Childhood and Adolescence: Voyages in Development, 7e: Chapter 6: Infancy: Cognitive

Childhood and
Adolescence: Voyages
in Development,
7e
Chapter 6: Infancy: Cognitive
Development
©2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part. 1
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
6-1 Describe the cognitive developmental theory of Jean Piaget, focusing on the six
substages of sensorimotor development.
6-2 Describe the information-processing theory of cognitive development, explaining how
it differs from Piaget’s theory.
6-3 Discuss social influences on early cognitive development.
6-4 Describe individual differences in cognitive functioning among infants and how they
are measured.
6-5 Describe the sequences of language development in infancy.
6-6 Discuss and evaluate theories of language development, keeping the following
question in mind: “Can you make a houseplant talk?”
6.1 Cognitive Development: Jean Piaget
Piaget’s Major Concepts
• Assimilation
– Absorbing new events into existing schemes (mental constructs)
• Accommodation
– Modifying existing schemes if assimilation cannot make sense of novel
events
• Cognitive processes develop in an orderly sequence of four stages:
– Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operations
– This chapter focuses on the first, sensorimotor stage
What Is the Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive
Development? (1 of 2)
• First 2 years of cognitive development, through sensory and motor
activities
• Substage 1: Simple reflexes—first month: assimilate sources of
stimulation into innate reflexes
• Substage 2: Primary circular reactions—1–4 months: repeat stimulating
actions that first occurred by chance
• Substage 3: Secondary circular reactions—4–8 months: repeat activity
patterns because of their effect on the environment
What Is the Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive
Development? (2 of 2)
• Substage 4: Coordination of secondary schemes—8–12 months:
intentional, goal-directed behavior begins; mental representations of
objects; can copy others’ actions
• Substage 5: Tertiary circular reactions—12–18 months: experimental,
trial-and-error behaviors to learn how things work
• Substage 6: Invention of new means through mental combinations—18–
24 months: external exploration replaced by mental exploration;
transition to development of symbolic thought and imitation
What Is Object Permanence?
How Does It Develop?
• Object permanence = recognition that an object/person continues to exist
when out of sight
– For 0–6-month-olds, “out of sight is out of mind”
– Mental representation of objects develops around sixth month
 Piaget’s substage 3
 Infants look for partially hidden objects
– By 8–12 months, infants seek to retrieve completely hidden objects
 A-not-B error: 9–10 months, will look for objects hidden in new places
– Research since Piaget’s shows some rudimentary object permanence may exist
as early as 2½–3½ months
Object Permanence before 4 Months of Age?
What Are the Strengths and Limitations of Piaget’s
Theory of Sensorimotor Development?
• Comprehensive model of infant cognition
• Many observations confirmed by others, cross-culturally
• Most researchers now agree: Not as discrete stages as Piaget
suggested
– Changes seem more gradual than discontinuous
• Piaget emphasized role of maturation, but interpersonal influences also
play roles
• Piaget appears to have underestimated infants’ competence
– Deferred imitation demonstrates mental representation as early as 9
months
6.2 Information Processing
What Is the Capacity of the Memory of Infants?
• Memory improves dramatically between 2 and 6 months and again by

12 months
– May indicate older infants are more able to encode and retrieve information
– Rovee-Collier and colleagues (1993–2014) showed “priming” (giving
advance reminders) improves infant memory
Imitation: Infant See, Infant Do
• Deferred imitation (imitating actions after a time delay) occurs as early as
6 months
– In one study (Klein & Meltzoff, 1999),12-month-olds could imitate a
behavior 4 weeks later, even without practicing it
– Infants may have an imitation “reflex” shortly after birth
 Seems inborn
• Contributes to formation of caregiver–infant bonds
• Enhances likelihood of newborn’s survival
 Related to “mirror neurons”
6.3 Social Influences on Early Cognitive
Development
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory
• Children’s cognitive development involves internalizing skilled strategies

from joint problem solving with more skilled partners
– Zone of proximal development
– Caregivers may provide this zone by helping infants play with blocks and
picture books
• Adults often encourage infants to try new things with their help
– Scaffolding
 Gradually withdrawn as infant learns
 Robinson et al. (2008): Maternal scaffolding varies by child’s task orientation
6.4 Individual Differences in Cognitive
Functioning Among Infants
Testing Intellectual Development in Infants
• Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID)

– 178 mental scale items
 Verbal communication, perceptual skills, learning and memory, and problem-
solving skills
– 111 motor scale items
 Gross motor skills (standing, walking, and climbing) and fine motor skills (use of
hands and fingers)
– Behavior rating scale
 Attention span, goal directedness, persistence, and social and emotional
development
Testing Infants: Why and with What?
• Screening infants for handicaps

– Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS)
– Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS)
How Well Do Infant Scales Predict Later
Intellectual Performance?
• Harris et al. (2005) found scores in first year of life correlated only moderately
with scores a year later
• Bayley scales items predict motor, visual–spatial, and language skills at 6–8
years
• Global scores on Bayley and other infant scales not very predictive of IQ
scores or academic performance of schoolchildren
– Prediction of teen and adult IQ scores stronger when children are 6–7 years
• Overall, Bayley scales can identify gross lags in development, relative
strengths and weaknesses; only moderately predict IQ scores 1 year later;
and more poorly predict scores after longer time periods
What Is Visual Recognition Memory? How Is It
Used to Enhance Predictability of Infant
Intelligence?
• Visual recognition memory = ability to discriminate previously seen
objects from novel objects
– Based on habituation
– Rose et al. (2001):
 Infants with greater visual recognition memory later got higher IQ scores
 Individual differences are stable from age to age
• Important because intelligence also theorized to be reasonably stable
 Capacity for visual recognition memory increases in first year
6.5 Language Development
What Are Prelinguistic Vocalizations?
• Newborns only cry

• Cooing—begins in second month
– Decreases markedly by around 8 months
• Babbling—begins around 6–9 months
– First vocalization that sounds like human speech
 Combines consonants and vowels
• Redundancy helps infants discriminate sounds
• Echolalia (repeating syllables) at 10–12 months
• Patterns of rising and falling intonation like that in adult speech near end of first
year
How Does the Child Develop Vocabulary?
• Receptive vocabulary (what children can understand) outpaces expressive
vocabulary (what children can use)
• First word (linguistic speech) typically 11–13 months; range of 8–18 months is
normal
• 3–4 months after first word to reach vocabulary of 10–30 words
• Up to 50 words by around 18 months
• 65% of first words = general and specific nominals (nouns, pronouns, names)
• Rapid burst in vocabulary at 18–22 months: to over 300 words in a few
months
– 75% of new words are nouns
– Continues through preschool years—average of nine new words a day
Referential and Expressive Styles in Language
Development
• Referential language style: Use language to label objects in environment
• Expressive language style: Use language to engage in social interactions
– More pronouns and words used in social routines
– More children use expressive than referential style, but most use a combination of
the two
• Factors may be child’s object orientation versus social orientation, and
parents’ way of teaching children
• Overextension: Generalizing meaning of one word to other things they
cannot name yet
– Gradually return to proper referents as vocabulary and classification develop
How Do Infants Create Sentences? On
Telegraphing Ideas
• Mean length of utterance (MLU): Average number of morphemes used in a
sentence
– Morpheme: Smallest unit of meaning in a language (word or part of word)
– MLU growth patterns similar among children: swift, with intermittent brief
regressions
• Holophrases: Single words used to express complex meanings
• Two-word sentences: begin when vocabulary is 50–100 words, at 18–24
months old
– Show understanding of syntax (word order)
Mean Length of Utterance for Three Children
6.6 Theories of Language Development: Can
You Make a Houseplant Talk?
How Do Learning Theorists Account for Language
Development?
• The Role of Imitation
– Social cognitive perspective: Parents serve as models
– However, young children’s spontaneous construction of incorrect grammar
indicates active language production rather than just imitating a model
• The Role of Reinforcement
– Skinner:
 Extinction—Foreign sounds drop out when ignored
 Shaping—Parents reinforce children’s successive approximations to real
words
How Can Adults Enhance Language Development
in Children?
• Use infant-directed speech
• Use questions that engage child in conversation
• Respond to child’s expressive language efforts in “attuned” way by expanding
them, for example, to “My doll”—“Yes, your doll is pretty”
• Join child in attending to a certain activity or toy
• Gesture to help child understand speech
• Describe environmental aspects where child’s attention is currently focused
• Read to child
• Talk to child a great deal
How Does Psycholinguistic Theory Explain
Language Development?
• Language acquisition involves interaction between environmental
influences and inborn tendency to acquire language
– Language acquisition device (LAD)
– “Universal grammar” or deep structure (Chomsky)
 Underlying set of rules for transforming ideas into the surface structure of
sentences
 Children are genetically prewired to attend to language and deduce rules for
constructing sentences from ideas
The Sensitive Period for Language Learning
• Sensitive periods begin around 18–24 months and last until puberty
– Neural development affords plasticity that facilitates language learning
– Experience with language also alters brain structure
– Evidence for sensitive periods:
 Brain injuries: other parts of brain may compensate before puberty
 Ability to adapt wanes in adolescence when brain has reached adult levels of
differentiation
 Case histories of Genie and Simon
What Is the Emergentist Theory of Language
Development?
• Interaction between biological structures enabling language acquisition
and cognitive and social processes leading language to “emerge”
• Natural selection, competition among species, increasing complexity
over time
• Child’s complex abilities to understand and produce language emerge
naturally from simpler biological, cognitive, and social processes
Emergentist Theory: Ingredients in the Emergence
of Language
• Genetics • Part of motor cortex controlling
• speech
Neurons
• Learning by association
• Sensory systems
• Attention
• Auditory area of brain
• Cognitive desire to make sense of
• Wernicke’s area
environment
• Broca’s area
• Social Interaction
Emergentist Theory: Processes in
Language Development
• Formation of neural networks enabling language acquisition
• Infant’s interaction with parents and others using language
• Infant’s linkage of auditory area of brain with articulatory (speech) and
conceptual (cognitive) systems
• Infant’s development of strategies for learning names of things and word
meanings
• Infant’s searching for regularities in the ways words are used
• All these processes are “species-specific,” that is, instinctive in humans:
complex, yet emerge automatically
Self-Assessment
• Which concepts in this chapter did you find most challenging, and thus
need to review?
• Which theoretical concepts in this chapter did you find most useful for
explaining things you have observed about how infants learn? (If you
have not had or known infants, this can include things your parents told
you about yourself as an infant.)
• Which things did you learn from this chapter that you think you can best
apply in your own life, such as in your education, work, or family?
Summary
Now that the lesson has ended, you should have learned how to:
• Describe the cognitive developmental theory of Jean Piaget, focusing on the six
substages of sensorimotor development.
• Describe the information-processing theory of cognitive development, explaining how
it differs from Piaget’s theory.
• Discuss social influences on early cognitive development.
• Describe individual differences in cognitive functioning among infants and how they
are measured.
• Describe the sequences of language development in infancy.
• Discuss and evaluate theories of language development, keeping the following
question in mind: “Can you make a houseplant talk?”

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Childhood and

• Memory improves dramatically between 2 and 6 months and again by

• Children’s cognitive development involves internalizing skilled strategies

• Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID)

• Screening infants for handicaps

• Newborns only cry

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