Egocentrism

Children's inablility to take perspectives different from their own

Representational Skill

The ability to recognize that one object stands for another, as, for example, pretending a banana is a telephone

Dual representation

The ability to mentally represent bothe a symbol and its referent

Sociodramatic play

A type of play that involves enactment of roles and stories, such as "You be the dad and I'll be the mom, and we'll go to the grocery store, okay?"

Three Mountains Task

A task invented by Piaget and Inhelder, in which children are asked to look at a model of a landscape marked by hills and mountains and tell how it looks from a perspective different from their own

Animism

The attribution of mental activity such as thoughts, feelings, and wishes to inanimate objects such as clouds, rivers, or stones

Conservation

The fact that some properties of objects remain the same, even while other properties are changing; in Piaget's theory, preoperational children do not grasp this concept

Horizontal décalage

Piaget's term for the fact that in contrast to theoretical predictions, children master skills attributed by his theory to the preoperational stage at varied ages

Recognition

The ability to identify an object, person, or quality that was encountered before (e.g., Sally recognized the picture of her sister on the bulletin board)

Recall

The ability to reproduce material from memory (e.g., when he was asked, Tommy recalled what kinds of foods he had eaten for lunch)

Metamemory

Knowledge about memory itself--about memory tasks, strategies, and conditions

Scripts

General outlines of events and the order in which they occur, used to organize thinking and memory about familiar occurences, such as eating in a fast-food restaurant

Theory of mind

The young child's ideas about the nature of mental activities, especially those of people around them

Phonemic awareness

The ability to hear and manipulate the sounds of spoken language

Dialogic reading

Shared book reading between children and parents in which parents ask open-ended questions, repeat and expand on children's utterances, and encourage children's speech

Cardinality

The concept that the last number in a counting sequence represents the quanity of objects in a set

Private Speech

Children's use of language to plan and direct their own behavior, especially when undertaking difficult tasks

Cooperative Learning

An educational technique in which children work together in small groups to solve problems or complete tasks

Syntax

 The grammatical structure of language, including (among many other elements) the ways in which past versus present tense or plural versus singular are maked by a language

Mutual Exclusivity Bias

Young children's expectation that objects have only one label and hence that words refer to separate, non-overlapping categories

Syntactic Bootstrapping

Children's ability to use the grammatical information in language (syntax) to help them work out the most likely meanings of new words

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful grammatical unit, such as an s added to a noun to make it plural

Semantic Bootstrapping

Children's ability to use the semantic information in language to help them work out the most likely grammatical structure of new utterances

Pragmatics

The use of language for a variety of goals, such as persuasion, in different circumstances

Late talkers

Chldren who, by ther 2nd birthday, use fewer than 50 words and who do not combine words into two- or three- word utterances

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales

An individual test of intelligence that can be given to young children, originally written by Alfred Binet and revised by Lewis Terman of Stanford University

Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI)

A popular test of young children's intelligence

Head Start

A federally funded program that provides young children from low-income homes with a year or two of preschool education, as well as with nutritional and medical services

Seasme Street

An educational television program intended to teach preliteracy and pasic mathematical concepts to young children