Development

Big questions about development

1. Do we start as moral or immoral?
2. Whats the relation between child and adult? How are they related in terms of continuity?
3. How much knowledge are we born with?
   1. There are two group of thoughts around this:
      1. Empiricism: They believe that we are born empty and we learn along the way
      2. Nativism: We are born with existing structure in brain
      3. Constructivism: It is a hybrid of above two

Jean Piaget is known as the father of developmental psychology. His research field was genetic epistemelogy. He gave the theory of cognitive development.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development

Children’s are active thinkers and they constantly try to have a more advanced understanding of the world. This understanding is known as schemas.

Schemas: These are the framework to form an understanding. There are two ways of achieving this:

1. Assimilation: Absorb knowledge
2. Accomodation: Make space for new knowledge in already existing knowledge database.

Piaget proposed that children have a totally different view of the world. The development occurs as a series of stages differing in how the world looks.

Piaget’s developmental stage theory

1. Sensorimotor

• This is the first stage of a child’s life and it happens from 0-2 years of age.
• The child have full sensory access but cant perceive it.
• He/She can see see and manipulate things without reasoning, just like a driverless car. One major thing which is absent here is the concept of object permanence.
• At all other stages, if an object is removed from our sight, we know that it still exists. But this is not the case with a child. They think that object is gone.
• Thats the reason why children from the age of 0-2 get so surprised on seeing peek-a-boo.

2. Preoperational

• This stage exists from age 2 to 7.
• Here the child have symbolic thoughts and they have some sort of perception of their thoughts.
• Even now they cant have higher order thoughts, maybe thats why they remain happy.
• During this phase the child is ego centric, means they cant understand that a different person can have a different view then theirs.
• They also lack the concept of conservation, means size matters more to them then numbers. If you give two glasses of milk with equal volume one larger in size and one smaller, they would say that smaller one has less milk.

3. Concrete operational

• This stage exists from age 7 to 12.
• Here the child have more logical thoughts, they become less ego centric.
• Although they are still not capable to reason abstractly or hypothetically. Ask someone from this age group about the meaning of true happiness?

4. Formal operational

• This is the final stage and then the child becomes an adult. Child develops the power of abstract and scientific reasoning here.

Limitations of Piaget’s theory

1. He never provided a theory how the children go from one stage to other.
2. His methods are not very efficient. He generally interviewed them and we cant take their answers to be 100% accurate.
3. He may be factually wrong. Some of the research show that even babies are quite smart then we think of.

How do we study babies?

There are several ways in which researchers study babies.

1. The first way is using machines and scans. We scan the brain of the baby while he/she is performing some activity. We then try to deduce the logic from the brain mapping available with us.
2. Babies are born with innate talent of sucking. We can devise an experiment to judge what baby likes or dislikes by their speed, etc while sucking.
3. Babies are also born with the talent of looking at more intersting thing. We can use this to design experiment to understand what a baby mind knows.
4. There was an interesting experiment to see if babies are born with morality. It was found that around 70% of babies chose good over bad when given a choice, which might suggest that babies do have morality inbuilt.

5. In another experiment, babies were tested whether they have the elementary sense of numbers, it was found that babies do have some sense of numbers inbuilt in them.

Children dont have the sense that different people can have different thoughts. They dont develop that understanding till the age of 4-4.5 years. There is another experiment conducted on children known as Sally and Anne experiment.

Language

Language is action. Langauge is a tool which differentiate humans to other animals.

Charles Darwin: Men have the instictive tendency to speak, no other animal have this capacity.

• Every human society have language
• Creolisation: involves people who are in slave trade. Even if people are from different society, they develop a pidgin language (common communication system)
• Language is used to convey creativity
• There are around 10^130 grammatical correct sentences. It might happen that if you use a sentecne, nobody has ever said it ever before.

Characterisation of language

1. Phonology

There are around 44 different sounds in english language, although there are only 26 letters. To learn a new language we need to understand the phonies of the language. It is quite astonishing that a listener’s mind is able to tell where a word in a sentence ends. Our mind automatically do it for us. Our brain is wired so to segment the words of the speech hence extracting a meaning out of it. If we hear any new language, our brain can even process where a word ends.

2. Morphology

This deals with words. The smallest meaningful unit of language is known as morpheme like -ing, come,-ed, etc. An average english speaker knows about 80000 morphemes.

3. Syntax

rules of language,

Language acquisition

Noam Chomsky says that development of language should not be seen as development of language but growth. Some researchers believe that the language is important for abstract thoughts, which seems to be not true based on some recent experiments. The language acquition happens in babies in following steps:

1. Born-4 months
   1. Babies start to understand the melody of language.
   2. They become sensitive to phonemes. It is found that babies are sensitive to phonemes of many languages.
2. 4-7 months
   1. Babies starts to babble. By birth deaf babbles with the help of the movement of their hands.
3. 7-12 month
   1. Babies speak their first words.
   2. At this stage they also become sensitive to words. They start responding to them.
4. 12-18 months
   1. Babies can produce sentences upto 2 words.
   2. They start learning morphemes like is,a,the,etc.

It is seen that young age is best for learning new language. Even if an adult person spends considerable amount of time learning a second language, he/she might not be able to get fluent.