Psych 100 1H Focus Questions Chapter 11 pg 414 end Class 24 10 21 2013 1 How do children explain behavior in mental terms What evidence suggests that the ability to hold false beliefs develops after age 4 and what role does make believe play in this development How is understanding impaired in autism children explain behavior in mental terms 2 3 years they can explain people s behavior in term of mental constructs expect people to respond to objects they can see and not to objects they cannot see Experiment 12 month olds can display an understanding of what is in another person s mind Infant played with two adults and three new toys One adult left the room and when came back inside ask child to give one of the toys to him her the toy the child didn t play with Infant gave adult the toy the adult did not play with ability to hold false beliefs develops after age 4 ex see a man carrying an umbrella on a sunny day we think that he must of believed it was going to rain that day 3 year olds do not understand that three year olds have no difficulty with pretense pretense mental conceptions that depart from reality never fail at tests that report what either they have or another person had pretended was in the box before it was opened what role does make believe play in false belief development pretend play provides basis for logical reasoning that involves premises not in physical reality 3 Understanding make believe helps imaginary reality separation older siblings help younger in this separation fig 11 6 ex no Santa Claus no tooth fairy etc 4 Successful make believe separation can promote hypothetical thinking brain mechanisms enable motivate pretend play came about in evolution because this play provides foundation for understanding nonliteral mental states false beliefs Ex All cats bark Muffins is a cat Does Muffins bark 4 and 2 year olds succeeded with this syllogism when hearing it in a playful voice understanding impaired in autism Autism several deficits in a social interaction lack of interest in others b language development no interest in communicating c behavioral control perseverative behavior continuing behavior ex hand flapping d range of interest narrow focus By age 4 most children of the world have learned one of the 3 000 or so languages Automaticity of language development strongly suggests innate predispositions autism congenital present at birth disorder than in some cases is genetic in origin and in others may stem from prenatal damage to the brain sever deficits in social interaction acquiring language tendency toward repetitive action and a narrow focus of interest signs of autism prolonged eye contact failure in emotional expression failure to follow another person s gaze perform poorly in false belief tests and on tests of ability to deceive detect deception 2 Define the terms morpheme content morpheme and grammatical morpheme How are morphemes both discrete and arbitrary onomatopoetic ex smash word is like its sound morphemes smallest meaningful units of a language combination of sounds most are words or prefixes suffixes Ex dog s morpheme ex on an up dis etc content morphemes nouns verbs adjectives and adverbs carry main meaning of sentence grammatical morphemes include articles a an the prepositions of and some prefixes suffixes re ed morphemes both discrete and arbitrary arbitrary morpheme that has no similarity need to exist between its physical structure and the object for which it stands allows new morphemes to be made which gives language flexibility discrete a morpheme that cannot be changed in a graded way to express gradations in meaning Ex you can t say that one thing is bigger than another by changing the morpheme big you need to add a morpheme or modify it nonverbal signals are not discrete or arbitrary 3 How are languages hierarchically organized Include the terms phoneme grammar and syntax in your response How do we learn grammatical rules languages hierarchically organized top level largest unit sentence combination of syntactically correct phases second level phrases grammar rules for organization ex she he and I not me and her him will walk to the store go by by no more third level morphemes broken down into phonemes elementary vowel constant sound phoneme elementary vowel constant sound phoneme some 15 80 basic word sounds ex ah ay kh th etc English about 45 phonemes grammar ways to arrange units at one level to produce the next level in hierarchy syntax how words can be arranged to produce phrases and sentences how do we learn grammatical rules grammar is learned implicitly by age four children have acquired most of their native language distinguishing grammatical from non grammatical sentences is not always based on meaning world wide indicates inborn predisposition 4 Provide a broad overview of language development highlighting important transitions and the emergence of important abilities early perception infantile preference for word sounds over non word sounds early discrimination among similar sounds later preference for high use native language phonemes later loss of discrimination among similar sounds b cooing 2 months repeated vowels c babbling 6 months repeated constants d native inflections 10 months word sounds similar to native language sounds e word comprehension before production understand word meanings before saying the words same for some animals f vocabulary development beginning 15 20 months very rapid first nouns then verbs last functions g word generalization extending words for categories ex daddy for male parent extended to all males kitty for all four footed animals with tails h grammatical rule application and overgeneralization syntactic organization subject predicate verb object changing tense ex walk to walked run to runned changing number ex shoes to shoeses horse to horses lamb to lambs sheep to sheepses overview of language development Experiments 1 4 years olds could produce sound by sucking on a nipple sucked more to produce a human voice rate of sucking increases after a sound has been changed babies as young as 6 months old hear differences between any two sounds that are classified as different phonemes they become better at discriminating between sounds that represent different phonemes of their native language and worse at discriminating sounds that are classed as the same phoneme Ex infants growing up in English speaking cultures are better at distinguishing l and r but not in Japanese important