LANGUAGE
young child.
DEVELOPMENT
● As perception and cognition improve, it
paves the way for an extraordinary
human achievement called language.
● On average, children say their first word
at 12 months of age.
● Once words appear, language develops
rapidly.
Language Areas in the brain
● By 5 years of age, children have
mastered the basic structure of their
native language.
● By age 6, children have a vocabulary of
10,000 words, speak in elaborate
sentences, and are skilled
conversationalists.
THREE THEORIES:
1. Behaviorist Perspective
- B.F. Skinner proposed that language, just
like any other behavior is acquired
through operant conditioning.
- As a baby makes sounds, parents
reinforce those that are the most like
words with smiles, hugs, and speech in
return.
- Some behaviorists rely on imitation to
explain how children rapidly acquire
complex utterances.
- Although imitation and reinforcement
contribute to early language
de-elopement, they are best viewed as
supporting rather than fully explaining.
2. Naturalist Perspective
- Noam Chomsky was the first to recognize
that even small children assume much
responsibility for their own language
learning.
- His theory regards the young child’s
amazing language skills as etched into
the structure of the human brain.
- Focusing on grammar, Chomsky believed
that the rules of sentence organization
are much too complex to be directly
taught or independently discovered by a
- He argued that all children have a
Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a
biologically based innate system that
contains a set of rules common to all
languages.
- It permits children, no matter which
language they hear, to speak in a
rule-oriented fashion as soon as they
have picked up enough words.
- House the in the left hemisphere of the
cortex are the two language-specific
structures namely Broca’s area and
Wernicke’s area.
- Broca’s area, located in the frontal lobe,
controls language production
- Wernicke’s area, located in the temporal
lobe, is responsible for interpreting
language.
- As children acquire language, the brain
becomes increasingly specialized for
language processing.
3. Interactionist Perspective
- In recent years, new ideas about
language development have arisen
emphasizing interactions between inner
capacities and environmental influences.
- The theory stresses the social context
of language learning. An active child,
well endowed for acquiring language,
observes and participates in social
exchanges.
- From these experiences, children
gradually build a communication system
that relates the form and content of
language to its social meaning.
- According to this view, native capacity, a
strong desire to interact with others, and a
rich language and social environment
combine to assist children in discovering
the functions and regularities of language
 SOCIOEMOTIONAL
DEVELOPMENT
THEORIES OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT:
Psychoanalytic Theory
- In both Freud’s and Erikson’s theories,
development is largely driven by
biological maturation.
- For Freud, behavior is motivated by
the need to satisfy basic drives. These
drives, and the motives that arise from
them, are mostly unconscious, and
individuals often have only the
dimmest understanding of why they
do what they do.
- Erikson’s theory - development is
driven by a series of developmental
crises related to age and biological
maturation. To achieve healthy
development, the individual must
successfully resolve these crises.
1. Freud’s Theory
- Freud’s theory of development is
referred to as the “theory of
psychosexual development” because
he thought that even very young
children have a sexual nature that
motivates their behavior and
influences their relationships with
other people.
- In each successive stage, Psychic
energy - the biologically based,
instinctual drives that fuel behavior
thought, and feelings - becomes
focused in different erogenous zones,
that is, areas of the body that are
erotically sensitive.
- Freud believed that in each stage,
children encounter conflicts related to
a particular erogenous zone and that
their success or failure in resolving
these conflicts affects their
development throughout life.
2. Erikson’s Theory
- Erikson accepted the basic elements of
Freud’s theory but incorporated social
factors into it, including cultural influences
and contemporary issues such as juvenile
delinquency, changing sexual roles, and
the generation gap.
- Each of Erikson’s stages is characterized
by a specific crisis or set of
developmental issues, that the individual
must resolve.
- If the dominant issue of a given stage is
not successfully resolved before
maturation and social pressures usher in
the next stage, the person will continue to
struggle with it.
LEARNING THEORIES
In contrast to Freud’s emphasis on the role of
internal forces and subjective experiences, most
learning theorists have emphasized the role of
external factors in shaping personality and social
behavior.
The primary developmental question on which
learning theories take a unanimous stand is that
of continuity/discontinuity: they all emphasize
continuity, proposing that the same principles
control learning and behavior throughout life and
that therefore there are no qualitatively different
stages in development.
1. Watson’s Behaviorism
- Watson believed that children’s
development is determined by their social
environment and that learning through
conditioning is the primary mechanism
of development.
- He also believed that psychologists
should study only objectively verifiable
behavior, not the “mind”.
- Believing he had established the power of
learning in development, Watson placed
the responsibility for guiding children’s
development squarely on the shoulders of
their parents.
 2. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning
- Skinner believed that children’s
development is primarily a matter of their
reinforcement history.
- Skinner’s work on reinforcement has
proven quite useful for changing
undesirable behaviors which have led him
to form the therapy known as behavior
modification.
- Behavior modification is a form of
therapy based on the principles of
operant conditioning in which
reinforcement contingencies are changed
to encourage more adaptive behavior
3. Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
- Like other learning theories, social
learning theory attempts to account for
personality and other aspects of social
development in terms of learning
mechanisms.
- Social learning theory emphasized
observation and imitation, rather than
reinforcement, as the primary
mechanisms of development.
- Bandura argued that most human
learning is inherently social in nature.
- He emphasized the active role of children
in their own development, describing the
development as a reciprocal
determinism – Bandura’s concept that
child–environment influences operate in
both directions; children are affected by
aspects of their environment, but they
also influence the environment.
THEORIES OF SOCIAL COGNITION
- These theories have to do with children’s
ability to think and reason about their
own and other people’s thoughts,
feelings, motives, and behaviors.
- Like adults, children are active processors
of social information.
- Social cognitive theories emphasize the
process of self-socialization – the idea
that children play a very active role in
their own socialization through their
activity preferences, friendship choices,
and so on.
1. Selman’s Stage Theory of Role Taking
- Robert Selman focused on the
development of role-taking – the ability
to adopt the perspective of another
person, to think about something from
another’s point of view.
- He proposed that such role-taking is
essential to understanding another
person’s thoughts, feelings, or motives.
- Young children’s social cognition is quite
limited because they lack the ability to
role take.
2. Dodge’s Information-Processing
Theory of Social Problem Solving
- This approach to social cognition
emphasizes the crucial role of cognitive
processes in social behavior.
- Studies on the use of aggression as a
problem-solving strategy found that some
children have a hostile attributional bias
– which in Dodge’s theory is the tendency
to assume that other people’s ambiguous
actions stem from a hostile intent.
3. Dweck’s Theory of Self-Attributions
and Achievement Motivation
- According to Carol Dweck, some children
have an incremental view of intelligence,
the belief that intelligence can be
developed through effort. These children
focus on mastery – on meeting
challenges and overcoming failures, and
generally expect their efforts to be
successful.
- Other children have an entity view of
intelligence, the belief that their
intelligence is fixed. These children’s goal
is to be successful, and if they are
succeeding, all is well. However, when
they fail, they feel “helpless”.
- Underlying these two patterns of
achievement motivation are differences in
what attributions children make about
themselves.
- Children with entity/helpless orientation
tend to base their sense of self-worth on
the approval they receive (or do not
receive) from other people about their
 intelligence, talents, and personal
qualities.
- In contrast, the self-esteem of children
with an incremental/mastery orientation is
based more on their own effort and
learning and not on how others evaluate
them. Because they do not equate failure
on a task with a personal flaw, they can
enjoy the challenge of a hard problem
and persist in the attempt to solve it.
ECOLOGICAL THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT
- Ethological and evolutionary theories view
children as inheritors of genetically based
abilities and predispositions that underlie
most aspects of their behavior. The focus
of these theories is largely on aspects of
behavior that serve, or once served, as
an adaptive function.
- The bioecological model stresses the
effects of context on development, but it
also emphasizes the child’s active role in
selecting and influencing those contexts.
- Children’s personal characteristics such
as temperament, intellectual ability, and
athletic skill lead them to choose certain
environments and also influence the
people around them.
- The developmental issue that is front and
center in ecological theories is the
interaction of nature and nurture.
- The importance of sociocultural context
and the continuity of development are
other implicit emphases in all these
theories. The active role of children in
their own development is another central
focus.
1. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems
Theory
- Bronfenbrenner conceptualizes the
environment as “a set of nested
structures, each inside the next, like a
set of Russian dolls”.
- Each structure represents a different level
of influence on development.
- Embedded in the center of the multiple
levels of influences is the individual
child, with his or her particular
constellation of characteristics (genes,
gender, age, temperament, health,
intelligence, physical attractiveness, etc.)
- Over the course of development, these
individual characteristics interact with the
environmental forces present at each
level.
- The different levels vary in how
immediate their effects are, but
Bronfenbrenner emphasizes that every
level, has an impact on the child’s
development
The development of emotions in childhood
Developmentalists view emotions in terms of
several components:
1. physiological factors including heart and
breath rate, hormone levels and the like;
2. subjective feelings;
3. the cognitions that may elicit or
accompany subjective feelings;
4. the desire to act, including the desire to
escape, approach, or change people or
things in the environment
THEORIES ON THE NATURE AND
EMERGENCE OF EMOTION
● Charles Darwin argued that the facial
expressions for certain basic emotional
states are innate to the species – and
therefore similar across all peoples – and
are found even in very young babies.
● Silvan Tomkins and Carroll Izard
proposed the theory of discrete
emotions, which argues that each
emotion is innately packaged with a
specific set of physiological bodily, and
facial reactions and those distinct
emotions are evident from very early in
life.
● Other researchers maintain that emotions
are not distinct from one another at the
beginning of life and that environmental
factors play an important role in the
emergence and expression of emotion.
● Some argue that infants experience only
excitement and distress in the first weeks
of life and that other emotions emerge at
later ages as a function of experience.

● According to Alan Sroufe there are three

basic affect systems – joy/pleasure,
anger/frustration, and wariness/fear – and
these systems undergo a developmental
change from primitive to more advanced
forms during the early years of life.

● The role of the environment is also

emphasized by theorists who take a
functionalist approach to understand
emotional development. They propose
that the basic function of emotions is to
promote action toward achieving a goal in
a given context.

● Functionalist like Joseph Campos has

also argued that emotional reactions are
affected by social goals and the influence
of significant others.