1. Chapter Four
The Emergence of Thought and
Language:
Cognitive Development in
Infancy and Early Childhood

2. 4.1 Piaget’s Account:
Learning Objectives
• According to Piaget, how do schemes, assimilation,
and accommodation provide the foundation for
cognitive development throughout the life span?
• How does thinking become more advanced as infants
progress through the sensorimotor stage?
• What are the distinguishing characteristics of thinking
during the preoperational stage?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of Piaget’s
theory?
• How have contemporary researchers extended
Piaget’s theory?

3. Basic Principles of Cognitive
Development
• Children are active scientists or explorers of their
world
• Children make sense of the world through
schemes
–Mental categories of related events, objects, and
knowledge
• Children adapt by refining their schemes and
adding new ones
• Schemes change from physical to functional,
conceptual, and abstract as the child develops

4. Piaget’s Account:
Assimilation and Accommodation
• Assimilation: fitting new experiences into
existing schemes
– Required to benefit from experience
• Accommodation: modifying schemes as a
result of new experiences
– Allows for dealing with completely new
data or experiences

5. Piaget’s Account:
Equilibration
• Equilibrium – balance between assimilation
and accommodation
• Disequilibrium – experience of conflict between
new information and existing concepts
• Equilibration – inadequate schemes are
reorganized or replaced with more advanced
and mature schemes
– Occurs three times during development, resulting in four
qualitatively different stages of cognitive development

6. Piaget’s Account:
Periods of Cognitive Development
• Sensorimotor period (0-2 years)
– Infancy
• Preoperational period (2-7 years)
– Preschool and early elementary school
• Concrete operational period (7-11 years)
– Middle and late elementary school
• Formal operational period (11 years & up)
– Adolescence and adulthood

7. Piaget’s Account:
Sensorimotor Thinking
• Deliberate, means-ends behavior
– 8 months
• Object permanence: knowing an object still
exists even if not in view
– Not fully understood until 18 months
• Using symbols
– Anticipate consequences of actions, instead of
needing to experience them
• 18 to 24 months

8. Piaget’s Account:
Preoperational Thinking
• Egocentrism
– Difficulty seeing world from others’ perspectives
• Animism
– Crediting inanimate objects with life and lifelike
properties
• Centration
– Concentrating on only one facet of a problem to
the neglect of other facets

9. Piaget’s Account:
Preoperational Thinking (cont’d)
• Conservation: knowing that volume, mass,
number, length, area, or liquid quantity are
the same despite superficial appearance
changes
– Centration interferes with conservation
• Appearance is reality
– Assuming that an object is really what it appears
to be (e.g., thinking that Shrek is a real ogre)

12. Implications of Piaget’s Theory
for Fostering Cognitive Development
• Create environments where children can
actively discover how the world works
• Provide experiences just slightly ahead of
children’s current stage
• Help children actively discover inconsistencies
in their thinking

13. Criticisms of Piaget’s Theory
• Underestimates infants’ and young children’s cognitive
ability
– Overestimates adolescents’ cognitive ability
• Vague about mechanisms and processes of change
• Does not account for variability in children’s performance
– Cognitive development is not as stage-like as Piaget
suggested
• Undervalues the sociocultural environment’s influence on
cognitive development

14. Extending Piaget’s Account:
Children’s Naïve Theories
• Children develop specialized theories about
much narrower areas than Piaget suggested
• Core knowledge hypothesis
– Infants are born with rudimentary
knowledge of the world
– Children elaborate knowledge based on
experience

15. Extending Piaget’s Account:
Children’s Naïve Theories (cont’d)
• Naïve physics: infants rapidly create a
reasonably accurate theory of objects’ basic
properties
• Infants understand these properties earlier
than Piaget hypothesized
– 4.5 months: understand object permanence
– 5 months: understand that liquids, but not solids,
change shape when moved
– 6 months: understand gravity and objects’
movements

16. Extending Piaget’s Account:
Children’s Naïve Theories (cont’d)
• Naïve biology
– Infants: use motion to discriminate animate
from inanimate objects
– 12-15 months: know that animate objects
are self-propelled, move in irregular paths;
act to achieve goals

17. Extending Piaget’s Account:
Children’s Naïve Theories (cont’d)
• 4-year-olds understand specific properties of
living things
– Movement, growth, internal parts, inheritance, illness, healing
• Teleological explanations
– Living things and their parts exist for a purpose: dogs have fur
so we can pet them
• Essentialism
– Although invisible, all living things have an essence
giving them their identity

18. Extending Piaget’s Account:
Children’s Naïve Theories (cont’d)
Preschoolers’ naïve biology has limits
• Do not know genes are basis for inheritance
• Think body parts have intentions or desires
• Do not know plants are living things
• May stem from belief in goal-directed motion
as key feature of living things

19. 4.2 Information Processing:
Learning Objectives
• What is the basis of the information-processing
approach?
• How well do young children pay attention?
• What kinds of learning take place during
infancy?
• Do infants and preschool children remember?
• What do infants and preschooler know about
numbers?

20. Information Processing:
General Principles
• Human thinking is understandable via a
computer model
• Mental hardware: neural and mental
structures enabling the mind to operate
• Mental software: mental programs allowing
for performance of specific tasks

21. Information Processing: Attention
• Attention: when sensory information receives
additional cognitive processing
• Orienting response: emotional and physical
reactions to unfamiliar stimulus
– Alerts infant to new or dangerous stimuli
• Habituation: lessened reactions to a stimulus
after repeated presentations
– Helps infant ignore biologically insignificant
events

22. Information Processing: Learning
• Classical conditioning
– When an initially “neutral” stimulus (e.g., a
bell) becomes able to elicit a response
(e.g., salivation) that previously was caused
only by another stimulus (e.g., food)
– Infants are capable of this conditioning
regarding feeding or other pleasant events
– Infants are less capable of this regarding
aversive stimuli

23. Information Processing: Learning
(cont’d)
• Operant conditioning: when a behavior’s
consequence make this behavior’s future
occurrence more likely (reinforcement) or less likely
(punishment)
– Ex: Giving flowers to a girl results in being kissed, so you give
flowers in the future (reinforcement)
– Ex: Giving flowers to a girl results in being slapped, so you stop
giving flowers (punishment)
• Imitation: learning a new behavior by observing
others
– Older infants imitate, but do 2- to 3-week-olds? (controversial)

24. VIDEO: Little Albert

25. Information Processing: Memory
• 2- to 3-month-olds
– remember past events
– forget them over time, but remember again with cues
• Autobiographical memory in preschoolers
– exists for significant events in their own past
– is richer when parents engage children in
conversations about the past, or ask for expanded
descriptions of the past
– appears as a sense of self emerges

26. Information Processing: Memory
(cont’d)
• Basis for age-related memory changes
– Hippocampus and amygdala develop early
• 6-month-olds can store new information
– Frontal cortex develops in second year
• toddlers begin retrieving information
from long-term memory

27. Preschoolers as Eyewitnesses
• Preschoolers
– are quite vulnerable to suggestion and
leading questions
– may “remember” an event as actually
occurring even though someone only told
them this
– have limited source-monitoring skills
• ability to remember the source of recalled information
(e.g., knowing an investigator called them “cute” instead
of a stranger having said this)

28. Preschoolers as Eyewitnesses
(cont’d)
• Accuracy of recall is improved when
– interviewed very soon after event
– encouraged to tell the truth and that it’s
okay to say “I don’t know”
– asked to describe event in their own words
– made comfortable by first recounting a
neutral event (e.g., a birthday party)
– asked questions allowing for alternate
explanations of the event

29. Information Processing:
Learning Number Skills
• 5-month-olds have basic number skills
– distinguish 2 from 3 objects and 3 from 4
– perform simple addition and subtraction
• 6-month-olds compare quantities by ratio
• 10-month-olds know the larger of two
quantities

30. Information Processing:
Learning Number Skills (cont’d)
• Preschoolers have mastered three principles
when applied to five or fewer objects
– One-to-one principle: number name for each object
counted
– Stable-order principle: number names must be
counted in the same order
– Cardinality principle: last number in a counting
sequence denotes how many objects there are
• 5-year-olds use these principles regarding 9 or
fewer objects

31. 4.3 Vygotsky’s Theory:
Learning Objectives
• What is the zone of proximal development?
How does it help explain how children
accomplish more when they collaborate?
• Why is scaffolding a particularly effective way
of teaching youngsters new concepts and
skills?
• When and why do children talk to themselves
as they solve problems?

32. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934)
• Russian psychologist; died young (37), did not fully
develop his theory beyond the period of childhood
• Intersubjectivity: all participants having a mutual,
shared understanding of an activity (e.g., game rules)
• Guided participation: cognition develops via structured
activities with more skilled others
• Apprenticeship: the process during which a more
skilled master teaches a skill or task to a less skilled
“apprentice” such as a child
– Promotes cognitive development

33. Mind & Culture: Vygotsky’s
Major Contributions
Zone of proximal development: difference between
what children can do with or without assistance
• Providing learning experiences within this zone
maximizes achievement
Scaffolding: giving just enough assistance to match
learner’s needs
• Students do not learn as well when told
everything to do, nor when left alone to
discover for themselves

34. Mind & Culture: Vygotsky’s
Major Contributions (cont’d)
• Private speech: “talking” to yourself to self-guide
and self-regulate behavior
– Speech is audible, but isn’t directed at
others, nor is it intended for others to hear
– Later becomes internalized as inner speech
• In its most mature form, inner speech is unintelligible to all
but the thinker and it does not resemble spoken language

35. 4.4 Language:
Learning Objectives
• When do infants first hear and make speech
sounds?
• When do children start to talk? How do they
learn word meanings?
• How do young children learn grammar?
• How well do youngsters communicate?

36. Language: The Road to Speech
• Perceiving speech
– Phonemes: smallest, unique sounds
• 1-month-olds can distinguish between vowels and
consonants
• Different languages have different sets of
phonemes
– Children practice all phonemes, gradually
restricting their use to only those to which
they are exposed
• Eventually, they lose the ability to distinguish
unused phonemes

37. Language: Identifying Words
– Children learn to pay more attention to
often repeated and emphasized words
– Infant-directed speech: adults speak slowly
and exaggerate changes in pitch and
volume when talking to infants
• Sometimes called motherese because it was
first observed in mothers

38. Language: Steps to Speech
• At 2 months, infants begin cooing
• Around 6 months, toddlers begin babbling
– Babbling is a proven precursor to speech
• At 8-11 months, children incorporate
intonation or changes in pitch typical of the
language they hear

39. Language: First Words and Many More
• Around 1 year, children use their first words
– Usually consonant-vowel pairs, such as “dada” or
“wawa”
• By 2 years, children have a vocabulary of a
few hundred words
• By age 6, children know around 10,000 words

40. Language and the Grand Insight:
Words as Symbols
• Before 12 months: use symbols in areas
other than language
– Gesturing: infants will point, wave, smack lips to
convey messages
• 12 to 18 months: gain insight that words are
symbols for objects, actions, and properties

41. Language: Fast-Mapping of Words
• 18 months: approximately when we see an
explosive rate of word learning
• Fast-mapping: rapid connection of new words
to their exact referents
– Importance? Means that children actually know to
which object a new word refers, instead of thinking
about all possible referents

42. Language: Factors Contributing
to Rapid Learning
• Joint attention: parents labeling objects, plus children
relying on adults’ behavior to interpret the label’s
meaning
• Constraints on word names: children using various
rules to learn new words
– An unfamiliar word refers to the object not already having a name
– Names refer to the whole object instead of its parts
– A new name (T-rex) for an already named object (dinosaur) denotes
the object’s subcategory name

43. Language: Factors Contributing
to Rapid Learning (cont’d)
• Sentence cues: children interpret unfamiliar words
in a sentence using different cues
– Rely on words they already know and the sentence’s
structure to infer a new word’s meaning or its function in
a sentence
– Rely on the sentence’s context
• Knowing to which object a word refers by attending to the
sentence’s adjective (e.g., the boz means the middle block with
wings instead of any other blocks without wings)

45. Language: Factors Contributing
to Rapid Learning (cont’d)
• Cognitive factors: rapid cognitive growth and skill
cause an explosion in new word learning
– Development of goals and intentions motivates children
to learn language
– Improved attentional and perceptual skills (e.g., shape
bias)

46. Language: Factors Contributing
to Rapid Learning (cont’d)
• Developmental changes in word meaning
– Before 18 months: learn words relatively slowly
(one word/day)
– By 24 months: learn many new words daily
• Greater use of language and social cues
• Reduced use of attentional cues

47. Language: Factors Contributing
to Rapid Learning (cont’d)
• Naming errors
– Underextension: defining a word too narrowly (e.g.,
using “car” to refer only to the family car)
– Overextension: defining a word too broadly (e.g., using
“doggie” to refer to all four-legged animals)
• Less common in word comprehension
• More common in word production
– May reflect another fast-mapping rule
» If you cannot remember the object’s actual name, say the
name of a related object (e.g., say “doggie” for a picture of a
goat)

48. Language: Factors Contributing to
Rapid Learning (cont’d)
• Children use sentence cues to infer the
meaning of unfamiliar words
– Ex: “Our Pug went woof-woof” (Pug must be some kind of
dog)
• Better attentional and perceptual skills assist
in learning language
• Naming errors result from underextension
and overextension

49. Language: Individual Differences
in Word Learning
Huge individual differences: vocabulary ranges
from 25 to 250 words at 18 months. Why?
Size of children’s vocabulary is
• greater for children with better phonological memory - the ability
to remember speech sounds briefly
• greater for children exposed to a richer language environment
• a bit more similar in identical than fraternal twins

50. Language: Bilingualism
• Learning two languages at once initially slows
down vocabulary learning
• Bilingual compared to monolingual children
• have somewhat smaller vocabularies for each
language
• have a greater total vocabulary
• better understand words’ arbitrary symbolic nature
• are more skilled at switching across tasks
• are better able to inhibit inappropriate responses

51. Language: Word Learning Styles
Two distinct styles of word learning, but most
children blend them
• Expressive style: social emphasis
– Vocabularies include social interaction and question
words plus naming words
• Referential style: intellectual emphasis
– Vocabularies consist mainly of words naming objects,
persons, or actions
– Vocabularies consist of few social interaction words or
question words

52. Language: Encouraging Language
Growth
Parents can assist in learning language by
• speaking to children frequently
• naming objects that grab children’s attention
• using grammatically sophisticated speech
• reading to children while carefully describing pictures and
asking questions
• encouraging watching TV programs that emphasize new word
learning, tell stories, and ask questions (e.g., Sesame Street,
Blues Clues)

53. Language: Encouraging Language
Growth (cont’d)
Before 18 months, commercially available infant-oriented
“language learning” videos are
ineffective. Why?
• Many videos poorly designed and developmentally
inappropriate
• Young children do not actively participate in the videos,
so they cannot relate what they see in them to real-world
objects, actions, or experiences

54. Language — Speaking in Sentences:
Grammatical Development
18 months: two- and three-word sentences based on
simple formulas (e.g., actor + action)
•Reflect telegraphic speech — using words directly relevant
to meaning and no more (“I no sleep”)
•Reflect over-regularization errors — applying rules to
words that are exceptions to the rule (“I goed home”)
•Exclude grammatical morphemes — words or endings
making a sentence grammatical
– By preschool, they show growing knowledge of grammatical
rules instead of simple memory (Berko,1958)

56. Language: How Do Children Acquire
Grammar?
Behaviorist solution: imitation and reinforcement
•Flawed
– Children produce novel sentences
– Children do not imitate adult grammar
– Grammar is far too complex to learn by
simply hearing adult speech

57. Language: How Do Children Acquire
Grammar? (cont’d)
Linguistic solution: innate neural mechanisms
guide the learning of grammar
1. Sentences breaking grammatical rules activate specific left
hemisphere regions
2. Human-specific grammar-learning neural mechanisms —
chimps can master only two-word speech (after massive effort)
3. Critical period for language and grammar acquisition (birth to 12
years)
4. Vocabulary growth and mastery of grammar are intimately
connected

58. Language: How Do Children Acquire
Grammar? (cont’d)
Cognitive solution — children look for patterns,
detect irregularities, and create rules
• Grammatical knowledge reflects multiple examples stored in
memory instead of being innate
Social-interaction solution — eclectic integration of
behavioral, linguistic, and cognitive solutions, plus
the importance of accurate communication during
social interaction promotes language and
grammatical development

59. Language: Communicating
with Others
Effective communication requires
• making sure to speak in language the listener understands
• paying attention while listening and making sure the speaker knows if
he/she is being understood
• taking turns as speaker and listener
– before 2 years: parents encourage conservational turn-taking and often model
turn-taking
– after 2 years: spontaneous turn-taking is common
– by 3 years: adjust speech to listeners, but often ignore problems in received
messages

60. Language: Speaking Effectively
• 10 months: deliberate communication efforts
through pointing and looking at another
• 12 months: communicate through speech; initiate
conversations
• Preschool age: adjust messages to listener’s
knowledge and the context (e.g., a word’s
ambiguity)

61. Language: Listening Well
• Preschool age: often do not realize when a
message is ambiguous
• Elementary school age: can evaluate when a
message is consistent and clear