Final Exam Chapters 9 10 12 13 Chapter 9 Cognitive Language Development in Early Childhood At the end of the second year toddlers are speaking in two words utterances that make little sense and rely on action oriented schemas to solve problems Cognitive Development At age 4 children can listen and retell stories although the rendition may be filled with error Preoperational Development Preoperational stage Piaget s term for the period between 3 6 years of age operational refers to the logical systems of thought which eventually emerge in middle childhood In example children around 7 8 years understand that all horses are animals but not all animals are horses Or understanding that addition is the opposite of subtraction The Symbolic Function Symbolic function the ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events o Symbolic function takes several distinct forms including deferred imitation symbolic pretend play mental images and language Deferred imitation children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior after a delay and in some cases when the model is no longer present o Improvements in the memory allow the child to retain modelled behavior for weeks or months o Improvements in physical and motor capability enable more precise imitation of complex model behaviors Symbolic pretend play children pretend that an object is something other than what it really is o i e a wooden block is a boat or a doll is a real person Shifting Context two three year old children typically require support from the play setting to initiate and sustain their pretense o An example would be to play outside of a child s typical setting i e playing in the backyard opposed to the kitchen Substituting objects children often substitute one object for another in their pretend play o i e 14 19 month olds use realistic looking dolls for their play opposed to older children that can use objects such as bricks or sticks to represent something o this shift to substituting objects occurs around the 3rd 4th year Substituting other agents for oneself researchers have observed a developmental progression in how children use agents in their pretense o Pretense first appears within the 2nd year where toddlers are the agents of their own pretense i e a toddler feeds herself by bringing an empty spoon to her mouth o Then children use dolls in pretend play but only as passive agents they will talk to the doll but the doll cant talk back o Around the 3rd year children will use dolls as active agents Sequencing and socialization of pretend episodes although pretense begins with single acts children coordinate such acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through the preschool years o Sequences begin to incorporate behavior patterns for agents which reflect conventional roles i e doctors give needles but do not milk cows or police catch crooks but not cook Mental images internal representations of external objects or events o Enables child to think about objects when the objects are not o Children can integrate experiences from the past into the present physically present to plan for the future The Advent of Pre concepts Centration children focus their attention on minute and inconsequential aspects of their experience o I e a child remembers nothing about her babysitter other than that she was wearing a pink top Pre concepts disorganized illogical representations of the child s experiences o Pre concepts provide a less than adequate representation of children s experiences they do establish a foundation for the eventual emergence of logical concepts in the subsequent stage of cognitive development Transductive Reasoning Thinking with Pre concepts Induction derive general principles from particular examples o i e a 8 year old boys observes that teachers favored girls in his classes he concludes the general principle that girls are teacher s pets Deduction general principles to predict particular outcomes o The child enters the next grade and believes his new teacher will be likely to favor girls Piaget believed that preoperational children are incapable of thinking inductively or deductively they use transduction Transduction reasoning within the unsystematic collections of images which constitute their pre concepts o Children s ideas are private and meaningful only within a child s pre conceptual understanding of a story Egocentrism Egocentrism child s inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals children have difficulty seeing the world as others see it a limitation to their thought Three mountain problem children between 4 12 years were shown a 3D model of a mountain scene and piaget asked each dhild to examin the model from different visual perspectives he moved a doll to various vantage points and asked the child to describe what is in the doll s point of view o Children under 8 years consistently identified their own view as that of the doll an example of their egocentrism Irreversibility Irreversibility the notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their transductive sequences of thought another limitation to their thought o i e a 3 year old child who has a sister is asked if she has a sister she will answer year but when asked if her sister has a sister she will say no o able to take things apart but not being able to put them back together Reasoning in Content Domains a child s limitations such as the centrated egocentric transductive and irreversible qualities make limitations on their understanding in domains such as o classification o quantitative reasoning o distinguishing between appearance and reality o theory of mind Classification Classification refers to the tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of characteristics Piaget studied this and found a 3 stage developmental progression o Stage 1 children 5 years and younger had no overall plan for sorting but produced graphic collections i e a child would group all rectangular objects as a house o Stage 2 children 6 8 years sorted in a more organized way producing a series of collections of objects each based on a different dimension of similarity referred to as non graphic collections i e a child would place objects that were circles into one pile and then squares in another pile but children were not able to classify on two dimensions simultaneously o Stage 3 children later childhood and early adolescence understood the relationships to the rules of class
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