranger similarly to the caregiver. Disorganized – no clear attachment patter. Show freezing or repetitive behavior.
Bucharest Early Intervention Project (Photo credit: Charles Nelson, BEIP UNICEF report)
