Chapter 9 Cognitive and Language Development in Early Childhood Toddlers are still speaking in two word utterances and are relying on action oriented schemas to solve problems By the end of the preschool years most children will engage easily in conversation and thinking demonstrates logic that adults have 1 Preoperational Stage a Preoperational Stage period from 3 6 years of age i Operational refers to logical systems of thought ii Preoperational preschoolers are incapable of these advanced forms of reasoning b Symbolic function ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events These express private idiosyncratic meanings derived from personal experience i Deferred Imitation children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior after a delay Imitate the behavior when it is adaptive to do so ii Symbolic Pretend Play children pretend that an object is something other than what it really is World of make believe for preschool children 1 Shifting Context 2 3 yr olds transform setting to a supportive play setting I e Backyard becomes a kitchen 2 Substituting Objects substitute one object for another 3 Substituting Other Agents for Oneself Toddlers are the agents of their own acts of pretense I e toddler may pretend feed herself 4 Sequencing and Socialization of Pretend Episodes Children coordinate acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through preschool years iii Mental Images internal representations of external objects or events c Advent of Preconcepts i Centration focusing attention on minute and often inconsequential aspects of their experience Results in unsystematic samplings of isolated bits of information from any given experience I e remembering bright earrings and a peanut from a trip at the zoo ii Preconcepts disorganized illogical representations of the child s experiences Foundation for eventual emergence of logical concepts in the subsequent stage of cognitive development d Transductive Reasoning Thinking with Preconcepts i Induction we derive general principles from particular examples girls boy thinks that all girls are teachers pets i e teacher likes ii Deduction use general principles to predict particular outcomes I e next teacher will favor girls iii Transduction within the unsystematic collections of images which constitute their Preconcepts Piaget believed preoperational children used this Reasoning inability to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals Hard e Egocentrism i Egocentrism to see world as others see it i e 3 mountain experiment f Irreversibility i Irreversibility transductive sequences of thought i e Do you have a sister Yes Does your sister have a sister No of thought notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reverse their 1 ii Difficult to mentally reverse sequences Over time this changes g Reasoning in Content Domains i Classification tendency to group objects based off of particular sets of characteristics ii Quantitative Reasoning refers to ability to estimate the amount of things and changes in the amounts of things 1 Conservation thinking Can t maintain constancy within the mind failure to conserve that characterizes preschool children s 2 Can t maintain notion that certain attributes of objects remain unchanged 3 1 1 Correspondence tend to make errors as numbers stay same but size of objects change iii Appearance and Reality young children are confused by discrepancies between appearance and reality Object Identity Task h Information Processing views cognitive development as a continuous process of change in children s information processing capabilities Refers to children s use of attention and memory to gain and retain information about their environment and their use of that information to solve problems i Attention Hard to keep attention on one thing ii Remembering 1 Information can be maintained only temporarily in short term memory and preschool children have limited capacity to process information for long term memory 2 Strategies purposeful efforts to facilitate memory such as rehearsal and organization a Mental strategies have to be used to transfer information from short term to long term storage Preschoolers don t have this to easily bring information into long term storage as they have no mental rehearsal or categorization b Long term memory is unorganized so recalling and remembering information it s hard to sift through c Short term memory additional result of information input into the system Information here will be lost for any future problem solving reasoning thinking if the application information is not utilized put into storage 3 Metacognition conceptualize own cognitive processes A part of the human mind dedicated to understanding your own thinking Knowing how you learn Knowing what you don t know Knowing having strategies for changing things in the mind Preschoolers aren t that good at this Don t have a good sense of what mental skills and capacities are Rehearse with child to help encourage metacognition iii Theory of Mind Used to explain predict human behavior 1 Mindreading cognitive process by which we attribute desires and beliefs to other individuals in order to explain and predict their behavior 2 Deception ability to generate false beliefs in other individuals 2 Language Development in Preoperational Stage Growth of Vocabulary o Learn words that reflect understanding of concepts of time and space o Grammar system of rules that structures how to combine words into meaningful learn about using inflections such as ing ed and s to modify o Over regularize over generalize application of a grammar rule ie The boy ranned Learning Rules of Grammar o Grammatical morphemes sequences nouns verbs and adjectives Communication with Others o Egocentric speech language that fails to consider the viewpoint of the listener o Monologue child talks to themselves oblivious to anyone around them o Collective Monologue two or more children taking turns between engaging egocentric speech with little or no transfer of meaning o Children adjust their speech when talking to peers and talking to adults Speech with adults o Private Speech is more complex suggesting that the preschooler appreciates the listener s perspective speech with no apparent communicative purpose Often narrate their behaviors and announce their next moves Private speech can help serve an important self regulatory function can modify tempo and direction of speech Over time private speech evolves into
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