Cognitive Development in Context

Cognitive Development in Context

1. Piaget's Constructivist view:

   • Children develop through active exploration and discovery
     • Construction of schema: cognitive conflict, assimilation, accommodation and equilibration.

2. Vygotsky's social constructivist view:

   • Learning begins as inter-personal activity. Scaffolding
   • Zone of proximal development: gap between the level achieved alone and assisted.

3. Early sensitivity to language

   • Before birth, recognise familiar sounds
     • At 3 days, prefer human voice to music or non speech. At 1 month distinguish between phonemes pa and ba.

4. Children's first words:

   • Tend to refer to salient objects and routines.
     • Vocabulary acquisition can be measured with standardised checklists, parent diaries.

5. Developmental sequence of speech

   • Birth: reflexive vocalisations
     • 2 months: practicing vowel sounds
       • 4 months: vocal play
         • 6 months: canonical babbling
           • 8 months: reduplicated babbling
             • 10 months: variegated babbling
               • 5-6 years: typically produce all sounds in native language.

6. Children's errors:

   • Context bound, under-extended, over-extended.
     • Children's active learning is illustrated by their creative errors and over-application of rules

7. Chomsky: innate knowledge of grammar

   • A language acquisition device: mental apparatus that filters the language heard and identifies how this maps onto rules of UG.
     • Proposed that all we need from the environment is exposure to language in the critical period

8. Skinner: Language is learnt

   • Proposed that language acquired through general learning processes: operant conditioning and imitation.
     • Good attempts are rewarded therefore repeated

9. Social Interactions: Bruner.

   • Language acquisition support system.
     • Parents support child language with mothers, simple words, repetition, raised pitch and imitation.
       • Mothers is not universal so cannot be essential.
         • Genie: discovered after being isolated and punished for making sounds from 18 months - 13 years. Attempt to teach her language, limited progress beyond one word stage.

10. Non verbal counting

    • Starkey and cooper (1980) presented 4m babies with arrays of 2 or 3 dots until they habituated.
      • Attention increased again when shown 3 or 2 dots, concluded infants could distinguish between 2 and 3.

11. Counting and Sharing

    • Frydman and Bryant (1988) Found that 4 year olds could share sweets accurately between 2 dolls. Early use of number words does not always imply understanding of number concepts.

12. Strategies

    • Limited capacity of short term memory, +/-7. Older children and adults make more use of strategies to encode and retrieve information. Younger children use fewer strategies and benefit less from them.

13. Scripts

    • Scripts and schema help us to understand the world by making new situations predictable.
      • Depend on sufficient examples and language ability.