Chapter 4

Question 1

When does brain development begin in utero?

Answer 1

Brain development begins within 18 days of conception

Question 2

Neurological Development: Neuron Growth

Answer 2

• All neurons were developed by 2nd trimester of pregnancy
• Beginning at 4 months, neurons start organizing
• Initially they are overproduced and then half or more are pruned back when they aren’t organized into networks
• Myelinization begins after birth
• Cells begin communicating after birth
• Physical brain organization is under genetic control, but development can be environmental

Question 3

Habituation: definition

Answer 3

• Becoming used to a stimulus

- After habituation, the stimulus does not elicit a significant response, so the infant can attend to new stimuli

Question 4

Early Cognitive Development: Sensation definition

Answer 4

• The ability to register sensory information
• There’s competition from older, less novel stimuli
• Quantity and quality of sensation changes with birth

Question 5

Which sensation is the first to develop in utero?

Answer 5

Touch is the first sense to develop in utero followed by sound and smell

Question 6

Early Cognitive Development: Perception

Definition

Answer 6

-Using sensory information and previous knowledge to make sense of incoming stimuli

Question 7

Early Cognitive Development: Motor Control definition

Answer 7

• Muscle movement and the sensory feedback informing the brain of the extent of that movement
• Begins at 7 weeks postconception

Question 8

Reflexes: definition

Answer 8

Automatic, involuntary motor patterns (twitches, jerks, random movements)

Question 9

Early Cognitive Development: Cognition definition

Answer 9

Mental activities involved in comprehension of information including:

• Acquisition
• Organization and storage
• Memory
• Use of knowledge

Question 10

Brain Structure: Neuroplasticity

Answer 10

• Children can sustain brain damage, but recover
• Damaged abilities are assumed by other portions of the cortex
• Children with early brain lesions use a variety of alternative developmental pathways to preserve language functioning

Question 11

How Experience Matters

Answer 11

• Synapse growth is highly dependent on experience
• Development is reliant on genetic and environmental effects
• The quality of experience in early development is critical
• Early learning lays a foundation for later learning – early intervention can significantly improve cognitive, linguistic, and emotional abilities
• See: critical period

Question 12

How does institutionalization affect IQ in children under 2?

Answer 12

• Typically developing children institutionalized at birth have low IQ in comparison to typically developing children in high-quality foster care before age 2 (results in dramatic increase in IQ)
• Similar trend in language
• Critical period ~ 16-18 months of age

Question 13

Prosody: definition and how infants use it

Answer 13

• The flow of language
• Infants use stress and rising and falling intonational patterns to discriminated word boundaries
• Soon after birth infants prefer their native language to other languages as they increasingly detect language specific prosodic (rhythm) patterns
• by 5 months, most infants respond to their own name
• by 6 months, they respond to “mommy” and “daddy”

Question 14

In English, what percent of words in conversation have stress on the FIRST syllable?

Answer 14

80% of words in conversation have stress on the initial syllable

Question 15

Sounds To Words: What is vocabulary size related to?

Answer 15

-Vocabulary size seems to be related to young children’s (26-32 months) ability to repeat phoneme combinations, especially in the initial position

Question 16

What are infants phonologically capable of at birth?

Answer 16

At birth, infants are capable of detecting every phoneme contrast used in human languages.

Question 17

What can infants discriminate at 5 months?

Answer 17

By 5 months, infants discriminate their own language from other languages with the same prosodic patterns.

Question 18

What can infants discern at 9 months?

Answer 18

By 9 months, children are using prosodic and phonotactic clues to discern individual speech sounds in connected speech.

Question 19

Reflexive crying and vegetative sounds: when do they develop and what are they?

Answer 19

• Develop around 0-2 months
• Reflexive vocalizations: cries, coughs, burps
• Vegetative sounds: grunts, sighs, clicks, and similar noises associated with activities such as feeding

Question 20

Cooing and laughter: when do they develop and what are they?

Answer 20

• Develop around 2-4 months
• Cooing is considered a Quasi-resonant nuclei (QRN)
• Mostly nasalized vowels and nasal consonants
• Sustained laughter specifically develops around 16 weeks

Question 21

Babbling and Vocal Play: when does it develop and what is it?

Answer 21

• Develops around 4-6 months

- Strings of sound segments, prolonged vowel- and consonant-like productions with variations in loudness and pitch

Question 22

Reduplicated and variegated babbling: when do they develop and what are they?

Answer 22

• Develop around 9 months
• Reduplicated: similar strings of consonant-vowel pairs, especially the consonants (bababababa)
• Variegated: no repetition, variation of vowel-like and consonant-like babbles

Question 23

Jargon: when does it develop and what is it?

Answer 23

• Develops up to 12 months
• Characterized by strings of babbled utterances modulated by intonation, rhythm, and pausing: sounds like a sentence, but it’s nonsense

Question 24

Joint Attention: definition and importance

Answer 24

• Joint attention: the ability of two or more individuals to attend to the same thing at the same time
• Joint attention is important for learning and may be a precursor of focusing on a topic together in conversation
• There is a correlation between cognitive development and development of joint attention

Question 25

How does attention affect language acquisition?

Answer 25

Infants with better attention are likely to acquire language more quickly due to better abilities to: - Follow the gaze of others - Engage in joint (shared) attention - Track referents (subjects) of others’ speech

Question 26

Importance of Memory

Answer 26

- Memory is vital for acquiring all forms of knowledge, including language - Better memory = Better language - As memory becomes less context bound (without the stimulus), a child can experiment and use objects and symbols in new ways - With increased memory, a child can understand and produce more than one symbol at a time

Question 27

How do recognition memory and recall relate to language skills?

Answer 27

Recognition memory and recall at 12 months predicts language skills at 36 months

Question 28

Neurological Development: Anatomical Specialization in your Cortex (when structures grow + develop in the brain)

Answer 28

- Brain cell differentiation began at 16th week of gestation - In utero, growth occurs rapidly in brainstem and primary motor + sensory areas - After birth there is rapid growth in the cerebellum and cerebral hemispheres, esp visual receptor areas - Then the auditory receptors - Left temporal lobe is large in fetal brain, continues to grow after birth and myelinizes later - We don't know when lateralization occurs

Question 29

Neurological Development: Turning on and Getting Organized | How the Brain Activates

Answer 29

- at birth, brain is a jumble of neurons - cells wait to establish purpose through activation - activation means cells communicating, aka synaptogenesis - when synaptogenesis occurs is super important - genes are concerned w/ where functions are, experience takes care of the fine details

Question 30

Neurological Development: Turning on and getting Organized | When different parts of the brain activate

Answer 30

- 2 months of age: the motor cortex more active (intentional movements develop) - 3 months of age: visual cortex (focus), then limbic system (emotion and memory), then the cerebral cortex (higher thinking) - second half of first year: frontal cortex and hippocampus (remembering stimuli, word association)

Question 31

Information Processing: its role in learning

Answer 31

- 4 steps in info processing: attention, discrimination, organization, memory - the first step in long-term learning is organization, and it's important - kids are continually taking in info, so organizing is important to being able to retain information and recall it later efficiently - info placed in long-term storage and maintained by rehearsal, which is repetition - integrative rehearsal is a special kind of rehearsal specific to transfer into long-term memory wherein new info is integrated into the structure of already-stored memory

Question 32

Perception of Phonemes in Newborns and Infants: | How do newborns and infants perceive phonemes?

Answer 32

- Newborns are capable of discriminating different pitches and frequencies, especially in the human speech range - Newborns respond to the human voice more than to environmental sounds - Infants initially discriminate between all phonemes in human languages before becoming limited to only the sounds in their language

Question 33

Perception of Phonemes in Newborns and Infants: | Timeline of phoneme perception

Answer 33

- Newborns perceive and discriminate all phonemes - Between 6-12 months infants show a preference for vowel sounds in their native language - By 8-10 months, infants’ perceptual abilities are restricted to their native language’s speech sounds