PSY 361 Exam 2

• Cell in body's nervous system
• Send and receive neural impulses, or messages, throughout the brain and nervous system
• 

Intercellular communication where information is exchanged between nerve cells, usually by means of a chemical neurotransmitter

• Common in most adults
• Process by which each half of the brain becomes specialized 

Ex: language and speech controlled by left side usually)

• Brain adapts to external conditions
• Most common in infancy/childhood but modifiable in adulthood

• Language brain of deaf children
• NOT in left side of brain but right side (motor area)

• Early brain damage to left side
• Children still able to develop language normally

• Primary Motor Area
• First to develop
• Voluntary movement
• Most developed (Touch)

• Primary Sensory Areas
• Begins with touch, then visual, then auditory
• By 3 months, all primary sensory areas are relatively mature

• Frontal Cortex (e.g., planning, decision-making)
• Begins to function in infancy but continues to develop throughout childhood

• Synaptogenesis
• Occurs 3-12 months
• Crucial for survival and learning
• Density of synapses 2x of early adolescence
• Why? Infant prepares to establish neural connections for virtually any kind of experience
• Synapses used regularly strengthened
• Synapses not used die

• Synaptic pruning after year 1
• Disposes axons and dendrites of a neuron not stimulated
• Frees up space for new synaptic connections

• Experience-Expectant Process
• Expect these are going to be normal
• Expext normal development will occur
• Ex: Most of us born not able to see the way we see now. If children get cataracts removed, they will still be blind because their brain didn't get that input

• Experience-Dependent Process
• What makes you an individual in your community
• Kind of experience in your life allowing you to develop particular synapses in your daily life
• Ex: Japanese children have more developed motor areas earlier than US because of use of chopsticks as a too for eating at an early age

• 2 environments:
• Enriched (bright, communal, novel rat toys)
• Impoverished (dark, solitary, low stimulation)

• Increased weight of cerebral cortex (4% overall, 6% for occipital region)
• Increased brain enzymes related to learning
• Larger neuronal cell bodies and glial cells
• More synaptic connections

• Integration of movements of many parts of the body
• Occurs around age of one year

• Ex: Walking (Development, integration, and practice of component skils)

• Reaching and Grasping
• Newborns: Perceive
• 2 1/2 months: Coordination
• 5 months: No longer overreach
• 9 months: Guide with glance

• Fine Hand Coordination
• Increases significantly 12 ⇒ 30 months
• Ex: Throw ball, turn pages, hold cup without spilling, dress themselves

Early development of locomotion

• Zinacantec babies swaddled tightly first 3 months
• Chinese babies in small apartments placed on pillows & feather beds ⇒ delayed development of locomotion

• Zinacantec babies swaddled tightly first 3 months
• Chinese babies in small apartments placed on pillows & feather beds ⇒ delayed development of locomotion

Infant on a checkered box with half of it with a "visual cliff" where it may look like there is a drop even with the transparent glass for protection

• Expectations and implications of puberty
• Decline in age of menarche
• New Guinea - 18 years
• US - around 12 years

• Girls
• Menarche: 12
• Redistribution of fat
• Negative impact on body image
• Negative early maturing
• Older companions

• Boys
• Spermarche: 13

Reversal in adulthood - late maturing boys& ealy maturing girls have more positive outcomes

• Eating disorders
• Obesity

People growing taller, reach full height sooner

• Genetics
• Environment
• Media

Anorexia: Avoid being obese, leads to starvation. Lose 25% or more of body weight.

Bulimia: Binge eating with vomiting 

• Had history of being overweight
• Pressure of their environment

Special brain cells that fire when an individual sees or hears another perform an action, just as they would fire if the individual were performing the same action

Mimicry of an action some time after having observed it; requires that the child have some sort of mental representation of the action

• Infants watch a televised model of a man removing a cap off of a pen
• After watching it several times, the infant may reproduce the model's behavior 24 hours later

• Primary Emotions
• 6 emotions 1st year: joy, fear, anger, surprise, sadness, disgust
• Bear simple, direct relation to the events that elicit them
• Smiling and laughter first expressions of pleasure
• Newborn = reflex smiles

• Secondary Emotions
• 18-24 months
• Embarrassment, pride, shame, guilt, envy

• Parent's talk around emotions help children figure out emotions of self and others
• Talk with mother and sibling at age 3 was related to better understanding of other's emotions at age 6

Social referencing - the process of "reading" emotional cues in others to help determine how to act in an uncertain situation

• No emotions from mother for 3 minutes
• Baby will protest from "flat affect"

• Wariness (6-9 months)
• Seek to be near primary caregiver (7-8 months)
• Show distress if separated
• Happy when reunited
• Orient to caregiver's actions

the process of "reading" emotional cues in others to help determine how to act in an uncertain situation

Freud: Caused by reduction of hunger drive 

Erikson: Become attached to people who reliably attend to their needs and who otherwise foster a sense of trust

Bowlby: Provides a balance between an infant's need for safety and varied learning experiences

Strong emotional bond that forms between infant and caregiver in the second half of the child's first year

• Cloth mother in Harlow's monkeys were secure base
• Where child feels safe emotionally

• Observe attachments between child and caregiver along with reactions with a stranger coming into room
• Reflected different attachments based on groups placed in

• Secure Attachment
• Babies explore new environments, minimal disturbed with separation, quickly comforted when she returns

• Insecure-Avoidant 
• Babies seem not to be bother by separation but specifically avoid her when she returns, sometimes visibly upset

• Insecure-Resistant
• Babies become upset with separation and inconsistent with return, seek contact or push mother away

• Insecure-Disorganized
• Babies disorganized and disoriented when reunited with mother after separation

• Mother is primary, infants capable of forming attachment to any familiar individual
• Multiple attachments are common (father, grandparent, sibling)
• In some communities number of attachments limited because requires frequent, close one-to-one interaction

• Cross-cultural studies
• German/Swedish - avoidant
• Japanese/Israeli - resistant

Many infants have multiple caregivers

For 1 year: Social misfits (no desire for social play or interchange, and behaved abusively toward their infants)

• structured system of arbitrary symbols used to communicate meaning
• –structured (governed by rules)
• –arbitrary
• –communicative
• Not all communication is language
• Not all language is verbal (ASL)

• Birth: Preference for language over other kinds of sounds; can differentiate basic phonemes characteristic of world’s languages
• Neonate: Can distinguish sounds of their native language from those of a foreign language
• 2 months: Social smiling; cooing babbling
• 3 months: Match behavior to that of another person
• 9 months: Social referencing and pointing at an object
• Approx 1 yr: babbling & first words
• 18 months: Will not point unless caregiver is present

• Phonemes: Basic sounds in a language
• Newborns can perceive the differences between all phonemes
• In time can only differentiate the phonemes of their native language

• Morphemes: Smallest units of meaning in the words of a language
• “Transplanted”  [trans] [plant] [ed]
• By 8-9 years, can use morpheme knowledge to figure out meanings of new words (e.g., “treelet”)

• Semantics (symbolic representation)
• How words are connected to their referents
• Words as mediators that allow a child to operate indirectly on an object via an adult
• Conversely, allows the child to be influenced by others (e.g., a command)
• Larger receptive vocabulary (i.e., what they understand)
• First words (10-14 months)
• First Words (in English mostly nouns)
• Refer to familiar people, objects, actions
• Vocabulary spurt (18-24 months)
• “fast mapping”
• Between 2 & 6 years:
• vocabulary 200 10,000 +

• Overextensions: Applying a verbal label too broadly (e.g., “Daddy” to all men)
• Underextensions: Applying the label too narrowly (e.g., “cat” only to the family’s cat)

• Syntax (grammar)
• How words are put together
• Tom went to the store vs. Tom the store went to

• Holophrases
• Simple-word utterances that stand for entire phrases or sentences
• “Up” “Bottle” “Milk”

• Telegraphic speech (20-26 months)
• e.g., “more cookie,” “Mommy car”
• Not grammar, but follow important rules (e.g., English word order)
• Basic grammar (2-3 years)
• e.g., plurals, possessive, basic verb tenses
• Overgeneralization errors (“My feets hurt!”)
• Complex grammar (4-6 years)
• e.g., tag questions (“I don’t like it, do you?”)

• Grammatical morphemes: Units that create meaning by showing relations between other elements within sentence
• Present progressive (-ing) first to appear
• Followed by location, number, possession, past tense

• How language is used appropriately
• Babies are looking to humans for clues

• After an infant has successfully searched for an object hidden at “A”, the object is then hidden in “B” while the infant watches.
• The infant will search for the object where it was previously found.

• Dogs in 3 conditions
• Social communicative
• Noncommunicative
• Nonsocial
• ** dogs in social communicative performed “A not B” error
• ** dogs in nonsocial got it “right”
• Wolves always got it right

• Mechanism: reinforcement and imitation
• Focus: word meaning; function of language
• Limitations
• –Novel combinations and novel word usage?
• –Learn too fast for conditioning explanation
• –Grammar acquisition?
• –Types of errors?
• Conclusion: Imitation and reinforcement possibly involved, but not primary mechanisms

• Mechanism: Language acquisition device (LAD)
• –Innate language-processing system programmed to recognize universal rules of language

Focus: acquisition of syntax

• Support (& Criticisms)
• –Language areas in the brain (but plasticity)
• –Sensitive periods (but not critical)
• –Grammar acquired more slowly than would predict
• –Don’t need explicit instruction to learn (but do need social context)

No single theory

• All emphasize
• –Innate capacity for language
• –Social context of language learning

• 2 approaches
• –Cognition emphasis
• –Social interaction emphasis

Important mechanism – joint attention – two (or more) people attending to the same object/event simultaneously

• –Whole object constraint
• –Mutual exclusivity
• –Categorizing constraint

Rabbit, Harvey, lunch, white, easter bunny, ears

• On average girls are slightly ahead of boys
• –Girls may mature physically faster than boys at this age
• –Mothers talk more to girls than to boys
• Initial differences don’t necessarily stay!

• Early language styles
• –Referential – use language to refer to objects
• –Expressive – use to refer to social routines / needs
• Links to cultural input
• –First words and vocabulary size vary initially across language communities
• –Amounts of child-directed talk vary
• –Importance of different parts of language vary by language style and cultural emphasis(verbs, nouns, etc.)
• Initial differences don’t necessarily stay!

• Bilingual Children:
• - May learn both language more slowly
• -May have smaller vocabs in each of the languages (depends on how you count)
• -Initial differences don’t necessarily stay!
• But they also:
• -Have better concept formation
• -More flexible in their thinking
• -Have better morphological awareness
• -Better attentional control
• -(these probably stay)

• One system
• - map second language words/symbols onto first language words/symbols rather mapping onto referent

• Two systems
• - system of symbols for each language is independent
• Implications: Two systems means knowing more and one system means having an incomplete system spread across 2 languages

• Mutual exclusivity constraint operative until the 150-word mark
• –Early bilinguals have Translation Equivalents both before and after the 150-word mark (Pearson, Fernandez & Oller, 1995)
• –Shows they’ve got two systems very early!

• Broca’s area
• Two languages share Brocas’s area
• –Only if both learned early
• –New languages will have separate divided region
• Importance of early input
• - Need at least 25% to become competent speakers

• 1.Biologically programmed sensitivity to language present at birth, which develops as the child matures (Nativist view)
• 2.Ability to learn from and imitate the language of others (Environmental-learning view)
• 3.Acquisition of basic cognitive capacities – schemas for actions with objects, ability to represent the world mentally, presence of lexical principles (Interactionist view – Constructivist version)
• 4.Inclusion of children in familiar routines in which language is one of many forms of interaction (Interactionist view – Cultural-context version)