Chapter 6

• Piaget's first of four distinct periods of cognitive development. From birth to 24 months.
• Infants learns through their senses and motor skills.

• PRIMARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS:
• Stage One - birth to 1 month - reflexes (sucking, grasping, staring, listening)
• State Two - 1 to 4 months - the first acquired adaptations (accommodation and coordination of reflexes) -- such as sucking a
• pacifier differently from a nipple; grabbing a bottle to suck it.

• SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS
• Stage Three - 4 to 8 months - An awareness of things: responding to people and objects. (clapping hands when mommy says patty-cake)
• Stage Four -- 8 to 12 months - New adaptation and anticipation: becoming more deliberate and purposeful in responding to people and objects. (Putting mother's hands together in order to make her start playing patty-cake)

• TERTIARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS
• Stage Five - 12 to 18 months - New means through active experimentation: experimentation and creativity in the actions of the little scientist. (putting a teddy bear in the toilet and flushing it)
• Stage Six - 18 to 24 months - New means through mental combinations: considering before doing provides the child with new ways of achieving a goal without resorting to trial and error experiments. (before flushing, remembering that the toilet overflowed the last time, and hesitating)

The first of three types of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence, this one involving the infant's own body. The infant senses motion, sucking, noise, and so on, and tries to understand them.

The second of three types of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence, this one involving people and objects. The infant is responsive to other people and to toys and other objects the infant can touch and move.

The third of three types of feedback loops in sensorimotor inelligence, this one involving active exploration and experimentation. The infant explores a range of new activities, varying his/her responses as a way of learning about the world.

The realization that objects (including people) still exist when they cannot be seen, touched, or heard.

Purposeful action - a baby's goal-directedness derives from an enhanced awareness of cause and effect.

Piaget's term for the Stage Five toddler (aged 12 to 18 months) who experiments without anticipating the results.

A sequence in which an infant first perceives something that someone else does and then performs the same action a few hours or even days later.

The process of getting used to an object or event through repeated exposure to it.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. A measuring technique in which the brain's electrical excitement indicates activation anywhere in the brain; fMRI helps researchers locate the neurological responses to stimuli.

A perspective that compares human thinking processes, by analogy, to computer analysis of data, including sensory input, connections, stored memories, and output.

• Affordances - perception (or input)
• Memory - brain organization (output) - information storage and retrieval

An opportunity for perception and interaction that is offered by a person, place, or object in the environment.

An experimental apparatus that gives an illusionof a sudden drop between one horizontal surface and another.

Perception that is primed to focus on movement and change.

A universal principle of infant perception, consisting of an innate attraction to other humans, which is evident in visual, auditory, tactile, and other preferences.

• Experimental conditions are similar to real life.
• Motivation is high.
• Special measures are taken to aid memory retrieval.

A perceptual experience that is intended to help a person recollect an idea, a thing, or an experience, without testing whether the person remembers it at the moment.

Memory for routines and memories that remain hidden until a particular stimulus brings them to mind.

Memory that can be recalled on demand. (evidence of it after age 1, but at age 5 and 6, it improves dramatically as school begins and those parts of the brain mature)

The high-pitched, simplified, and repetitive way adults speak to infants. (also called baby talk/motherese)

• Newborn - reflexive communication (cries, facial expressions)
• 2 Months - range of meaningful noises (cooing, fussing, laughing)
• 3-6 Months - new sounds including squeals, growls, croons, trills, vowel sounds
• 6-10 Months - Babbling, including both consonant/vowel sounds repeated in syllables
• 10-12 Months - Comprehension of simple words; speechlike intonations; specific vocalizations that have meaning to those who know the infant well. Deaf/hearing babies use gestures (pointing)

• 12 Months - First spoken words that are recognizably part of the native language.
• 13-18 Months - Slow growth of vocabulary (up to about 50 words)
• 18 Months - Vocabulary spurt -- three or more words learned per day. Variation, though. Some toddlers do not speak.
• 21 Months - First two-word sentence.
• 24 Months - Multiword sentences. Half the toddler's utterances are two or more words long.

The extended repetition of certain syllables, such as ba-ba-ba, that begins between 6 and 9 months of age.

• A sudden increase in an infant's vocabulary, especially in the number of nouns, that begins at about 18 months of age.
• (ma-ma, ba-ba)

A single word that is used to express a complete, meaningful thought. (Mama! Mama? Mama.)

All the methods - word order, verb forms, and so on - that languages use to communicate meaning, apart from the words themselves.

Chomsky's term for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language, including the basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation.

Proffered the theory that language learning is innate; adults need not teach it. Felt that language was too complex to be mastered merely through step-by-step conditioning, noting that all children master basic grammar at about the same age, naming it universal grammar.

• Behaviorism, or learning theory. All learning is acquired, step by step, through association and reinforcement. The parents are the expert teachers;frequent repetition is instructive, especially when linked with daily life; and well taught infants become well spoken children.
• Epigenetic theory. Language learning is innate. All babies babble, no reinforcement/teaching is needed.
• Sociocultural theory. Social-pragmatic theory. It perceives the crucial starting point to be neither vocabulary reinforcement (behaviorism) nor the innate connection (epigenetic), but rather the social reason for language: communication.

• The model called emergentist coalition. Combines valid aspects of several theories about the emergence of language during infancy.
• Children learn language to do numerous things: Indicate intention, call objects by name, put words together, talk to family members, sing to themselves, express their wishes, remember the past, and much more.