Early Language Acquisition and Cognition-General

This class is about “Developmental Cognition.” How does this relate to other classes offered at the University of Oregon? In a similar field of study, “Cognition” taught by Dr. Ulrich Meyer, a structural diagram of cognition-general was given (figure 1). General cognition was presented as the process by which (a) incoming stimulus is, (b) slightly analyzed and is then (c) passed on to the short-term or working memory. The short-term/working memory is where general cognition takes place. Herein lays the foundation for (d) conscious cognition and thought and the focus or maintenance loop. From here the mind has access to (e) the long-term memory and the subconscious/semantics.

Figure 1
Cognition-General

Incoming Stimulus
i
Some
Early Analysis
i
Short Term Memory

Conscious CognitionThought
(Maintenance Loop/ Focus)
o
(Access)
o
Long Term Memory
(subconscious-semantics)

How does this relate to our class as related to developmental cognition? In the instance of, or domain of, “Early Language Acquisition,” eight month old learners experience independent mechanisms, like the segmentation of words from fluent speech. This is represented in this cognitive structural diagram (figure 2).

Figure 2
Experience Independent Mechanisms

Environmental Stimulus
Bunches of Words/Sounds
i
early analysis/interpretation
i
Short Term Memory

Conscious Cognition
Ego trying to Define and Speak
(Induction Dilemma)
Segmentation of Words from
Fluent Speech
(Maintenance Loop/Focus)
o
(Access)
o
Long Term Memory
Subconscious:
-semantics
-definitions

This is a representation of powerful mechanisms for the computation of statistical properties of language input.

essentialism

Gelman’s research has demonstrated that young children possess an essentialist view and even some adults use this same concept. As stated in the lecture slides, Gelman defines essentialism as an “assumption that categories of things in the world have a true, underlying nature or ‘essence’ that causes things to be in particular categories, gives them their identity”. Gelman uses three concepts to provide evidence of essentialism. The first concept is inductive potential. Inductive potential is the ability to group a new member of a category into the preexisting category based on similar traits. The second concept that Gelman uses is innate dispositions. This concept states that nature will not be affected by nurture. The third concept is maintenance of identity. This idea comes from the fact that you can dress something up, but it will remain the same. Gelman believes that children can be born with an essentialist point of view.

Children will use the essentialist view as part of their learning process. Gelman believes that essentialism is an innate part of life that you are born with. Once you start to understand what essentialism is, it is easy to see where she comes up with this idea. Gelman did research on young children to see if they understood what essentialism was. Gelman found that children as young as four understood what inductive potential were. Children understand that “an object will be more similar to members of the same category, even if it looks more similar to members of another category.” To test if children understood the concept of innate disposition, Gelman presented the idea that an animal was raised with another class of animals to children. Gelman than asked the children characterized traits questions about the raised animal. Children understood that nature would beat nurture. The third concept was used to see if children understand that you can dress an object up, but will it remain the same. Keil found that second grade students understood this concept for animal, but not for artifacts. These concepts are basic ideas and it is understandable why children are able to grasp them. As children mature, the concepts do not get abandoned and new concepts are formed.

This week in class I found the concept of essentialism very interesting. It was interesting to me because I could understand how it was related in everyday life. The concepts seem easy enough that a child could easily use it as part of their learning. An example of this would be the concept of Halloween. During the fun of dressing up for Halloween, a child still knows that there is a person behind the costume. Not only do children use essentialism, but adults will use it too. An example would be that if I’m meeting a friend of a friend, I’m assuming that the friends share similar character traits. Another example would be that if I’m seeing something for the first time than I will use underlying categories to define the new item. I agree with Gelman’s idea that essentialism is an innate concept.

I found the way that children develop the concept of time to be extremely interesting while we were discussing it in class. We talked about how time includes both experiential and logical aspects. Experienced time is how long we think a particular event takes place, while logical time is produced through reasoning.
In our book it discusses experiential time and how even children as young as four months old can discriminate between two movies being run forward and backwards showing a liquid being poured into a glass. This shows that these young infants have knowledge of how our world operates and that in order for one thing to occur there is a specific process that must also occur in along with a specific time in which that process happens. “Thus, understanding of temporal order seems well established in the first year of life” (Siegler and Alibali, pg. 284). This knowledge is very important in understanding how and why our world works the way that it does.
Logical time is often harder to develop and there are people ranging in all ages including adults that still do not have this concept fully developed. Our book also talks about the single object/single motion intuition is the belief that all parts of the same object will move at the same speed when it is in motion. This is hard to explain but the race car example works well, where a race car travelling around a race track has two doors on it that are moving at different speeds, the one on the outside is moving much faster. This idea is much better realized when it is acted out in real life with examples such as two people holding on to a pole and walking in a circle, where the outside person must walk a lot faster to keep up with the inside person. Without this demonstration or other knowledge of physics logical time is a much more complex concept to fully understand.
The knowledge and understanding of time in our society is crucial. We differ in our society in that we are extremely time oriented and always must stick to a strict schedule, where other societies for instance in Mexico this time obsession is much different, they rely more on personal interactions rather than set chronological time. The development or this concept of time is therefore very important for infants to understand in our society.

Development of a category of gender

Psychological essentialism is a mode of category representation in which membership of a category requires an underlying and unchanging reality, in other words, an essence (Gelman et al. 1994; Prentice and Miller, 2007). Recent studies with adult participants show that categories that can be observed by relatively stable physical qualities, such as categories of race, ethnicity, and physical disability are more strongly essentialized than categories associated with social class, appearance, or interests (Haslam et al., 2000). According to Haslam et al. (2000), among all the categories that are used to categorize people, including age, race, and intelligence, the categorical domain that is the highest in essentialism is gender. Although gender may be the most essentialized category compared to other categories, research suggests that the categorization of gender follows a reverse U-shaped developmental path, changing from a not essentialist to highly essentialist understanding, and then going back to a less essentialist understanding.

At the beginning of the development of a category of gender, there does not appear to be an essentialist view. Children between the ages of 2 and 3 believe that a person’s sex can change by changing external features such as clothing and hairstyle (Siegler & Alibali, 2005). They do not see sex as a permanent feature and believe that one can change their sex if they want to change it. Even though this pattern of categorization does not imply anything about whether young children perceive gender as a social or biological category, it implies that young children do not see gender as a category determined by essence.

Gender as a category of essence seems to appear by the age of 4, when children start to attribute gender differences to underlying and unchanging biological sex differences. A study by Taylor (1996) demonstrates this tendency toward essentialism and how it changes with age. In this study, 4 to 10 year-old children and adults were presented a story in which a baby was raised on an island with only members of the opposite sex (e.g. a girl raised by men) or with only members of the same sex (e.g. a girl raised by women). Then, they were asked what properties that character would have at age 10. At all ages, participants in the same-sex island condition said the character would acquire same-sex properties. However, in the opposite-sex condition, children up to age 10 based their responses significantly more on gender category rather than the effects of the environment. For example, they said a baby girl would acquire feminine properties even though she was raised by men. In contrast, 10-year-old children and adults responded that a baby girl would acquire more masculine properties when raised by men. This study suggests that on average, children up to 10-years-old see gender as a category of essence, and after 10-years-old, gender is perceived more as a social category that can be influenced by environment.

In a world where adults do not have a consensus on how much of gender as a category can be attributed to social factors or biological qualities, it is surprising to see the consensus among children about seeing gender as an essential category up to a certain age. Research on the domain-specifity of categorization processes of children may shed light to both why children follow such a U-shaped development and why the end of this U-shape only reaches to the point which makes gender the category domain that is the highest in essentialism among adults.

Children are innate essentialists??

In the class, I wondered how we know that a whale actually is not fish. I also wondered when we start understanding that plants also have lives like we do. It seems that we just know everything about this world naturally after we grew up. Recent studies have suggested that we learn to categorize by judging essential requirements for each categories. In addition, the study by Gelman and her colleagues (1994) suggested that children already have innate assumptions of the world. In other words, children already have ability to make judgments on essential conditions. In order to test their hypothesis, Gelman and her colleagues (1994) ruled out several explanations that children develop the knowledge of the world by reviewing other studies. Specifically, they ruled out the explanation such that children’s judgments do not rely on perceptual similarity, their past experiences and teaching from their parents. Nevertheless, children’s past experiences, their perceptual development and their parents help children to become essentialist.

First of all, it is impossible that children would do well on categorizing without their perceptual observation. For instance, to understand the concept of living and non-living, children need to observe the differences and the similarities between living objects and non-living objects. The more detailed they observe between living objects and non-living objects, the more concrete concepts of living and non-living they have developed. Specifically, they might notice all living subject would move, and then they observed that all living objects would grow and die. Thus, it is possible that children construct the essential conditions for each categories based on their perceptual development.

Second, the past experience plays an important role on helping children to revise their existed categories. Take the study of gender-role properties as an example. Children in young age were confused of the gender of a male Barbie if it were dressed in a skirt. However, children in older age, they knew what is essential to determine genders and were not confused the gender role by outside appearance . Related to children’s perceptual development, children in young age only noticed the outside appearance. But, how do children start to notice what is essential to observe? Apparently, children might know the essential differences between genders through their past experiences. For example, they might notice the difference between body structures of genders when they take bath with their siblings or their parents. So, their past experience might give them chance to observe the salient difference among categories.

Third, although parents do not explicitly teach their children an essentialist philosophy, parents might influence children’s reasoning. Children might have more past experiences than others if their parents encourage them to discover this world. For example, preschool children with helicopter parents might be prevented from observing animals, insects or plants closely because their parents are overprotecting. They worry that their children might get germs or get hurt from playing with animals, insects or plants. Thus, preschool children with helicopter parents might not have enough experiences and observations to construct their theory of the world than other preschool children with normal parents. In addition, the children with responsive parents might have more knowledge of world and human than children with non-responsive parents. For instance, responsive parents give corrective information to their children repeatedly and rapidly when their children think that a caterpillar is a still caterpillar after it grows up. On the other hand, non-responsive parents might ignore the errors that children made and the questions that children asked. Presumably, children with responsive parents might have more knowledge of the world and human because responsive parents encourage them to seek new knowledge and revise the incorrect concepts of the world and human that children made.

In conclusion, although the study by Gelman (1994) provided the evidence that preschool children are innate essentialists, children still need their past experience, their perception and the knowledge from their parents to build up the assumptions of the world. For example, it is doubtful that a child would know that there is blood inside of his or her body if he or she never experiences bleeding or sees others bleed. Therefore, it is possible that children’s innate knowledge of the world is not innate. Instead, children’s theory of the world and human is based on he combination of their perceptual observation, accumulation of past experiences and the knowledge from their parents.

The Importance of Education

The one thing that I have continually noticed throughout the readings is the importance of educating children. And by educating, I don’t just mean formally, with books and classrooms. I also mean through life experiences. In many of the problem solving topics discussed in the reading, and even biological processes, children could not ever gain the knowledge that they need to be successful in life without experience with the outside world.

First of all, when discussing biological concepts, it is important to note that children do seem to have some innate knowledge of biological and non-biological movement, and that with some amount of time they also come to understand living and non-living objects, but without the experiences that they have had in life, they could not come to know either. The book even mentions a study done by Inagaki (1990) where they compared the understanding of children that had raised goldfish as pets to children that hadn’t raised goldfish. The children that had experience with a pet was better able to understand another kind of animal that they were less familiar with, simply because they had some personal concept of living things.

Also, in many of the problem solving tasks, there is importance put on feedback to and education of the children, and the effects of that on the children. It is important to note that children do have some basic understanding of problem solving, but it is also very interesting to see how they combine what they already know with what they are taught, in order to solve new problems. For example, in the balance-scale problems, it was indicated that even children that were expected to be able to solve such problems, having been taught them in a classroom environment, were unable to make the jump from the type of balance they had learned the problem on to the one used in the experiment. Therein lies a problem, in my opinion. It seems that if the educational system currently in use was actually beneficial to students, they would be able to generalize information that they have learned in classes like physics to real world situations, where the balance problem might not even be a balance, but could be a car teetering on the edge of a cliff. It seems like it would be important to be able to figure out a problem like this in a hurry.

As for mental models, I find it interesting that children have so many different mental models of the earth. In my opinion, this is reassuring, because it shows that children are capable of thinking for themselves. This is useful in many cases, as some teachers start with incorrect information (as before they knew what shape the earth really was) that may have to be corrected at some point in a child’s life. If a child were just blindly taking in information, they would not be able to go back and change old misinformation, and would potentially walk around confused about which information was correct. Sometimes, reading about this stuff makes me wonder what I did when I was the age of the children mentioned in these studies. Did I believe that the earth was round? Although it wasn’t mentioned in this book, I want to point out that there are still people that believe that the earth is flat, and that the photos that we have seen of Earth are not actually real. It seems like that would be difficult information to hold onto so tightly that you can form a cult around it.

However, my main point about education being important was seen in the use of analogous thinking. I found it surprising that even though children of a certain age can be shown how one person solved a problem, they have difficulty using that information to solve a very similar problem, until they are asked to repeat what happened in the previous example. This seems to be some indication that without educational experiences, children could not make certain leaps in their thinking. Of course, over time, children gain general experience with the world that they can use to solve certain types of problems, but if they don’t go out and handle objects and work with gravity and trajectories and those sorts of things, they will never have an ability to solve some of the problems that come up in the daily life of an adult.

Sign Language in Infants

So although I agree that infants who learn to use sign language in infancy learn it more quickly when taught very early, I have a few problems with the overall idea of learning sign language as a better way to communicate with young babies.
First of all, there is significant research to suggest that there is a critical period for language learning in which children's brain's seem to grasp the concepts of language more quickly than during any other period in their lives. If this is the case, how is it that children find it easier to communicate through sign language than speaking language if they supposedly occur at the same time in both hearing and non-hearing infants? So, let's say, the problem for children in speaking to their parents is that their vocal chords aren't fully developed to the point of speaking clearly, why is it then that non-hearing children also have babbling tendencies through signing? It seems that if in fact it was a lack of vocal chord development wouldn't this babbling phenomenon occur just in hearing children?
Another problem I have with this theory of early understanding through sign language is the notion that children can understand signs earlier than they can understand speech, how is this possible? It's not that I don't think that infants can understand signs, I've seen it and know that this is something these infants can in fact do, but why is it that we believe that infants can more easily understand a gesture made in their direction than a word spoken to them. Because "motherese" has been proven to be infants preferred way to be spoken to, how does this translate to sign language? There is no way to soften signs or make them more preferable to infants ears so I find it very difficult to believe that infants would prefer signs to speech.
Because I have seen children utilize sign language to achieve their desires I do not doubt that it is possible for infants to learn this type of communication, I just have a hard time believing that the preference and skill required is as black and white as some parents would like to believe.