Chapter 6: physical and cognitive development in early childhood

Question 1

Bodily Growth and Change 3-5 year olds

Answer 1

• 3-5-year-olds grow from 95 to 109cm
• 3-5-year-olds grow from 14 to 18kg

Growth is cephalocaudal

• Limbs lengthen

• Proportion of body fat decreases
• Brain develops
• Skeleto-muscular system strengthens

• Permanent teeth emerge

Question 2

Impact of size variation

Larger than average child

Smaller than average child

Answer 2

Larger than average children may:

• Be excluded for ‘roughness’
• Lack challenges
• Have more expected of them

Smaller than average children may:

• Be injured by larger children
• Lack mastery in normative tasks of strength and endurance
• Be ‘babied’ — low self-confidence

Question 3

Health and illness

Answer 3

• Pre-schoolers more likely than adults to get acute infectious diseases such as ear infections and stomach upsets

• Immune system not yet fully developed
• Many infectious diseases eliminated by vaccination in industrialised nations
• Significant differences in developing countries
• UNICEF goal (MDG4) – to reduce child mortality by two thirds by 2015

Question 4

Child mortality rates

Answer 4

Question 5

Child injuries

Answer 5

• ‘Unintentional’ injuries more accurate term than ‘accidental’ injuries
• Child factors influencing injury include sex and temperament
• Parental factors: poverty, maternal employment, beliefs about preventability
• Societal conditions play a role (international differences)
• Intentional injury or physical abuse also a serious problem

Question 6

Deaths and unintentional injuries in Australia

Answer 6

• Overall, a low rate of death
• In 2003, child deaths accounted for 1.3% of all deaths registered
• Most child deaths are of infants aged < 1 year (68% of deaths of 0-14-year-olds in 2003) and are related to perinatal and congenital factors
• However, after infancy period, injury deaths (e.g., transport accidents, drownings, assaults) emerge as leading cause of death for children
• From 1999-2003, 41% of all deaths of children aged 1-14 years were injury deaths (1,260 children)

Question 7

Motor development

Gross

Fine

Answer 7

Gross Motor Development

• Large muscle groups
• Centre of gravity moves downward, allowing for new motor skills to develop
• Ball throwing, jumping, running

Fine Motor Development

• Using eye-hand and small muscle coordination
• Buttoning a shirt, drawing

Question 8

Gross and fine motor skills by age

Answer 8

Question 9

Artistic development

Answer 9

• Scribbles: during 2nd year
• Shapes: circles, squares, triangles (3-4yrs)
• Designs: combine shapes into more complex designs (4yrs)
• Pictorial: draw actual depictions of objects, such as houses and trees (4- 5yrs)

Question 10

Variations in motor development

sex differences

cultural differences

Answer 10

Sex differences

• Boys slightly stronger than girls
• Girls marginally better at balance and coordination tasks
• May be related to social factors

Cultural differences

• May be related to child-rearing practices
• Cultural and sex differences smaller than individual differences

Question 11

Piaget’s Cognitive development

Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)

Answer 11

• Symbolic representations supersede sensorimotor activities

—Pretend play

—Language

• Understand constancies as well as object permanence
• Start to internalise functional relationships

Question 12

Piaget’s cognitive limitations: Conservation

Answer 12

Something remains the same even if its appearance is altered

• Matter/mass
• Liquid
• Length
• Number
• Area
• Volume

preoperational children are not meant to understand conservation

Question 13

Why Can’t Preoperational Children Conserve?

Answer 13

• Centration: focus on one aspect and neglect others (e.g., height of liquid not volume)

• Irreversibility: Failure to see that an action can go in two or more ways; cannot mentally reverse a set of steps

• Focus on successive states: tendency for preoperational children to focus on the end states rather than the transformations from one state to another

Question 14

Other cognitive limitations of preoperational children

Answer 14

• Number skills – questions concerning understanding of numerical concepts
• Classification skills – limited to basic level categories and incapable of taxonomic categorisation
• Animism – tendency to apply attributes of living things to inanimate objects
• Magical thinking – attribute inexplicable events to magic or fantasy figures

Question 15

Egocentrism

Answer 15

Egocentrism: Confusing one’s own perspective with that of another’s

• Not being able to take another’s view/perspective
• Believing the universe centres around the self
• Piaget believed that children under 8 years lack a theory of mind
• Wimmer and Perner (1983): False belief task
  
  • Suggests earlier development of theory of mind

Question 16

Egocentrism: Piaget’s Three Mountain Task

Answer 16

• The pre-operational child is unable to describe the mountains from the doll’s point of view.
• Four-year-olds always point to photos that show their own view.
• At 7 years they point to the picture that corresponds to the doll’s view.

Question 17

Theory of Mind

Answer 17

• While Piaget said that children younger that about 8 do not have ToM, research has found that children as young as 2-5 years may have ToM
• Piaget’s methodology flawed:
  
  • Asked abstract questions
  • Needed to ask concrete questions

Question 18

Moral reasoning

Answer 18

• Piaget observed children playing games with rules
• Three phases of moral reasoning:
• Amoral (very young children)
• Heteronomous morality (4-5yrs)
• Autonomous morality (10yrs)

• Later research suggests evidence for earlier advancement

Question 19

Language acquisition

Expressive language

Receptive language

Phonology

Pragmatics

Answer 19

• Rapid expansion, closely involved in the development of cognitive skills

• Expressive language: words, signs, gestures
• Receptive language: Understanding what is communicated
• Phonology: basic sounds of the language
• Pragmatics: how language is used in context

Question 20

Semantic development

Answer 20

Semantics: receptive language

• Rapid expansion of vocabulary - nouns generally emerge before verbs
• Overextensions common up to 2 years
• Mispronunciation due to lack of phonemic mastery

Question 21

Semantic development

Fast mapping

Syntactic bootstrapping

Answer 21

Fast mapping: growth in receptive language
• Child learns the meaning of a word after hearing it only once or twice

• By age 3, average child knows 900-1000 words
• By age 6, they know about 2,600 and understands more than 20,000

Syntactic bootstrapping: use of contextual cues

• Unfamiliar words learnt through grammatical context in which they are found

Question 22

Grammatical development

Morphemes

Inflection

Intonation

Syntax

Answer 22

Morphemes
• Can be a word ‘pig’ or part of a word ‘(pig)sty’

Inflection
• Prefixes and suffixes that carry meaning of plurality and tense (e.g., ‘s’, ‘ed’)

Intonation
• Pitch or tone

Syntax
• Order of morphemes

Question 23

Telegraphic speech (18-24 months)

Answer 23

Telegraphic Speech (18-24mths):
• 2-3 essential words expressing an idea

• Competence in syntax gradually increases

Question 24

Pragmatics

Answer 24

comprehension of when, how and where to use different language forms

Pragmatics of language

• Use in context
• Polite forms of address

Conversational skills develop
• Move from collective monologues

• Conversations where utterances are uncoordinated and not taking into account what the speaker has said

• Start to adopt referential skills
• Ability to communicate information, thoughts, intentions,

feelings accurately to another person

• Use non-verbal cues

Question 25

Theories of language Learning theory (Skinner 1957) Recent research

Answer 25

**Learning theory:** Skinner (1957) * Behaviourist view * Contingent reinforcement for effective communication * Parents reward correct speech by responding positively • Shaping **More recent research** • Limited evidence for simple reinforcement

Question 26

Theories of Language Acquisition: Social Learning Theory

Answer 26

* Bruner (1996): parents central in providing scaffolding for emerging language * Parents tend to use child-directed speech, and techniques of recasting and expansion * Scaffolding developed and staggered to reflect complexity of language development * Imitation and linguistic play also key

Question 27

Theories of Language Acquisition: Nativist Approach

Answer 27

* _Chomsky (1959, 1994):_ language skills hard-wired at birth through innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD) * Universal grammar enable assimilation * Support from the development of signing in deaf childrenand Berko’s (1958) ‘wug test’ * Limitations in the role of the environment and failure to account for semantics and pragmatics * Synthesis of innate capacity and behaviourist principles most likely explanation

Question 28

Delayed Language Development

Answer 28

* About 5-8% of preschool children experience delays in speech and language * May be problems in fast mapping * Many children catch up – especially if comprehension is normal * Dialogic reading: * Prompts * Evaluates * Expands * Repeats

Question 29

Language Development of Deaf Children

Answer 29

* May not exhibit spoken language but rather build personal gestural systems * Idiosyncratic systems more common where deaf children have hearing parents * Language argued to define ‘Deaf’ as a unique culture * Adoption of sign language as a first language requires the adoption of social attitudes and cultural values

Question 30

Sing language forms

Answer 30

* E.g., Auslan, BSL, ASL * Have own inherent grammar and vocabulary, with variations for region, ethnicity, SES etc. * Iconic - words have visual similarities that convey meaning * Deaf infants follow similar sign language development to hearing children’s spoken language development