Piaget's theory of cognitive development posits that children progress through distinct stages as they develop more advanced cognitive abilities. According to Piaget, infants progress from sensorimotor thinking to preoperational thinking as they develop object permanence and the ability to use symbols. Children then progress to concrete operational thinking where they can conserve and understand perspectives other than their own. The information processing approach views cognitive development through a computer model of mental hardware and software that allows for attention, learning, memory, and number skills to develop from infancy through early childhood. Vygotsky emphasized the role of social interaction and the zone of proximal development in cognitive development. Language develops rapidly as children gain the insight that words are symbols and use fast mapping

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