p4 l4 (cognitive dev)

• Language


  A form of communication, whether spoken, written, or signed, that is based on a system of symbols
• Milestones in infant language development

  • Crying (birth)
  • Cooing (1 to 2 months)
  • Babbling (6 months)
  • Making the transition from universal linguist to language- specific listener (6 to 12 months)
  • Using gestures (8 to 12 months)
  • Comprehending words (8 to 12 months)
  • Speaking one's first word (13 months)
  • Undergoing a vocabulary spurt (19 months)
  • Rapidly expanding one's understanding of words (18 to 24 months)
  • Producing two-word utterances (18 to 24 months)
• Telegraphic speech


  The use of short and precise words without grammatical markers such as articles, auxiliary verbs, and other connectives
• Broca's area


  An area in the brain's left frontal lobe that is involved in speech productions

  
• Wernicke's area


  An area in the brain's left hemisphere that is involved in language comprehension

  
• Aphasia


  A loss or impairment of language ability caused by brain damage
• In evolution, language clearly gave humans an enormous advantage over other animals and increased their chances of survival
• Child-directed speech


  Language spoken in higher speech than normal, with simple words, and sentences
• Language acquisition device (LAD)


  Chomsky's idea that children are biologically equipped to learn language with a prewired device
• Emotion


  Feeling, or affect, that occurs when a person is in a state or an interaction that is important to him or her
• Broad range of emotions

  • Enthusiasm, joy, and love (positive emotions)
  • Anxiety, anger, and sadness (negative emotions)
• Psychologists stress that emotions, especially facial expressions of emotions, have a biological foundation
• Emotions are the first language with which parents and infants communicate, and emotions play key roles in parent-child relationships
• Primary emotions


  Emotions that infants display early in their development
• Self-conscious emotions


  Emotions that develop later in childhood
• Crying


  The most important mechanism newborns have for communicating with the people in their world
• Types of cries

  • Basic
  • Anger
  • Pain
• Increasingly experts recommend immediately responding in a caring way to babies' cries during the first year
• Social smiling


  Occurs as early as 2 months of age
• Stranger anxiety


  An infant's fear and wariness of strangers; it tends to appear in the second half of the first year of life
• Separation protest


  An infant's distressed crying when the caregiver leaves
• Emotion regulation


  The ability to manage one's emotions, which is important for infants to develop
• Temperament


  Individual differences in behavioral styles, emotions, and characteristic ways of responding
• Chess and Thomas' classification of infants

  • Easy
  • Difficult
  • Slow to warm up
• Inhibition to the unfamiliar


  An important temperament category proposed by Kagan (extremely inhibited, extremely uninhibited, and intermediate)
• Goodness of fit


  The match between a child's temperament and the environmental demands the child must cope with
• Goodness of fit can be an important aspect of a child's adjustment
• Caregivers should be sensitive to the individual characteristics of the child, be flexible in responding to these characteristics, and avoid negatively labeling the child
• Trust versus mistrust


  The stage of Erikson's theory of psychosocial development that characterizes an infant's first year

  
• The infant begins to develop a self-understanding called self-recognition at about 18 months of age
• Autonomy versus shame and doubt


  The stage of Erikson's theory that characterizes the second year of life
• Face-to-face play


  Begins to occur at about 2 to 3 months of age
• Newly developed self-produced locomotion skills significantly expand the infant's ability to initiate social interchanges and explore their social world more independently
• Joint attention


  Intensifies at about 10-11 months, when infants begin to follow the caregiver's gaze and direct the caregiver's attention to objects that capture their interest
• Social referencing


  "Reading" emotional cues in others to help determine how to act in a particular situation
• Sophistication and Insight are reflected in infant's perception of others' actions as intentionally motivated and goal-directed and their motivation to share and participate in that intentionality
• Attachment


  A close emotional bond between two people
• Securely attached babies


  Use the caregiver, usually the mother, as a secure base from which to explore the environment
• Types of insecure attachment

  • Avoidant
  • Resistant
  • Disorganized
• Strange Situation


  An observational measure of attachment created by Ainsworth