EARLY CHILDHOOD

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES

The years from ages 3 to 7 are filled with remarkable cognitive accomplishments. All over the world,
children learn the language(s) of their families. Some even learn two or more languages at once. They go
from using fewer than 500 words at age 3 to using over 2,500 words and understanding over 20,000 at
age 6. They learn the grammar and syntax of their languages. By age 5 or 6, many can read. Language
development reflects the changes in thinking and reasoning during the early years. In this module we will
look at the perspectives of Piaget, Vygotsky, and the information processing theorists on thinking, self-
regulation, attention, memory, knowledge, problem-solving strategies, and theory of mind. By the time
you finish this module you should be able to:

 Identify five cognitive abilities that appear and increase from ages 3 to 7.

 Describe the development of language during the early years, including the role of culture in
language, dual-language development, and what can be done to support emergent literacy in the
early years.

 Explain the differences between and the implications of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories for
parents, teachers, and other professionals working with young children.

 Distinguish and describe changes in children’s knowledge of numbers, attention, memory,

problem-solving strategies, and theory of mind during the early years.

NEW COGNITIVE POSSIBILITIES FOR A DEVELOPING BRAIN

For centuries, the period from about ages 3 to 6 has been viewed as a time of great growth in cognitive
abilities. Even if they were unsure of their child’s exact age, medieval European parents first assigned
chores to their children around age 6, the time considered the end of infancy (Orme, 2001). During these
years of early childhood, most 3-year-olds who know several hundred words become 6-year-olds with a
vocabulary of about 20,000 words. Children who at age 2 to 3 believed that everyone shared their
thoughts and feelings realize at age 6 that different people have different minds and thus different
thoughts and beliefs. Three-year-olds who count, “one, two, three, seven, five, ten,” can do simple
addition by age 6. And most children have a preference for using their right or left hand by age 5 or 6.
Kagan and Herschkowitz (2005) summarize five cognitive abilities that appear and increase during these
years in Western cultures:

• Integrating the present with the past. Children can connect an experience in the present with an event
in the past. For example, beginning around age 4, a child greeting a parent returning from the store with
a grocery bag might retrieve the knowledge that the parent left earlier to buy ice cream and ask, “What
ice cream did you get?’ A younger child is less likely to integrate the parent’s present return with the past
event of leaving to buy ice cream.

• Anticipating the future. Children develop a better sense of what is “sooner” and what is “later.” For
example, 7-year-olds, but not most 3-or 4-year-olds, can differentiate events close in time (a birthday next
week, an upcoming holiday) from events that are farther away (summer vacation, Ramadan, Christmas or
Halloween next year).

• Appreciating causality. Even though younger children can make causal connections, “I got medicine
because it makes my fever go away” (Hickling & Wellman, 2001; McCormack & Hoeri, 2005), they are less
likely to reflect on situations and search for causes. If something unfamiliar happens, however, 7-year-
olds are likely to try to understand why.

• Relying on semantic categories. As children develop during this time, they increasingly use words and
networks of meaning (semantic categories) to represent and remember experiences. For example, ask a
4-or 5-year-old “What is the first word that comes to mind when you say sun?” and you might get a
response of shine or burn—simple word associations. But ask a 6-or 7-year-old the same question, and
the response might be other objects in the semantic category such as moon, earth, or planet. Being able
to use meaningful categories allows children to think more logically and to expand their knowledge of the
world by adding new information to categories and building hierarchies such as dog is a pet, is an animal,
is a living thing.

• Detecting relationships between events and concepts. During this period, children are increasingly able
to understand abstract relationships such as larger, smaller, shorter, and taller and to apply these flexibly,
so they know, for example, that a child can be the shortest in one group but the tallest in another group.

Underlying these accomplishments are several brain developments that allow maturing children to focus
attention, inhibit impulses, think faster, and follow longer, more complex sequences of actions and ideas.
With these growing capacities, young children are ready to expand their language. Language plays an
important role in the five cognitive abilities described here because it provides a means for expressing
ideas and asking questions, the categories and concepts for thinking, and the links between the past and
the future. Language frees us from the immediate situation to think about what was and what might be
(Das, 1995; Driscoll, 2005).

LANGUAGE IN THE PRESCHOOL YEARS: AMAZING DEVELOPMENTS

All children in every culture master the complicated system of their native language, unless severe
deprivation or physical problems interfere. This knowledge is remarkable. Sounds, meanings, words and
sequences of words, volume, voice tone, inflection, and turn-taking rules must all be coordinated just to
have a conversation. Yet, by about age 4, most children have a vocabulary of thousands of words and
knowledge of both rules of grammar and rules of conversations. They have “basically all that is needed
for communication in face-to-face contexts with friends and family” (Colledge et al., 2002).
What Develops: Language and Cultural Diversity

There are more than 6,000 natural languages in the world (Tomasello, 2006). In general, cultures develop
words for the concepts that are important to them. For example: How many different shades of green can
you name—mint, olive, emerald, teal, sea foam, turquoise, chartreuse, lime, apple? An oil painting artist
can add cobalt, titanate green, cinnabar green, phthalo yellow green, viridian green, and many others.
Google a few of your favorite clothing stores. What colors do they offer for T-shirts? A quick check on a
few popular sites revealed neon papaya, soft mint, green apple, butter, china blue, tidal blue, petal,
jadeite, and peach melon. English-speaking countries have over 3,000 words for colors. Such words are
important in our lives for fashion and home design, artistic expression, films and television, and T-shirt
choices—to name only a few areas. In contrast, the Himba people of Namibia and a tribe of hunter-gather
people in Papua New Guinea who speak Berinmo have five words for colors, even though they can
recognize many color variations. But whether there are few or many color terms, children gradually
acquire the color categories that are appropriate for their culture (Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro,
2004).

Languages change over time to reflect changing cultural needs and values. The Shoshoni Native Americans
have one word that means, “to make a crunching sound walking on the sand.” This word was valuable in
the past to communicate about hunting, but today new words describing technical tools have been added
to the Shoshoni language, as the emphasis of life moves away from nomadic hunting. To hear hundreds
of new words for 21st-century tools, listen to techies talk about computers and apps (W. F. Price & Crapo,
2002).

Diversity in Language Development

Some children learn two or more languages growing up. In fact, about half the children in the world grow
up exposed to two or more languages.

We call people who speak two or more languages bilingual—but this is not a simple idea. The definition
of the term bilingualism is the source of disagreement. Some definitions focus exclusively on a language-
based meaning: Bilingual people, or bilinguals, speak two languages. But most bilingual individuals also
must be able to move back and forth between two cultures while still maintaining a sense of identity.
Being bilingual and bicultural means mastering communication in two cultures as well as dealing with
potential discrimination.

Do you speak two or more languages? If you mastered your own first language, then added a second or
third language, you are an example of additive bilingualism—you kept your first language and added
another. But if you lost your first language when you added a second one, you experienced subtractive
bilingualism (Norbert, 2005). Children whose family and community value their first language are more
likely to keep the first language when they add a second one. But children who experience discrimination
against their use of the first language may be at greater risk of leaving the first language behind as they
learn a new language (Hamers & Blanc, 2000). Immigrants are more likely to experience discrimination
and therefore “subtract” their first language, at least in interactions outside the family.
Dual-Language development.

Are children at a disadvantage if they are learning two languages at once? That depends. Children exposed
to two languages from birth reach the language milestones in both languages on the same schedule as
monolingual children (children who are learning only one language). Initially, bilingual children may have
a larger vocabulary in the language that they are learning from the person with whom they spend the
most time or have the closest bond, so a child who stays home all day with a French-speaking parent will
likely use more French words. But over time, these children “can and do become fully and equally bilingual
if dual language exposure occurs (a) early in life, (b) consistently and in a sustained manner, and (c) across
a wide and rich range of contexts” (Petitto & Kovelman, 2003).

One general finding is that children will not develop a second language if that language constitutes less
than 25% of the language input they receive. Three factors were positive predictors of English language
development for Spanish-speaking children in one study: (1) the number of different conversations
partners with whom the child spoke only English, (2) the number of different English speakers that the
child heard, and (3) the percentage of the child’s English language exposure that came from native
speakers. One implication of these findings for dual-language development is that parents probably
should talk to their children in their native language but also be sure there is rich exposure to
conversations with native speakers of the second language (Place & Hoff, 2011). If adequate input is
available and continues over time in both first and second languages, children can become balanced
bilinguals—equally fluent in both languages (Hoff, 2006; Petitto & Kovelman, 2003). Simply put, learning
two languages simultaneously is not detrimental to language growth in either of the languages (Brice &
Brice, 2009). Even balanced bilingual children may mix vocabularies of the two languages when they
speak, but this is not a sign that they are confused because their bilingual parents often intentionally mix
vocabularies as well, selecting the word that best expresses their intent. So with consistent and sustained
engagement in two languages, children can become fully bilingual.

Benefits of Bilingualism. There is no cognitive penalty for children who learn and speak two languages. In
fact, there are benefits. Higher degrees of bilingualism are correlated with increased cognitive abilities in
such areas as concept formation, creativity, theory of mind, cognitive flexibility, and understanding that
printed words are symbols for language. In addition, these children have more advanced metalinguistic
awareness (awareness of the forms and structures of language); for example, they are more likely to
notice grammatical errors. These findings seem to hold as long as no stigma is attached to being bilingual
and as long as children are not expected to abandon their first language to learn the second (Bialystok,
2001; Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin, 2003; Hamers & Blanc, 2000). Laura Petitto and Ioulia Kovelman
(2003) suggest that perhaps humans evolved to speak multiple languages because this would have survival
value, so maybe the “contemporary pockets of civilization where one language is spoken are the aberrant
deviation; in other words, perhaps our brains were neurologically set to be multilingual” (p. 14). In
addition, fluency in two or more languages is an asset when graduates enter the business world (Mears,
1998).

Even though the cognitive and social benefits of bilingualism are clear, that does not mean it is easy to
grow up bilingual in our schools. To be successful in school, bilingual children must integrate all the
component skills of language and literacy we are about to discuss—sounds and pronunciation, vocabulary
and meaning, grammar and syntax, as well as pragmatics, the knowledge of when and how to speak
(Castro et al., 2011). Savvy and creative teachers can certainly provide assistance along this tough road.

How and When Does Language Develop?

Language development involves the whole child, so it is likely that many factors—biological, cultural, and
experiential—play a role in language development. To master a language, children must (1) read the
intentions of others to acquire the words, phrases, and concepts of their language and also (2) find
patterns in the ways other people use these linguistic symbols to construct the grammar of their language
(Tomasello, 2006). Individual differences in language development occur. One conclusion of years of
research is that children in social environments with “more adult-produced, child-directed speech—
particularly speech that uses rich vocabulary and complex structure—acquire language more rapidly”
(Hoff, 2006).

There is no one theory of language development, but rather there are many different explanations and
perspectives. For example, the behavioral explanation emphasizes learning language based on principles
of reinforcement and punishment, whereas nativist theories emphasize humans’ inborn language faculty
(García & Náñez, 2011). The important point is that children develop language as they develop other
cognitive abilities by actively trying to make sense of what they hear and by look-ing for patterns and
making up rules to put together the jigsaw puzzle of language. In this process, humans may have built-in
biases, rules, and constraints about language that restrict the number of possibilities considered. Another
built-in bias leads children to assume that the label refers to a class of similar objects. So the child learning
about the rabbit is equipped naturally to assume that rabbit refers to the whole animal (not just its ears)
and that other similar-looking animals are also rabbits (Jaswal & Markman, 2001; Markman, 1992).
Reward and correction play a role in helping children learn correct language use, but the child’s thinking
in putting together the parts of this complicated system is very important (Waxman & Lidz, 2006). Table
6.1 on the next page shows the milestones of language de-velopment, ages 1 to 6, in Western cultures,
along with ideas for encouraging language development.

Sounds and Pronunciation.

Phonology is the study of how sounds function in a language system. A phoneme is the smallest unit of
sound that can affect meaning: For example, in English, the k sound can change at to cat. By about age 5,
most children have mastered the sounds of their native language, but a few may remain unconquered. In
English, generally the j and v sounds and the consonant clusters of th, zh, str, sl, and dr are the last to
develop (R. E. Owens, 2008). Young children may understand and be able to use many words, but they
prefer to use the words they can pronounce easily.

As young children learn to hear differences in the sounds of language, they enjoy rhymes, songs, and
general sound silliness. Young children like stories by Dr. Seuss partly because of the sounds, as is evident
by the book titles—All Aboard the Circus McGurkus or Wet Pet, Dry Pet, Your Pet, My Pet. The young son
of a friend of ours wanted to name his new baby sister Brontosaurus “just because it’s fun to say.”
VOCABULARY AND MEANING. As you can see in Table 6.1, children between ages 2 and 3 can use about
450 words (expressive vocabulary) even though they can understand many more (receptive vocabulary).
By age 6, children’s expressive vocabularies will grow to about 2,600 words and their receptive vocabulary
will be an impressive 20,000-plus words (Otto, 2010). Children who are learning two languages at once
tend to have smaller vocabularies in each language compared to children learning only one, at least during
childhood, but these size differences depend on the bilingual children’s exposure to each language—more
exposure, larger vocabulary (Hoff, 2006).
In addition, the vocabulary of bilingual children is linked to the context in which they use each language,
so children are more likely to know more academic words in the language they use in school. If you
combine vocabulary knowledge for bilingual children—the total number of concepts that they have words
for from both languages—vocabulary size likely is the same for bilingual and monolingual children (B. Z.
Pearson, Fernandez, Lewedeg, & Oller, 1997).

By some estimates, children learn about 10 words a day between the ages of 1 and 18 (P. Bloom, 2002).
How is this incredible rate of learning possible? Researchers describe a process called fast-mapping—
children hear a word once and quickly locate the meaning on their mental map of the language, based on
what they already know or what is “close by” on the map. So if they already know that blue is a color, they
can map the meaning of turquoise quickly when they are told it is a color. This fast-mapping is amazingly,
well, fast. One study showed that children as young as 2 could fast-map a new word after only a 3-second
exposure (Halberda, 2003).

Children can fast-map nouns and adjectives, map several words at a time, and can even map from
television. But the learning may be a rough estimate of the exact meaning—turquoise is some kind of
color, for example. Refining the precise meaning takes a bit more time and experience with different color
concepts (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 2002). More accurate fast-mapping is supported when adults provide
more cues as part of extended and rich conversations (Mintz, 2005). Children generally fast-map concrete
nouns and action verbs that can be pointed to or demonstrated before mapping more abstract words that
denote relations or comparisons (big–little or tall–short). But even when they learn the meaning of a
relational word such as big or tall, children may have very specific meanings for these words—the
meanings they first mapped. So a child may insist that a tall glass can’t be tall because it is not as high as
a tree that his parents called “tall.”

Another process in learning words is mutual exclusivity—the assumption that each object in the world
belongs in just one category, so it has just one category label (Markman, 1992; Markman, Wasow, &
Hansen, 2003). Imagine this situation. Brian, a 4-year-old boy, is shown two objects—a key (he knows the
word key)—and a soda bottle vacuum stopper he has never seen. An adult asks Brian to give him the
blicket. Like most children, Brian selects the soda bottle vacuum stopper as the blicket because he knows
the key is not a blicket. So without being told that the unknown object was a blicket, Brian learned the
name indirectly by comparing it to a known object. In one study, six different familiar and unfamiliar pairs
of objects were used (a key and a soda bottle vacuum stopper, a spoon and a honey dipper, etc.), and the
adult actually pointed to the familiar object while asking, “Can you give me the blicket?” Still, the children
in the study selected the unfamiliar object as the blicket (in spite of the pointing) more than 87% of the
time (Jaswal & Hansen, 2006).

Young children begin to elaborate on their simple language by adding plurals; endings for verbs such as -
ed and -ing; small words such as and, but, and in; and articles (a, the); and by using possessives (the girl’s
hair). A classic study by Jean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children could even apply these rules for
making plurals, possessives, or past-tense verbs to words that they had never encountered. For example,
when shown a picture of a single “wug”, the preschool children in the study could answer correctly “wugs”
when the researcher said, “Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two _____.” In
the process of figuring out the rules governing these aspects of language, children make some very
interesting mistakes.
LEARNING GRAMMAR AND SYNTAX. For a brief time, children may use irregular forms of particular words
properly, as if they are saying what they have heard. Then, as they begin to learn rules, they overregularize
words by applying the rules to everything. Children who once said, “Our car is broken” begin to insist,
“Our car is broked.” A child who once talked about her feet may discover the “s” for plurals and refer to
her foots or feets, then learn about -es for plurals (horses, kisses) and describe her footses, before she
finally returns to talking about her feet (Flavell et al., 2002). Parents often wonder why their child seems
to be “regressing.” Actually, these “mistakes” show how logical and rational children can be as they try to
assimilate new words into existing schemes (review Piaget’s theory in Module 2 for a discussion of
assimilation and schemes). Apparently, these overregularizations happen in all languages, including
American Sign Language. Because most languages have many irregular words, accommodation (Piaget’s
term) is necessary in mastering language. One interesting finding was that girls tend to overregularize
verb tenses more than boys, so they are more likely to say “holded” instead of “held.” Joshua Hartshore
and Michael Ullman (2006) speculate that because girls may have better memory for words, they have
better access to similar words (folded, molded, scolded) and generalize to “holded”; thus, “girls’
hypothesized superior lexical memory abilities may lead to more rather than fewer overregularizations,
thanks to their memorization and associative generalization of regular past-tense forms” (p. 31).

Children master the basics of word order, or syntax, in their native language early. Another aspect of
overregularizing language involves syntax. Because the usual order in English is subject–verb–object,
preschoolers just mastering the rules of language have trouble with sentences in any different order. For
example, if 4-year-old Justin hears a statement in the passive voice, such as “The truck was bumped by
the car,” he probably thinks the truck did the bumping to the car because “truck” came first in the
sentence. Interestingly, however, in languages where the passive voice is more important, such as the
South African language Sesotho, children use this construction much earlier, as young as 3 or 4 (Demuth,
1990). So in talking with young children, in English at least, it is generally better to use direct language—
not passive. If you use passive constructions, immediately rephrase in active language. By early
elementary school, many children can understand the meaning of passive sentences, but they do not use
such constructions in their normal conversations, unless the passive construction is common in their
culture.

PRAGMATICS: USING LANGUAGE IN SOCIAL SITUATIONS. Pragmatics involves the appropriate use of
language to communicate in social situations—how to enter a conversation, tell a joke, interrupt, keep a
conversation going, or adjust your language for the listener. For instance, children must learn the rules of
turn taking in conversation. Young children may appear to take turns in conversations, but if you listen in,
you realize that they are not exchanging information, only talk time. Even so, they are learning and
practicing the pragmatics of conversations. Children show an understanding of pragmatics when they talk
in simpler sentences to younger children or command their pets to “Come here!” in louder, deeper voices
(Rice, 1989). Children as young as 2 provide more details in their descriptions of a situation to a parent
who was not there than they do in descriptions they give to a parent who had experienced the situation
with them. So even young children seem quite able to fit their language to the situation, at least with
familiar people (Flavell et al., 2002).

Cultural differences occur in pragmatics, even within the same spoken language. For example, Shirley
Brice Heath (1989) spent many hours observing White middle-class parents and African American families
who were poor. She found that the adults asked different kinds of questions and encouraged different
kinds of “talk.” White parents asked test-like questions with right answers, such as, “How many cars are
there?” or, “Which car is bigger?” These questions seem odd to African American children, whose families
don’t ask about what they already know. The African American child might wonder, “Why would my aunt
ask me how many cars? She can see there are 3.” Instead, Heath found that African American families
encourage rich storytelling and also teasing that hones their children’s quick wit and assertive responses.

Emergent Literacy

Today, in most languages, reading is a cornerstone of learning, and the foundation for reading is built in
early childhood. But young children vary greatly in their knowledge and skills related to reading, so
research has expanded to study what supports these emerging literacy skills. Emergent literacy is made
up of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that develop as children learn to read and write, as well as the
environments and contexts that support these developments (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998).

What are the most important skills that help literacy emerge? The answers are not certain, but research
has identified two broad categories of skills that are important for later reading: (1) skills related to
understanding sounds and codes such as knowing that letters have names, that sounds are associated
with letters, and that words are made up of sounds in a sequence (this last skill often is called phonemic
awareness), and (2) oral language skills such as expressive and receptive vocabulary, knowledge of syntax,
and the ability to understand and tell stories (Dickinson, McCabe, Anastopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, & Poe,
2003; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). Some educators have emphasized code skills and others oral language,
but a study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Childhood Research
Network (NICHD, 2005b) that followed over 1,000 children from age 3 through third grade found that oral
language skills at age 4 1⁄2 predicted word decoding in first grade and reading comprehension in third
grade. The NICHD researchers concluded, “most recent investigations find that preschool oral language
skills [e.g., size of vocabulary, ability to use syntax, ability to understand and tell stories] play an important
role alongside code skills in predicting reading in the transition to school” (p. 439). The relationships found
were more than simple correlations, so evidence indicates that both code and oral language skills are
necessary for later literacy. These sets of skills probably support each other in the process of learning to
read and write.

One way to think about emergent literacy that captures both code and oral language skills for emergent
literacy is the notion of inside-out skills and outside-in skills and processes, described in Table 6.2. This
model, developed by Grover Whitehurst and Christopher Lonigan (1998), includes two interdependent
sets of skills and processes.

A reader must decode units of print into units of sound and units of sound into units
of language. This is an inside-out process. However, being able to say a written word
or series of written words is only a part of reading. The fluent reader must understand
those auditory derivations, which involves placing them in the correct conceptual and
contextual framework. This is an outside-in process. (p. 855)
Table 6.2 Components of Emergent Literacy

For example, to understand even a simple sentence in print, such as “She ordered a camera from
Amazon?” the reader must know about letters, sounds, grammar, and punctuation. The reader also has
to remember the first words as he is reading the last ones. But these inside-out skills are not enough. To
understand, the reader needs to have conceptual knowledge: What is a camera? What does it mean to
order? Is this the Amazon River or Amazon online? Why the question mark? Who is asking? How does this
sentence fit in the context of the story? Answering these questions takes outside-in skills and knowledge.

Building a Foundation. What builds this foundation of emergent literacy skills? Two related activities are
critical: (1) conversations with adults that develop knowledge about language and (2) joint reading, using
books as supports for talk about letters, sounds, words, pictures, and concepts (NIL, 2008; Whitehurst &
Lonigan, 1998). Especially in the early years, children’s home experiences are central in the development
of language and literacy (Burgess, Hecht, & Lonigan, 2002; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002). In homes that
promote literacy, parents and other adults value reading as a source of pleasure, and there are books and
other printed materials everywhere. Parents read to their children (even a few minutes a day is helpful),
take them to bookstores and libraries, limit the amount of television everyone watches, and encourage
literacy-related play such as setting up a pretend school or writing “letters” (Pressley, 1996; Snow, 1993;
Zeece, 2008)..

EMERGENT LITERACY AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN. The process of learning to read follows the same
pattern in first and second languages, but bilingual children may require more time to accomplish the
same tasks as their English-speaking peers. Instruction in the key components of literacy described in
Table 6.2, particularly oral proficiency, increases students’ capacity to transfer language knowledge from
the primary to the secondary language (August & Shanahan, 2006, 2010). Also, parent involvement and
quality preschools support emergent literacy in both English and Spanish, in part because the children’s
oral language improves in both languages when parents are involved in literacy activities (Farver, 2007).
Emergent literacy skills are critical for school readiness (Hammer, Farkas, & Maczuga, 2010).

PIAGET AND VYGOTSKY

Language is a major cognitive accomplishment of early childhood. In fact, when children have difficulties
in their language development, it often is because they have problems in cognitive abilities (Colledge et
al., 2002). Two early theorists provided insight into cognitive abilities: Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky.

Piaget: Preoperational Thinking

By the end of the sensorimotor stage, at about age 2, the child can use many goal-directed action
schemes—searching for a lost toy, for example, or throwing a spoon to the floor in a game of “how many
times will you pick this up?” with parents. As long as these schemes remain tied to physical actions,
however, they are of no use in recalling the past, keeping track of information, or planning. For this,
children need what Piaget called operations, or actions that are carried out and reversed mentally rather
than physically, such as mentally pouring the water from the thin tall glass back into the short fat glass to
confirm that the amount of water stays the same. The stage after the sensorimotor period is called
preoperational (roughly ages 2 to 7), because the child has not yet mastered these mental operations, but
is moving toward mastery. During this time, children are developing important abilities to represent
actions internally—to “think” about actions (Piaget, 1970a, 1971).

Advances in the preoperational stage. According to Piaget, the first type of thinking that is separate from
action involves making action schemes symbolic. Symbols are representations that look similar to what
they stand for—a picture of a tree symbolizing a tree, for example, or a child pretending to drink from a
cup. Signs are more arbitrary; like alphabets or numbers, they represent things or ideas without
necessarily looking like them. The ability to form and use signs and symbols—words, gestures, images,
sounds, and so on—is a major accomplishment of the preoperational period and moves children closer to
mastering the mental operations of the next stage.

This ability to work with signs and symbols, such as using the word “horse” or a picture of a horse or even
pretending to ride a horse to represent a real horse that is not actually present, is called the semiotic
function. The child’s earliest use of symbols is in pretending. Children who are not yet able to talk will
often use action symbols—pretending to stir food in an empty bowl or cup or touching a toothbrush to
their teeth, showing that they know what each object is for. This behavior also shows that their schemes
are becoming more general and less tied to specific actions. The eating scheme, for example, may be used
in playing house.

Children develop the semiotic function over time. Young children are first able to use deferred
imagination—to imitate actions or sounds of objects or people not present. For example, a child may scold
the dog with words and a voice tone he heard his older sister use earlier. Then comes symbolic play—the
child uses a piece of wood as a boat or a house. Next to develop is drawing that moves from scribbles to
drawings that represent something, although that something may be obvious only to the child artist.
Finally, children are able to create mental images of objects or people—they have a “picture in their
minds” of things that are not moving like their pet dog or a cartoon character. Mental images in motion
take longer to develop (Wadsworth, 2004).

Of course, as we saw earlier, during the preoperational stage, we also see the rapid development of that
very important symbol system, language. Between the ages of 2 and 6, most children enlarge their total
vocabulary from about 200 to 20,000 words. The development of the semiotic system of language opens
many more possibilities for thinking, remembering, planning, and problem solving.

Even though young children know a great deal, they still have limited understandings about their world
and they lack key cognitive operations.

LIMITATIONS OF THE PREOPERATIONAL STAGE. As the child moves through the preoperational stage,
the developing ability to think about objects in symbolic form remains somewhat limited to thinking in
one direction only, or using one-way logic. It is very difficult for the child to “think backward,” or imagine
how to reverse the steps in a task. Remember Justin’s difficulties with the passive voice? To make sense
of the sentence “The truck was bumped by the car,” Justin must mentally undo and then redo the
sequence by translating from the passive voice “was bumped” to the active voice, “The car bumped the
truck.” This translation requires reversible thinking—mentally undoing and redoing an event, and
preschool children have not yet mastered this ability (Davies, 2004; Piaget, 1970a, 1974). Reversible
thinking is involved in many other tasks that are difficult for the preoperational child, such as conservation.
What is conservation? Read on.

Conservation is the principle that the amount or number of something remains the same even if the
arrangement or appearance is changed, as long as nothing is added and nothing is taken away. You know
that if you tear a piece of paper into several pieces, you will still have the same amount of paper. To prove
this, you know that you can reverse the process by taping the pieces back together; however, this kind of
thinking is difficult for young children. The principle of conservation applies in several areas—number,
area, volume, mass, and weight. The ability to conserve in these different areas develops slowly between
ages 6 and 7, but conservation of weight takes a few years longer. A classic example of difficulty with
conservation is found in the preoperational child’s response to the Piagetian task described in Figure 6.2.
Piaget’s explanation for Amaya’s answer in Figure 6.2 is that she is focusing, or centering, attention on the
dimension of height. She has difficulty considering more than one aspect of the situation at a time, or
decentering. The preoperational child cannot understand that decreased diameter compensates for
increased height because this would require taking into account two dimensions at once. Thus, children
at the preoperational stage have trouble freeing themselves from their own immediate perceptions of
how the world appears. At the beginning of this Module, we described five basic cognitive abilities that
develop during the preschool years. As Amaya im-proves in two of those abilities, integrating the past
with the present and reflecting on the causes of changes, she will be able to understand that the current
situation (taller glass of water) is still connected to the past situation (shorter, wider glass of water) and
the change in glass shape may have caused the water to rise (Kagan & Herschkowitz, 2005).

This brings us to another important characteristic of the preoperational stage. Preoperational children,
according to Piaget, have a tendency to be egocentric, that is, they see the world and the experiences of
others from their own viewpoint. Egocentric, as Piaget intended it, does not mean selfish; it simply means
that children often assume everyone else shares their feelings, reactions, and perspectives. For example,
if a little boy at this stage is afraid of dogs, he may assume that all children share this fear. Very young
children center on their own perceptions and on the way the situation appears to them. This is one reason
it is difficult for preoperational children to understand that your right hand is not on the same side as
theirs when you are facing them.

Egocentrism is also evident in the child’s language. You may have seen young children happily talking
about what they are doing even though no one is listening. This can happen when the child is alone or,
even more often, in a group of children: Each child talks enthusiastically, without any real interaction or
conversation. Piaget called this the collective monologue.

Research has shown that young children are not totally egocentric in every situation, however.
Young children do seem quite able to take the needs and different perspectives of others into ac-count,
at least in certain situations. For example, when asked by a researcher, 3-and 4-year-olds can place objects
where another person or doll would be able to either see the object or not see it, so they can take the
visual perspective of another into account (P. L. Harris, 2006; Newcombe & Huttenlocher, 1993). In
fairness to young children, even adults can make assumptions that oth-ers feel or think like they do. For
example, have you ever gotten a gift that the giver loved but was clearly inappropriate for you?

IMPLICATIONS FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD. The brain develops with stimulation, and activity provides some
of that stimulation at every age. Babies in the sensorimotor stage learn by exploring, sucking, pounding,
shaking, throwing—acting on their environments. Preoperational preschoolers love pretend play, and
through pretending, they form symbols, use language, and interact with others. They are beginning to
play simple games with predictable rules.

Piaget was more interested in understanding children’s thinking than in guiding educators. He did express
some general ideas about educational philosophy, however. He believed that the main goal of education
should be to help children learn how to learn (Piaget, 1969). Even though he did not design programs of
education based on his ideas, many other people have. For example, the National Association for the
Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has guidelines for developmentally appropriate education that
incorporate Piaget’s findings (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009).

Piaget has taught us that we can learn a great deal about how children think by listening carefully, by
paying close attention to their ways of solving problems. If we understand children’s thinking, we will be
better able to match educational experiences to children’s current knowledge and abilities. In the early
childhood years, activity and play are important educational experiences. In fact, play is so important for
the young child’s growth and development, that we will spend several pages discussing play later in this
Module.

LIMITATIONS OF PIAGET’S THEORIES. Piaget taught us that children do not think like adults. His influence
on developmental psychology and education has been enormous, even though recent research has not
supported all of his ideas. It now appears that Piaget underestimated the cognitive abilities of young
children. The problems he gave them may have been too difficult and the directions too confusing. His
subjects may have understood more than they could show on these problems. For example, work by
Gelman and her colleagues (Gelman, 2000; Gelman & Cordes, 2001) shows that preschool children know
much more about the concept of number than Piaget thought, even if they sometimes make mistakes or
get confused. As long as preschoolers work with only three or four objects at a time, they can tell that the
number remains the same, even if the objects are spread far apart or clumped close together. So, we may
be born with a greater store of cognitive tools than Piaget suggested.
Research across different cultures has generally confirmed that Piaget was accurate in the characteristic
ways of thinking and the sequence of the stages he described, but age ranges for the stages vary. Western
children typically move to the next stage about 2 to 3 years earlier than children in non-Western societies.
But careful research has shown that these differences across cultures depend on the subject or domain
tested and how much the culture values and teaches knowledge in that domain. For example, children in
Brazil who sell candy in the streets instead of attending school appear to fail a certain kind of Piagetian
task—class inclusion (Are there more daisies, more tulips, or more flowers in the picture?). But when the
tasks are phrased in concepts they understand—selling candy—then these children perform better than
Brazilian children the same age who attend school (Saxe, 1999). So cultural differences and the type of
tasks used affect children’s performances on Piaget’s assessments.

One theory that includes culture as a major component of children’s cognitive development was proposed
by Lev Vygotsky, described next.

VYGOTSKY: THE BEGINNING OF SELF-REGULATION

At the beginning of the Module we described five general abilities that develop during the preschool years.
Two of the abilities, anticipating the future and appreciating causality, are involved in regulating your own
thinking and actions. Language plays an important role in developing self-regulation as well.

THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE AND PRIVATE SPEECH. Vygotsky believed that cultural tools, including material
tools (pencils, computers, etc.) and psychological tools (signs and symbol systems such as numbers, maps,
and language) play very important roles in cognitive development.

In Vygotsky’s theory, language is the most important symbol system in the cultural tool kit, and it is the
one that helps to fill the kit with other tools. Vygotsky placed more emphasis than Piaget on the role of
language in cognitive development. He believed that “thinking depends on speech, on the means of
thinking, and on the child’s socio-cultural experience” (1987b, p. 120). In fact, Vygotsky believed that
language in the form of private speech (talking to yourself) guides cognitive development. If you have
spent much time around young children, you know that they often talk to themselves as they play.
Vygotsky suggested that these mutterings, called private speech, play an important role in cognitive
development by moving children toward self-regulation, the ability to anticipate the future, and to plan,
monitor, and guide one’s own thinking and problem solving. Vygotsky explained that self-regulation
developed in a series of stages. First, the child’s behavior is regulated by others using language and signs
such as gestures. For example, the parent says, “No!” when the child reaches toward a candle flame. Next,
the child learns to regulate the behavior of others using the same language tools. The child says, “No!” to
another child who is trying to take away a toy, often even imitating the parent’s voice tone. The child also
begins to use private speech to regulate her own behavior, saying “no” quietly to herself, as she is tempted
to touch the flame. Finally, the child learns to regulate her own behavior by using silent inner speech
(Karpov & Haywood, 1998). The use of private speech peaks at around 9 years and then decreases,
although one study found that some children from ages 11 to 17 still spontaneously muttered to
themselves during problem solving (McCafferty, 2004; Winsler, Carlton, & Barry, 2000; Winsler & Naglieri,
2003).
This series of steps from spoken words to silent inner speech is another example of how higher mental
functions appear first between people as they communicate and regulate each other’s behavior, and then
emerge again within the individual as cognitive processes. Through this fundamental process, the child is
using language to accomplish important cognitive activities such as directing attention, solving problems,
planning, forming concepts, and gaining self-control. Research sup-ports Vygotsky’s ideas (Berk & Spuhl,
1995; M. J. Emerson & Miyake, 2003). Children and adults tend to use more private speech when they are
confused, having difficulties, or making mistakes (R. M. Duncan & Cheyne, 1999). Inner speech not only
helps us solve problems but also allows us to regulate our behavior. Have you ever thought to yourself
something like, “Let’s see, the first step is” or, “Where did I use my glasses last?” or, “If I work to the end
of this page, then I can. . . .”? You were using inner speech to remind, cue, encourage, or guide yourself.
In a really tough situation, such as taking an important test, you might even find that you return to
muttering out loud.

Because private speech helps children to regulate their thinking, it makes sense to allow, and even
encourage, children to use private speech at home and in school. Insisting on total silence when young
children are working on difficult problems may make the work even harder for them. One approach, called
cognitive self-instruction, teaches children to use self-talk to guide learning. For example, children learn
to give themselves reminders to “go slowly and carefully

THE VALUE OF ASSISTED LEARNING AND CULTURAL TOOLS. Vygotsky’s theory suggests that teachers
need to do more than just arrange the environment so that children can discover on their own. Children
cannot and should not be expected to reinvent or rediscover knowledge and tools already available in
their cultures. Rather, they should be guided and assisted in their learning—so Vygotsky saw teachers,
parents, and other adults as central to the child’s learning and development (Karpov & Haywood, 1998).
assisted learning, or guided participation, requires support and scaffolding—giving information, prompts,
reminders, and encouragement at the right time and in the right amounts, and then gradually allowing
the children to do more and more on their own. But assisted learning does not mean interrupting children
who are engaged. Rather, adults are encouraged to provide the level of scaffolding needed. When children
are in meaningful interactions with activities or each other, leave them alone. On the other hand, when
children are frustrated or troubled—the puzzle has too many pieces or a fight is about to break out—then
some assistance makes sense.

Here is an example of a teacher providing scaffolding. Two children are playing in the music center and
one gets stuck trying to create a song: “A man fell . . . um . . . down a tree, down a tree . . . I don’t know. .
. .” Frustration ensues as one child strums an autoharp and insists that the other keep making up the song.
The would-be singer protests, “But I can’t think of the rest.” The teacher steps in:

Teacher: I like the first part. “A man fell down a tree.” That’s a good start to a song.

Singer: Yeah, but I don’t know any more words to sing.

Teacher: Well, what else could the man do besides fall down a tree?

Autoharp player: (Stops playing the autoharp) I know. He could go up the tree. (Laughs)
 Singer: OK. Play it. . . . A man fell down the tree, up the tree, up the tree. A man fell down and up
and down . . . and . . . Wait. What can he do next?

Teacher: You could sing what happens to him when he falls down.

Singer: Oh . . . A man fell up and down and up and down and fell to the dirty floor.

Teacher: Wonderful. Now what will be your second verse?

Discussion, playing, and singing continue, and the teacher moves on. (Frost, Wortham, & Reifel,
2005, p. 240)

LEARNING AND THE ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT. Both Piaget and Vygotsky probably would
agree that children need to be taught in the place where the learning challenge matches their current
abilities (J. Hunt, 1961)—where they are neither bored nor frustrated. Piaget might emphasize matching
children’s current thinking abilities, but Vygotsky probably would recommend providing support to extend
and grow current thinking. Vygotsky called the place where this growth is possible the zone of proximal
development (ZPD), defined as the area between the child’s current development level “as determined
by independent problem solving” and the level of development that the child could achieve “through
adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). This is the area where
instruction can succeed, because real learning is possible. Children should be put in situations where they
have to reach to understand, but where support and teaching are also available. Sometimes the best
teacher is another child who has just figured out how to solve the problem, because this child is probably
operating in the learner’s ZPD. Having a child interact with someone who is just a bit better at the activity
is a good idea—both children benefit in the exchange of explanations, elaborations, and questions. In
addition, children should be encouraged to use language to organize their thinking and to talk about what
they are trying to accomplish. Dialogue and discussion are important avenues to learning (Karpov &
Bransford, 1995; Kozulin & Presseisen, 1995; Wink & Putney, 2002).

LIMITATIONS OF VYGOTSKY’S THEORIES. Vygotsky added important considerations by highlighting the

role of culture and social processes in cognitive development, but he may have gone too far. As you have
seen in this Module, we may be born with a greater store of cognitive tools than either Piaget or Vygotsky
suggested. Some basic understandings, such as the idea that adding increases quantity, may be part of
our biological predispositions, ready for use to guide our cognitive development. Young children appear
to figure out a great deal about the world before they have the chance to learn from their culture or more
capable adults and peers (Schunk, 2012).
Also, Vygotsky did not detail the cognitive processes underlying developmental changes: Which cognitive
processes allow children to engage in more advanced and independent participation in social activities?
The major limitation of Vygotsky’s theory, however, is that it consists mostly of general ideas; Vygotsky
died before he could expand and elaborate his ideas, pursue his research, and develop applications of his
theory. His students continued to investigate his ideas, but much of that work was suppressed until the
1950s and 1960s by Josef Stalin’s dictatorial regime that stifled scientific development and the free flow
of ideas in the Soviet Union (Gredler, 2005; Kozulin, 2003; Kozulin & Presseisen, 1995). As a result, others
have created most of the applications described today—and we don’t know if Vygotsky would have agreed
with them.

COMPARING PIAGET AND VYGOTSKY

SELF-TALK. Piaget called children’s self-directed talk “egocentric speech.” He assumed that this egocentric
speech is another indication that young children can’t see the world through the eyes of others. They talk
about what matters to them, without taking into account the needs or interests of their listeners. As they
mature, and especially as they have disagreements with peers, Piaget believed, children develop
socialized speech. They learn to listen and exchange (or argue about) ideas. As you saw earlier, Vygotsky
had very different ideas about young children’s private speech. Rather than being a sign of cognitive
immaturity, it is a necessary stage in the development of self-regulation. Table 6.3 contrasts Piaget’s and
Vygotsky’s theories of private speech. We should note that Piaget came to accept many of Vygotsky’s
arguments and agreed that language could be used in both egocentric and problem-solving ways (Piaget,
1962).

One explanation for the significant changes in cognitive development and languages in the early years is
that the capacities for attention and memory are rapidly increasing. A number of theories describe
attention and memory, but the most common are the information processing explanations (Ashcraft &
Radvansky, 2010; Sternberg, 1999).
INFORMATION PROCESSING: KNOWING AND REMEMBERING
Several information processing theories address cognitive development, but all share the basic
assumption that children become better information processors as they develop—they become faster
and more efficient thinkers (Bjorklund, 2005; Munakata, 2006). Most information processing theories also
assume that different kinds of memory exist, including short-term memory, or working memory (what
we are currently thinking about and can hold briefly in memory), and long-term memory, where all that
we know is stored. What do information processing theories tell us about young children’s cognitive
development? We start with knowledge.

The Importance of Knowledge

Information processing theories suggest that one of the most important elements in cognitive
development is what the individual brings to the situation. What we already know is the foundation and
frame for constructing all future learning—because what we already know determines to a great extent
what we will pay attention to, perceive, learn, remember, and forget (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000;
Schunk, 2012).

Earlier information processing approaches emphasized general cognitive abilities such as processing
speed that explain performance on all cognitive tasks. Today, many information processing theories are
domain specific, meaning the theories apply to specific cognitive abilities (e.g., the domain of visual
perception, language, or spatial reasoning) or particular area of knowledge (e.g., the domain of number,
physics, or biology). Research on children’s knowledge in different domains has helped us understand
their cognitive development. David Bjorklund, who has done extensive research on children’s developing
knowledge, observed that in the research on cognitive development, one of the most consistent findings
in the last 30 years has been that children’s thinking is domain specific. As Bjorklund notes, “There are
many examples in the literature of children performing one cognitive task like a champ while performing
other seemingly similar tasks like a chump” (2005, p. 140). Children’s thinking develops in specific domains
of knowledge—and number is one important domain in the early years.

YOUNG CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF NUMBER. An understanding of number develops during the

early childhood period. An essential step is learning the number words for your culture. In European
languages and those derived from them such as English, the numbers 1 to 10 are fairly easy to learn, but
after 10 there are numbers that don’t match a base-10 pattern, like 11, 12, 13, 14, and so on. In contrast,
the words for numbers in East Asian languages match the base-10 number system. For example, the
Chinese word for 12 is translated, “ten two.” So Chinese children do not have to learn special words for
numbers like 11, 12, 13, and 14. Another advantage in Chinese is that the word for 12 immediately tells
you that 12 is made up of one tens-value and two units-values. Evidence indicates that this difference in
counting words from 10 to 100 is one of the reasons that East Asian children generally are better than
English speakers in some arithmetic procedures (Geary, 2006; Geary, Bow-Thomas, Liu, & Siegler, 1996).

Principles of Counting. Knowing the number words is just one part of learning to count. Piaget, one of the
first psychologists to carefully study children’s understanding of number, noted that children can say the
number names, and even apply the names to a sequence of objects, years before they count accurately
or even understand that they are determining quantity. So 3-year-old Emily might count her books—“one,
two, three, ten, seven, eleven-teen, three-teen, sixteen!” When asked how many books, Emily is likely to
announce, “sixteen.”

Information Processing: Executive Functioning Improves with Development

Typically, as they grow older, children become better at processing information—that is, better at
encoding, memory, retrieval, and especially executive functioning. Executive functioning involves all
those processes that we use to plan, focus attention, remember, organize, coordinate thinking and
perform goal-directed, intentional actions. Executive functioning skills include focusing attention,
inhibiting impulsive responses, making and changing plans, and using working memory to hold and
manipulate information (Best & Miller, 2010; Raj & Bell, 2010). As children develop more sophisticated
and effective executive functioning skills, they are active in advancing their own development; they are
constructing, organizing, and improving their own knowledge and strategies (Siegler & Alibali, 2005). Let’s
examine three important aspects of children’s developing executive functioning: attention, memory, and
problem solving.

Young Children’s Attention. Attention takes effort and is a limited resource. By now in this Module, you
probably have to work a bit to pay attention to these words about attention! For younger children, mental
operations require a good amount of effort and attention. But with time and practice, some processes
can become automatic, achieving automaticity. This is true for all of us at the beginning of learning
something new. For example, when you were learning to drive, you probably couldn’t listen to music and
drive at the same time. After years of practice, you can plan a party, listen to music, and carry on a
conversation as you drive (but please—no texting!). Like driving or searching for a hidden toy, processes
that initially require attention and concentration become automatic with practice. Actually, automaticity
probably is a matter of degree; we are not completely automatic, but rather more or less automatic in our
performances depending on how much practice we have had and on the situation. For example, even
experienced drivers might become very attentive and focused during a blinding blizzard (J. R. Anderson,
1995).

As the driving example demonstrates, we can pay attention to only one cognitively demanding task at a
time (Ashcraft & Radvansky, 2010). To regulate attention, children need to focus on relevant information,
ignore irrelevant information, sustain attention over time, and control impulsive responses to distractions.
The ability to regulate attention is a critical skill—one that children need to develop early. Researchers in
cognitive neuroscience often describe the ability to control and focus attention as a “hub cognitive
ability”—necessary for the development of other important cognitive abilities such as language and
problem solving (Wass, Scerif, & Johnson, 2012, p. 363). For example, a study that followed more than
1,000 children from birth to age 4 1⁄2 found that the ability to control attention was related to several
positive outcomes in language and social skills (NICHD Early Child Care Network Research, 2005b, c).

Young children are not aware that they need to focus and sustain their attention. They think of their mind
as being like a lamp that “lights” everything equally. But attention is more like a flash-light that focuses
selectively (Flavell et al., 2002). Over 25 years ago, John Flavell (1985) described four aspects of attention
that seem to develop as children mature, including the growing knowledge that attention shines its
selective flashlight on some things and not others:
 1. As children grow older, they are more able to control their attention. Older children not only have
longer attention spans; they also focus more accurately on what is important while ignoring
irrelevant details. In addition, they can simultaneously pay attention to more than one dimension
of a situation, which may explain why they develop conservation in the Piagetian sense. They can
focus on both the width and the height of the liquid in a glass, for example.

2. As children develop, they become better at fitting their attention to the task. Older children, for
example, know that they should focus their attention on the items they keep missing when they
are trying to learn a list of words or pictures. Children below second or third grade are more likely
to keep studying all the words or pictures.

3. Children improve in their ability to plan how to direct their attention. Younger children have a
hard time redirecting attention and changing plans. For example, when asked to sort pictures
based on one dimension such as color, 3-year-olds had no trouble. But when asked to re-sort the
pictures by shape, the children kept returning to the previous way of sorting by color. They could
not change strategies and inhibit the previous way of sorting (Marcovitch, Knapp, Boseovski, &
Kane, 2010). This difficulty changing sorting criteria shows up in research on 3-year-olds around
the world, but older children are able to change plans and redirect their attention to new sorting
criteria (Best & Miller, 2010; A. Diamond & Kirkham, 2005).

4. Children improve their abilities to monitor their attention, to decide if they are using the right
plan, and to change approaches when necessary to follow a complicated series of events.

Some of these improvements in attention stem from the rapid growth of the frontal lobes of the brain’s
cerebral cortex during the preschool years. Also, as their brains develop, young children are more able to
inhibit impulsive responses (e.g., sorting based on a previous rule, described earlier) as well as to resist
distractions that interfere with the task at hand. Dramatic improvement in inhibition occurs from ages 3
to 5 because, in addition to changes in the brain, developing language capabilities during these years allow
children to benefit from the scaffolding of parents and teachers. Through interactions with adults and
peers, children learn to plan their next steps, maintain focus, solve distracting problems, and reach goals
through sustained attention (Best & Miller, 2010; Bono & Stifter, 2003; Gauvain, 2004).

There are individual as well as developmental differences in attention. As you will see later in the Module,
the development of attentional skills also is related to quality characteristics of children’s environments
such as their mother’s or primary caretaker’s responsiveness and the cognitive stimulation available in
their homes (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2003b, 2005c). Children can vary greatly in their
ability to attend selectively to information in their environment. Many children diagnosed as having
learning disabilities actually have attention disorders (Hallahan, Kauffman, & Pullen, 2012), particularly
with long tasks.

YOUNG CHILDREN’S MEMORIES. Before age 4, children think remembering means what they see or know
now and forgetting means not knowing, but by age 4, children begin to understand that remembering
means recalling something from the past (Perner, 2000). Working memory plays a role in many cognitive
abilities, for example, performance on vocabulary and addition tasks for 4-and 5-year-olds (Noël, 2009).
Working memory is the ability to hold and work with information without using external cues or aids such
as writing the information down (Best & Miller, 2010). Like controlling attention and inhibiting impulsive
responses, working memory is a critical skill for executive functioning. Controlling attention, inhibiting
impulsive responses, and working memory are the foundation for flexible goal-directed behavior (R. F.
Walker & Murachver, 2012).

There are three basic aspects of working memory: memory span, or the amount of information that can
be held in short-term/working memory, memory processing efficiency, and speed of processing. These
three basic capacities act together and influence each other. For example, more efficient processing
allows greater amounts to be held in memory (Demetriou, Christou, Spanoudis, & Platsidou, 2002). You
can experience this effect of efficient processing by trying to hold these letters in memory:

HMOBFFCNNATMSUV

Now try these:

HMO BFF CNN ATM SUV

You just used a strategy—a general plan or set of plans to achieve a goal (Pressley & Hilden, 2006)—to
group the string of letters into memorable (and meaningful) chunks, and you could hold more in memory:
Your more efficient and faster processing expanded your memory span. Also, you brought your knowledge
of the world to bear on the memory task. Young children have fewer strategies and less knowledge, so
they have more trouble with memorizing a longer series (Best & Miller, 2010).

As children grow older, they develop more effective strategies for remembering information. Most
children spontaneously discover rehearsal around age 5 or 6 and continue to use it. In a series of studies
that followed children from ages 4 to 18 (a difficult process, so there are few studies like this), Beate
Sodian and Wolfgang Schneider (1999) found that as soon as most (81%) of the children discovered the
memory strategy of clustering items in categories, they used it from then on. So some strategies can
develop very quickly, but teaching strategies to very young children is not always effective. Children
younger than 5 or so can be taught to use clustering or rehearsal strategies and will use the strategies
effectively as long as they are reminded. But they will not apply the strategies spontaneously.

Young children have very limited working memory spans, but they improve with age. It is not clear
whether these differences are the result of changes in memory capacity or improvements in strategy use,
but probably both are involved. As the brain and neurological system of the child mature and
myelinization (the coating of neural fibers with fatty myelin that increases brain efficiency) makes
processing faster and more efficient, more working-memory space is available (Bransford et al., 2000).
Changes in the brain that support memory affect how efficiently memories can be encoded, consolidated,
stored, and then retrieved (Bauer, 2006). In terms of strategies, for young children, using a new strategy
or operation—such as reaching for a toy, counting, or finding a word—takes up a large portion of their
working memory. Once an operation is mastered and becomes more automatic, however, more working
memory is available for short-term storage of new information (A. Johnson, 2003). So, through changes
in the brain, faster processing of information, the development and automating of strategies, and added
knowledge, working memory increases in capacity from ages 4 through adolescence (Alloway, Gathercole,
& Pickering, 2006; Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge, & Wearing, 2004; Best & Miller, 2010).
CHILDREN’S MEMORIES FOR EVENTS. Research has shown that preschool children can and do remember
events in their lives, even events that happened before they were 2 or 3 years old, and they can accurately
describe something about these events more than a year later, but very few memories for events that
occurred before 1 or 2 years old persist into adulthood (Fivush & Nelson, 2004; C. Peterson, 2012; Raj &
Bell, 2010). Do children’s memories for events in their lives improve with age? Generally speaking, the
answer is yes, but some evidence indicates that the type of event matters. Memory for positive events
seems fairly accurate, as long as the child was at least 3 years old at the time of the event. For example,
when adults were asked about the birth of a sibling, it did not matter if the adults were 3, 17, or any age
in between—the number of questions they could answer about the birth was the same. But if the event
was negative, such as a painful medical procedure or a fire alarm that the child did not understand at the
time, children below age about 5 did not have a clear memory of the event (Bauer, 2006; Pipe, Lamb,
Orbach, & Esplin, 2004).

Other age differences involve cues, content, and quantity of reported memories. Compared to older
children, younger children need more cues and prompts to remember, the content of their memories
includes more common or routine parts of the experience (“we went hiking and had lunch” versus “we
went hiking, and I found an arrowhead”), and they report less information; for example, they use fewer
connections and qualifiers such as then, before, after, because, so, and so on (Fivush & Haden, 1997;
Fivush & Hamond, 1990; Fivush, Hazzard, Sales, Sarfrati, & Brown, 2003).

INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES. Children who engage in more elaborated discussions with
adults about shared experiences, who talk about the emotions involved (“Were you scared when you saw
the spider?”), and who reminisce about details of the experiences can recount more coherent and
complete narratives by the end of the preschool years. Adults provide scaffolding and guide talking about
past, present, and future, so memories are socially constructed, as Vygotsky would say. This social
construction leads to gender and cultural differences in early memories. As adults, women have earlier,
longer, and more detailed first memories than men, and individuals from Western cultures have earlier,
longer, and more detailed first memories than people from Asian cultures. One reason suggested by
Fivush and Nelson (2004) is that young children’s discussions about the past with adults in Western
cultures tend to focus on the child’s actions (for boys and girls) and feelings (more for girls), whereas Asian
parents are less likely to talk about the child separate from the group and tend to downplay emotions
such as anger that would interfere with group membership. So when Asian parents reminisce with their
children, they tend not to scaffold early memories of the child separate from the group. During the
preschool years, children develop an autobiographical or personal memory for the events in their own
lives. Their memories begin to include what happened to them and how they felt; for example, “I fell down
and was so embarrassed because everyone was watching me” (Bauer, 2006, p. 398, emphasis in the
original). They provide more time markers such as “last summer” or “at Thanksgiving” (K. Nelson & Fivush,
2004). They include more detail and description, and maybe even quoted dialogue, “And then I said . . .
and then Jamal said. . . .” So children develop richer narratives—stories—about their own lives during
their preschool years (Bauer, 2006).

As these narratives grow, children begin to realize that they might have experienced the past events
differently—remember different details or have different feelings—compared to others who were there.
As they sort out these differences, children are developing their theory of mind—the realization that
others have different minds, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs (Fivush & Nelson, 2004). We will look more
closely at theory of mind later in this Module.

SCRIPTS. One kind of memory involves repeated events in our lives, such as getting ready for bed or going
to a grocery store. The memories for these common recurring events are sometimes called scripts. We all
have scripts for events like ordering food in restaurants, and these scripts differ depending on whether
the restaurant is a four-star bistro or a fast-food drive through. Even young children have scripts for how
to behave during snack time at preschool or at a friend’s birthday party. In fact, scripts seem to help very
young children to organize and remember the predictable aspects of their world. Having a script for
visiting a fast-food restaurant is useful in predicting what will happen when you walk in and in knowing
how to behave. This frees up some working memory to learn new things and recognize when something
is out of place in the situation. In terms of human survival, it probably is useful to remember what is likely
to keep happening and to notice when something is out of place (K. Nelson, 2004).

ACCURACY OF CHILDREN’S EYEWITNESS MEMORIES. Often children are asked about their memories of
something they witnessed. Can we rely on young children’s memories in these situations? The answer
appears to be, it depends: “when interviewed appropriately, preschoolers can exhibit reliable long-term
recall” (C. Peterson, 2002, p. 395).

The real problem with memory accuracy occurs for young children when suggestive questions are asked,
such as, “Did the girl in the red shirt steal the bicycle?” or “Was the monkey wearing a collar or a leash?”
(Bruck, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 2002). Compared to older children and adults, young children are more likely
to be influenced by leading questions and false suggestions, in part because young children have trouble
with source monitoring, or remembering where they encountered the information. Was it something they
really experienced, or did they see it on TV, or did the event hap-pen to a friend, not to them (London &
Ceci, 2012)? Also, when questions are suggestive, repeated, and high pressure (“the other children said
yes!”), then young children are more likely to recall inaccurate memories (Finnila, Mahlberga, Santtilaa,
& Niemib, 2003). Of course, adults also are affected by the questions asked and the way they are
interviewed (Wells, Memon, & Penrod, 2006).

THEORY OF MIND

Do you remember how much trouble 3-year-olds have changing the way they sort objects, switch2ing
from color to shape (Marcovitch et al., 2010)? One reason this switch is difficult may have to do with
children’s theory of mind, an understanding of how mental processes work. A theory of mind is not a
formal scientific theory, but is more like an everyday, commonsense understanding (Wellman, 2004). John
Flavell defines theory of mind as “our understanding of the mental world—the inner world inhabited by
beliefs, desires, emotions, thoughts, perceptions, intentions, and other mental states” (2004, p. 274).
Basically, a theory of mind allows children to understand that thought and reality are not always the
same—people can believe things that are not true and they can be deceived. Children need a theory of
mind to understand that other people have their own minds, thoughts, dreams, feelings, beliefs, desires,
and perceptions (P. L. Harris, 2006). Children need a theory of mind to make sense of other peoples’
behavior. Why is Sarah crying? Does she feel sad because no one will play with her? Children also probably
need a theory of mind to understand that they can “change their minds” and plan a new sorting strategy,
switching from color to shape, for example (R. F. Walker & Murachver, 2012).

Study of children’s understanding of the mental world began, as many things did in cognitive
development, with Piaget in the 1950s and 1960s. He described children’s difficulties in taking the
perspective of others and their beliefs that physical objects such as clouds might be alive and have
thoughts because they move (called animism). In the 1970s, work on metacognition in information
processing theory examined similar questions about people’s knowledge of their own mental machinery
and how it works. Then in the early 1980s, two Australian psychologists, Joseph Perner and Heinz Wimmer
(e.g., Wimmer & Perner, 1983) invented the “unexpected contents” method described next to test young
children’s understanding of false beliefs, and theory of mind research was launched (Flavell, 2004).

APPEARANCES ARE DECEIVING: FALSE BELIEFS AND DECEPTIONS.

Here is a classic study of theory of mind using the “unexpected contents” method (Astington & Gopnik,
1988, p. 195). A researcher shows a 3-year-old a candy box and asks what is inside. The child says, “candy.”
Then the researcher opens the box and shows the child what is really inside—pencils:

Child: Oh . . . holy moly . . . pencils!

Researcher: Now I am going to put the pencils back and close it. Now when you first saw the box, before
we opened it, what did you think was inside?

Child: Pencils.

Researcher: Your friend Nicky hasn’t seen what is inside the box. When Nicky comes in and sees it . . .
When Nicky sees the box, what will he think is in the box?

Child: Pencils.

Once the child sees what is really in the box, he believes that he always thought there were pencils inside
and so would his friend Nicky, or anyone else. The child’s perception of what is in front of him now
overwhelms his thinking. To give a correct answer to the question about what Nicky would say, the child
has to hold two ideas in his mind at the same time—what Nicky would expect to be in a candy box and
what actually is in the box. The child also would need to understand that people could have false beliefs.
Much of the research on theory of mind uses this kind of false-belief task.

Around the world, most 3-year-old children do not have a theory of mind (unless their language is very
advanced); at 4 the understanding is growing; and by 5 it is in place (P. L. Harris, 2006). Some researchers
suggest that this almost universal timing indicates brain maturation plays a big role in developing a theory
of mind. Language is important, too (R. F. Walker & Murachver, 2012). Children with advanced language
develop this understanding sooner, and deaf children who do not learn sign language develop the
understanding much later. When parents talk to their children about thoughts and beliefs and encourage
them to imagine what others might think, then the children develop a theory of mind sooner (Lockl &
Schneider, 2007; Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002; Symons, 2004). Children with older siblings develop a
theory of mind sooner, perhaps siblings argue, negotiate, cooperate, and try to trick each other, so these
children learn earlier that other people have their own thoughts and beliefs (Perner, 2000; Wellman,
2004).

What advances come with an advancing theory of mind? Flavell (2004) summarizes the understandings
that develop and those that take longer, as you can see in Table 6.4. Theory of mind figures prominently
in current explanations for the disorder of autism.

INTENTIONS. Between the ages of 18 months and 2 years, children start to use want, wish, hope, and
other desire terms, and between 24 and 30 months, they can distinguish between what they want and
what they will get: “I want a dog, but I can’t have one” (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995). So by about age 2,
children have a sense of intention, at least of their own intentions. As children develop a theory of mind,
they also can understand that other people have intentions of their own. Older preschoolers who get
along well with their peers can separate intentional from unintentional actions and react accordingly. For
example, they will not get angry when another child accidentally knocks over their block tower. But
aggressive children have more trouble assessing intention. They are likely to attack anyone who topples
their tower, even accidentally (Dodge & Pettit, 2003). As children mature, they are more able to assess
and consider the intentions of others.

SUMMARY

New Cognitive Possibilities for a Developing Brain

In the early years, children develop and increase in five new cognitive abilities. They can integrate the
present with past experiences, anticipate what might happen in the future, think about and understand
causality, use semantic (meaning) categories and concepts to organize their thinking and express ideas,
and detect relationships between concepts such as larger and smaller.

Language in the Preschool Years: Amazing Developments

In general, cultures develop words for the concepts that are important to them. Languages change over
time to indicate changing cultural needs and values. About half the children in the world live in
environments where two or more languages are spoken. If adequate input is available and continues over
time in both the first and second languages, children can become balanced bilinguals—equally fluent in
both languages. Higher degrees of bilingualism are correlated with increased cognitive abilities, creativity,
theory of mind development, cognitive flexibility, and metalinguistic awareness.

Children in social environments with more adult-produced, child-directed speech—particularly speech

with rich vocabulary and complex structure—acquire language more rapidly. In learning language,
humans may have built-in biases, rules, and constraints about language that restrict the number of
possibilities considered. Areas of language development in the early years are sounds, pronunciation, and
vocabulary. Fast-mapping can add as many as 10 words a day. At this time, young children learn grammar
and syntax, often by overregularizing grammar rules. Young children also begin to master pragmatics—
knowing how to use language appropriately in social situations.

Emergent literacy is made up of the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that develop as children learn to read
and write, as well as the environments and contexts that support these developments. Two broad
categories of skills that are important for later reading are: (1) skills related to understanding sounds and
codes, such as knowing that letters have names, that sounds are associated with letters, and that words
are made up of sounds in a sequence (phonemic awareness) and (2) oral language skills, such as expressive
and receptive vocabulary, knowledge of syntax, and the ability to understand and tell stories. In homes
that promote literacy, parents and other adults value reading as a source of pleasure, and there are books
and other printed materials everywhere. Parents read to their children, take them to bookstores and
libraries, limit the amount of television everyone watches, and encourage literacy-related play. Parent
involvement and quality preschools support emergent literacy in language learning.

Piaget and Vygotsky

Piaget called children’s self-directed talk “egocentric speech,” but Vygotsky believed children’s self-
directed talk—private speech—played an important role in guiding and monitoring thinking and problem
solving, in addition to moving children toward self-regulation, the ability to anticipate the future, and to
plan, monitor, and guide one’s own thinking and problem solving. Piaget’s theories highlight the value of
activity and play in the cognitive development of young children. Vygotsky’s theory suggests that teachers
need to do more than just arrange the environment so that children can play and discover on their own.
They should guide and assist children in their learning within their zone of proximal development (ZPD).
The ZPD is the area where the child cannot solve a problem alone but can succeed through assisted
learning, or guided participation. Teachers and parents can provide support and scaffolding—giving
information, prompts, reminders, and encouragement at the right time and in the right amounts, and
then gradually allowing the children to do more and more on their own.
Information Processing: Knowing and Remembering

Information processing theories suggest that one of the most important elements in cognitive
development is that person’s knowledge, particularly domain-specific knowledge. For example, between
the ages of 2 and 6, children seem to grasp how-to-count principles. Some researchers have suggested
that a sense of number may be part of our evolutionary equipment, but others disagree and make the
case that a full understanding of number requires learning. Many activities with numbers and counting
can be valuable experiences for young children.

To regulate attention, a critical skill, children need tofocus on relevant information, ignore irrelevant
information, sustain attention over time, and control impulsive responses to distractions. Memory has
three basic aspects: memory span, or the amount of information that can be held in short-term/working
memory; memory processing efficiency; and speed of processing. These three basic capacities act
together and influence each other. As children grow older, they develop more effective strategies for
remembering information. During the preschool years, children develop an autobiographical or personal
memory for the events in their own lives that improves with age and may be affected by cultural
differences. One kind of personal memory, called scripts, involves repeated events in our lives, such as
getting ready for bed. Young children also can report accurate eyewitness memories if they do not have
to wait too long to report and are not asked leading questions.

Children can learn to apply more effective strategies to solve problems, either through instruction or by
discovery. Even if they have been taught or have discovered more effective strategies, young children may
not use them unless cued. Effective strategies may develop in waves, as more-effective strategies
gradually replace less-effective ones. One kind of knowledge to develop in the early years is a theory of
mind, an understanding of the nature of thinking and mental states.