• Chapter 7 – Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Physical Development in Early Childhood

• Skeletal growth:
  • new epiphyses emerge
  • lose baby teeth
• Brain development:
  • rapid growth of the prefrontal cortex
  • hemispheres continue to lateralize

Handedness

• Reflects dominant cerebral hemisphere:
  • right-handed (90%)— left hemisphere
  • left-handed (10%)— both hemispheres
• Jointly influenced by nature and nurture:
  • position in uterus
  • practice

Brain Development in Early Childhood

• Left hemisphere especially active:
  • language skills
  • handedness
• Links among parts of
  the brain increase:
  • cerebellum
  • reticular formation
  • hippocampus
  • corpus callosum

Influences on Physical Growth and Health

• Heredity and hormones:
  • growth hormone
  • thyroid-stimulating hormone
• Nutrition
• Infectious disease:
  • malnutrition
  • immunization
• Childhood injuries

Nutrition in Early Childhood

• Appetite declines
• Wariness of new foods is adaptive
• Needs a high-quality diet
• Imitates others’ food choices
• Poor-quality diet is associated with cognitive deficits and behavior problems

Infectious Disease and Malnutrition

• Poor diet depresses immune system
• Illness reduces appetite
• Diarrhea a danger in developing countries; can be helped by
  • oral rehydration therapy
  • zinc supplements

Immunizations

• Many U.S. children lack immunizations
• Reasons include
  • cost
  • parents’ stressful daily lives
  • misconceptions about vaccine safety

Factors Related to  Childhood Injuries

• Gender and temperament
• Poverty, single parenthood, low parental education
• Societal conditions:
  • international differences
  • teenage parents
  • shortage of high-quality child care

Motor Development in Early Childhood

• Gross-motor skills:
  • balance improves
  • gait smooth and rhythmic by age 2
  • upper- and lower-body skills combine into more refined actions by age 5
  • greater speed and endurance
• Fine-motor skills:
  • self-help: dressing, eating
  • drawing and printing

Progression of Drawing Skills

• Scribbles
• First representational forms:
  • draws first recognizable
    • Scribbles
    • First representational forms:
    • draws first recognizable    pictures: 3 years
• More complex drawings: 5–6 years
• Early printing: 4–6 years

Individual Differences in Motor Skills

• Gender
  • Boys excel in skills using force and power
  • Girls excel in skills using balance and agility
• Practice
• Adult encouragement

Piaget’s Preoperational Stage

• Ages 2 to 7
• Gains in mental representation:
  • make-believe play
  • symbol–real-world relations
• Limitations in thinking:
  • egocentrism
  • lack of conservation
  • lack of hierarchical classification

Early Childhood Development of Make-Believe

• With age, make-believe gradually
  • detaches from real-life conditions
  • becomes less self-centered
  • becomes more complex
• Sociodramatic play develops

Benefits of Make-Believe Play

• Contributes to cognitive and social skills
• Strengthens mental abilities:
  • sustained attention
  • memory
  • language and literacy
  • creativity
  • regulation of emotion
  • perspective taking

Dual Representation

• Viewing a symbolic object as both an object and a symbol
• Strengthens around age 3
• Adult teaching can help:
  • experiences with maps, photos, drawings, and make-believe play
  • pointing out similarities of symbols to real world

Egocentrism

• Failure to distinguish others’ viewpoints from one’s own

Animistic Thinking

• Belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities

Conservation

• Understanding that physical characteristics remain the same when appearance changes:
  • Centration: focus on one aspect to neglect of others
  • Irreversibility: inability to mentally reverse a series of steps

Follow-Up Research on Preoperational Thought

• Egocentrism
  • Able to take others’ perspectives
  • Animistic thinking results from incomplete knowledge of objects
• Logical thought
  • Conservation evident on simplified tasks
  • Reasons by analogy about physical changes
• Categorization
  • Hierarchical classification evident in everyday knowledge

Evaluation of Piaget

• Development of logical operations is gradual
• Disagreement over whether a preoperational stage really exists
  • some experts deny the stage approach
  • others support a flexible stage notion—a related set of competencies develops over an extended period

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

• Private speech
• Zone of proximal development
• Scaffolding: support of an “expert”

Children’s Private Speech

• For Piaget, “egocentric speech”
• For Vygotsky, the foundation for all higher cognitive processes
• Serves a self-guiding function; increases during challenging tasks
• Gradually internalized as silent, inner speech

Zone of Proximal Development

• Scaffolding:
  • Adults aid learning
    by adjusting support to child’s level of performance
  • Effectiveness varies culturally

Evaluation of
Vygotsky’s Theory

• Helps us understand cultural variation in cognition
• Focuses on language, deemphasizes other routes to cognitive development
• Says little about how basic elementary capacities (motor, perceptual, attention, memory, and problem-solving skills) contribute to higher cognitive processes

Gains in Information Processing

• Attention: inhibition, planning
• Memory: recognition, recall, episodic memory
• Theory of mind: false belief
• Emergent literacy
• Mathematical reasoning

Recognition and Recall

• Recognition
  • Noticing that a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced
• Recall
  • Generating a mental representation of an absent stimulus
  • More difficult than recognition

Episodic Memory

• Scripts: memory for familiar everyday events
• Autobiographical memory: memory for one-time events

Autobiographical Memory

• Improves with cognitive and conversational skills
• Influence of adult interaction:
  • elaborative style: fosters organized and detailed personal stories
  • repetitive style: weak at promoting autobiographical recall

The Young Child’s Theory of Mind

• Early awareness of mental life: infancy through age 3
• Mastery of false belief tasks: around age 4
• Factors contributing to mastery of false belief:
  • language
  • executive function
  • social experiences

Fostering Emergent Literacy

• Language skills:
  • phonological awareness
  • vocabulary and grammar
• Informal literacy experiences:
  • games
  • interactive reading
  • writing
• Books for low-SES

Early Childhood  Mathematical Reasoning

• Ordinality:
  • order relationships between quantities
  • 14–16 months
• Cardinality:
  • when counting, last number is the total
  • 3½–4 years

Individual Differences in Early Childhood Mental Development

• Factors contributing to individual differences:
  • home environment
  • quality of child care, preschool, or kindergarten
    • child-centered vs. academic
    • early intervention programs
  • educational media

Features of a High-Quality Home Environment

• Stimulation:
  • toys, games, reading
  • language
  • academic
• Physical organization
• Emotional support
• Modeling and encouragement
• Variety in stimulation
• No physical punishment

Types of Preschool

• Child-Centered
  • Children select from wide variety of activities
  • Learn through play
• Academic
  • • Teachers structure learning
    • Formal lessons:
      • letter, numbers, colors, shapes
      • repetition and drill

Signs of Developmentally Appropriate Practice

• Physical setting
• Group size
• Caregiver–child ratio
• Daily activities
• Adult–child interactions
• Teacher qualifications
• Relationships with parents
• Licensing and accreditation

Educational Media

• Television is most common form
• Slow-paced, narrative programs are most effective:
  • gains in early literacy, math skills

more elaborate make-believe play

• • higher academic achievement
• Excessive entertainment TV can be harmful

Learning with Computers

• Can support writing skills
• Improves problem solving and metacognition
• Excessive use for entertainment can be harmful

Language Development in Early Childhood

• Vocabulary: fast-mapping
• Grammar: overregularization
• Conversation: pragmatics
• Supporting language development:
  • recasts
  • expansions

Vocabulary Development

• Fast-mapping:
  • object names
  • verbs
  • modifiers
• Coins new words
• Uses metaphors

Strategies for Word Learning

• Mutual exclusivity bias
• Shape bias
• Cues in sentence structure
• Rich social information

Grammatical Development

• Basic rules:
  • subject–verb–object structure between ages 2 and 3
  • small additions to sentences to express meaning: “-s,” variations of “to be”
• Overregularization
• Complex structures: question-asking, passive voice, embedded sentences, indirect objects

Pragmatics

• 2-year-olds can engage in effective conversation
• By age 4, adjusts speech to fit listener’s age, sex, social status
• Challenging situations, such as telephone conversations

Supporting Early Childhood Language

• Conversation with adults
• Recasts: restructuring inaccurate speech to correct form
• Expansions: elaborating on children’s speech
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