• How has the study of deaf children informed our understanding of language development?

• Deaf population is perfect for studying critical periods because there is a large population, children are loved and treated well, they are normal socially and cognitively, they vary in the age at which they were exposed to language.

• Newport (1990) studied ASL competence among deaf people

• Participants = 35-70 years old, had at least 30 years signing experience

• 3 groups

• native signers (born to deaf signing parents)

• early learners (exposed at 4-6 years)

• late learners (first exposed after age 12)

• Subjects tested on production and comprehension of complex morphology and syntax

• RESULTS:

• comprehension of word order - no effect for age of acquisition

• production and comprehension of morphology is strongly affected by age of acquisition

• Infants form categories of objects. The key element in infants categorization abilities is perceptual categorization, the grouping of objects that have similar appearances. Infants categorize objects along many perceptual dimensions, including color, size, and movement. By 2, children categorize objects based on shape. Children begin to grasp individual categories, but hierarchical and causal relations among categories.

• Describe the research evidence about children’s understanding of living things.

• Both 9 and 12 month olds show surprise when they see inanimate objects move. This suggests that they understand that self-produced motion is a distinctive characteristic of people and other animals.

• During preschool years, children gain basic understanding of the properties of biological entities: growth, heredity, illness and death.

• inheritance- 3 and 4 year olds that are told that Mr and Mrs Bull have hearts of an unusual color, and they predict that Baby Bill will also have a heart of that color. Most preschoolers also believe in “essentialism” which is the view that living things have an essence inside of them that makes them what they are.

• Preschoolers understand that something inside of living things is making them grow to be larger and more complex. They also know a little about germs and how germs can make you sick. They also understand that living things can heal, but at a certain point they will die.

• They typically don’t group plants with animals into a single category of living things until they go to school though.

• Children rapidly acquire biological knowledge because of extensive exposure provided by families and because of brain mechanisms that lead children to be interested in living things and to learn about them quickly and easily.

• Nativists argue that children have an innate capacity for representing and learning about space

• Empiricists argue children acquire spatial representations in same way they learn about everything on their own. This suggests that they understand that self-produced motion is a distinctive characteristic of people and other animals.else; children combine info to reach goals by moving through environment, also use language and cultural tools to inform spatial understanding.

• 2 sides agree on:

• early in infancy, children show impressive understanding of above, below, left of, right of.

• certain parts of the brain are specialized for particular spatial info

• Code locations of objects relative to self.

• As they get older, infants’ can hold the location of an object in their mind for longer-- their spatial representations become more “durable” (EX: 7-month-olds correctly reach for the object hidden under one of two blankets 2 seconds earlier, but not 4 seconds earlier.)

• Piaget said children only had “egocentric representations”: coding of spatial locations relative to one’s own body, regardless of surroundings (ie. they will continue to reach for an object hidden on their right even when they have been turned around 180 degrees) Piaget was mostly right, kids will find something if hidden by a large/striking landmark, otherwise they are egocentric.

• Self-locomotion leads to a decrease in egocentric representation

• Repetitive sequence of events over time. By the end of their first year, infants can remember the order of events for a substantial period.

• BASIC: knowledge of temporal order- what happened first, what happened next, and so on.

• (EX: 3-month-olds presented with a series of photos, first one on right, then one on left, and so on. Within 20 seconds, the infant began to anticipate the side the new photo would be placed)

• The improvement in children’s sense of future time between the ages of 5 and 6 years is probably influenced by 5yr olds experience in kindergarten classrooms, where the cycle of seasons, holidays, and daily routines is emphasized.

• Children are subject to certain illusions about time, in part because of the role of attention in time perception.

• “A watched pot never boils”

• Children become increasingly proficient at reasoning about time. they become able to infer that if 2 events started at the same time, but one event ended later than the other, then the event that ended later must have lasted for a greater amount of time.

• Children can make logical inferences about time

• Children are trying to understand causal reasoning when they take toys apart, switch the light switch back and forth.

• There is a difference between understanding psychological causes and physical causes. Children and adults are better at understanding psychological causes than infants.

• In a study, 4 and 5 year olds were presented with pictures of “wugs” and “gillies.” Some of the kids were given causal reasons for why each creature looked the way it did- wug had spikes and claws because it likes to fight. The kids who were given the reasons why the creatures looked they way they did were better at remembering the names of the creatures later on.  

• Preschoolers’ questions about causes and reasons show that they understand that different categories of objects vary in the types of causal relations they are typically involved in. For example, a preschooler who sees an object will ask “what is it for?” instead of “what does it like to eat” because he knows what an artifact is compared to an animal.

• Physical causes- By 6 months, infants understand causal connections among some physical events (looking longer at scenario where stationary object starts moving before it is hit). When 9-11 month olds are shown actions that are causally related, they usually can reproduce the actions. Do not reliably reproduce causally unrelated actions until 21 months. By end of 2nd year, kids can infer causal impact of one variable based on indirectly relevant info about another. (At 24 months versus 19 months they can deduce which object will make blicket detector go off). Preschoolers expect that if a variable causes an effect, it should do so consistently. At age 5, kids are fascinated by magic tricks because no obvious causal mechanism could produce the trick.  

A) Behaviors of children at different ages differ sharply.

B) A child's entry into a new stage involves a gradual shift from one way of experiencing the world to a different way of experiencing it.

C) Children of a particular age show wide-ranging similarities across a variety of situations.

D) When children enter a new cognitive stage, they demonstrate their new way of thinking across a broad spectrum of tasks.

Which of the following items would NOT be considered part of the sociocultural context involved in an American child's

language development?

A) number of words in a child's vocabulary

B) town budget for speech therapy

C) parental knowledge of child development

D) modern American value for education

E) All of the answers are parts of the sociocultural context involved in a child's language development.

A) structured

B) correlational

C) experimental

D) None of the answers is correct.

Which of the following factors is cited as a reason why some children are resilient in the face of multiple developmental

hazards?

A) prenatal nutrition

B) education

C) responsive care

D) welfare

Which of the following statements about fetal activity and inactivity is true?

A) Fetuses do not have true sleep states, but they do have periods of inactivity while awake.

B) Fetuses have periods of high activity and rest while awake, and they have both active and quiet sleep states.

C) Fetuses sleep all day and night, but their sleep can be active or quiet.

D) Fetuses are in constant motion throughout the day and night.

A researcher discovers that boys who spend more time playing violent video games are also more aggressive outside the home. Which of the following conclusions would the researcher be justified in making?

A) It is not possible to discern from this finding whether playing violent video games causes increased aggression or vice versa.

B) Reducing time spent playing violent video games is an effective way to reduce aggression in boys.

C) The link between aggression and violent video games is not likely to be evident in girls.

D) The relationship between aggression and violent video games is culturally determined, such that in interdependent societies, the two are not associated.

Which of the following is NOT an assumption of infant attention paradigms:

A) The same children are tested when they are 1, 3, 5, and 10 years of age.

B) Different children are tested at 1, 3, 5, and 10 years of age.

C) The processes underlying changes in emotion understanding are evaluated in a group of 3-year-olds and group of 10-year-olds.

D) All of these

1. Which lobe of the cerebral cortex is most important for foresight and goal-directed behavior?

Chapters 2,3,4

A) temporal

B) parietal

C) frontal

D) occipital

If the correlation between identical (monozygotic) twins on Trait R is higher than the correlation between fraternal (dizygotic) twins on Trait R, behavior geneticists conclude that:

A) genetic factors are important in the development of Trait R.

B) genetic factors are irrelevant to the development of Trait R.

C) environmental factors are irrelevant in the development of Trait R.

D) genetic factors and environmental factors play equivalent roles in the development of Trait R.

3. Which of the following practices is believed to have led to a secular trend in the development of self-locomotion by U.S. infants (i.e., that infants born after the late 1990's crawled at a later age than infants born before the late 1990's)?

A) decrease in number of adults who smoke

B) increase in proportion of families with two working parents

C) improvements in nutrition

D) changes in infant sleep position practices

To examine whether infants can perceive a difference between a square of uniform color and a square with a pattern on it, a researcher displays the two squares side by side. The researcher records the number of seconds infants look at each

square. This method is called the:

A) habituation technique.

B) preferential-looking technique.

C) contrast-sensitivity technique.

D) pattern-recognition technique.

A) child as social being

B) child as scientist

C) child as computational system

D) child as product of evolution

Synapse elimination (i.e., synaptic pruning) generally occurs as a result of:

A) brain damage.

B) nutritional deficiencies.

C) normal overabundance of synapses.

D) mental illness.

A) Individuals are able to remember the details of a magazine article after they have read it.

B) Children who are born with cataracts that are not removed early enough will have permanently impaired vision.

C) Rats that are trained to use just one limb to get a food reward have increased dendritic material in the particular area of the

motor cortex that controls the movement of that limb.

D) All of the statements are examples of experience-expectant processes.

A) child as social being

B) child as scientist

C) child as computational system

D) child as product of evolution

A) dislike vegetables even more but also come to dislike sweet, fatty foods.

B) prefer vegetables over sweet, fatty foods.

C) develop a strong preference for both vegetables and sweet, fatty foods.

D) dislike vegetables even more and have a stronger preference for sweet, fatty foods

Core-knowledge theorists believe that humans are equipped with specialized learning mechanisms for:

A) extremely difficult problems.

B) sexual reproduction.

C) problems that have been important from an evolutionary perspective.

D) only language and human faces.

Research by Meltzoff in which 18-month-olds observed either an adult or a mechanical device pull at two ends of a dumbbell demonstrated that children can learn by imitating the:

A) behavior of adults.

B) behavior and intentions of adults.

C) behavior of adults and inanimate objects.

D) behavior and intentions of adults and inanimate objects.

A) observational learning

B) statistical learning

C) classical conditioning

D) instrumental conditioning

. Which of the following statements best describes researchers' current view of young infants' ability to mentally represent

objects?

A) Young infants are able to mentally represent objects, but they do not have any expectations about the behavior of objects that are out of sight.

B) Young infants are able to mentally represent objects, but only if they have substantial experience with the object (e.g., toys with which they have played).

C) Young infants are able to mentally represent objects and to think about the existence of invisible objects.

D) Young infants are unable to mentally represent objects.

Which of the following is true about infants' understanding of number?

A) Piaget's conservation of number task is a good measure of their knowledge about number.

B) Infants can distinguish small numbers from each other, can add and subtract small numbers, and can enumerate actions.

C) For young children (i.e., under age 7 years), changing the spatial arrangement of items does NOT impact their understanding of the number of items.

D) Infants can understand complex addition and subtraction (e.g., 7 + 14 = 21).

E) none of the above

Piaget believed that the best way for children to learn is through:

A) experimenting with the world on their own.

B) modeling peers and adults.

C) explicit instruction from adults.

D) rewards and punishments.

Research in which 12- and 15-month-old infants were introduced to a faceless, eyeless blob suggested that infants are willing to attribute intentions and goals to:

A) virtually any object, animate or inanimate.

B) inanimate objects.

C) inanimate objects if they look like animate objects.

D) inanimate objects if they behave like animate objects.

Piaget believed that young infants' failure to reach for a hidden object indicated that they:

A) had lost the desire for the object.

B) lack the concept of object permanence.

C) were unable to reach the object.

D) were unable to uncover the object.

A) classical conditioning

B) perceptual learning

C) observational learning

D) instrumental conditioning

Kevin and his mother are playing with an interesting squeaky toy. Kevin's mother squeezes the toy in front of him and then hides it under a blanket. Kevin has fun finding the toy under the blanket and then giving it back to his mother. After several rounds of this game, Kevin's mother hides the toy behind a pillow instead of under the blanket. Rather than looking behind the pillow, however, Kevin lifts the blanket to look for the toy. Which of the following statements is true?

A) Kevin does not know the toy still exists.

B) Kevin is making the A-not-B error.

C) Kevin habituated to the toy being under the blanket.

D) All of the statements are true.

A) statistical learning.

B) social referencing.

C) perceptual learning.

D) habituation.