Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Learning Objectives

After completing Chapter 11, students should be able to:

1. Explain how infants reveal that they are actively exploring the world and remembering what they see.
2. Discuss evidence concerning the development of object permanence.
3. Describe Piaget's four stages of cognitive development, including the role of assimilation, accommodation, and operations, and summarize three major areas of disagreement concerning Piaget's theory.
4. Explain both Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective and the information-processing perspective on cognitive development, comparing and contrasting them with Piaget's perspective.
5. Explain the evidence that suggests that an understanding that people can hold false beliefs usually does not develop prior to age 4.
6. Describe what the research on people with autism suggests about how the understanding of objects differs from the understanding of minds.
7. Discuss the ways in which all human languages are similar.
8. Describe the course of language development, including research on infant phoneme perception and how children begin to link words to appropriate referents.
9. Explain the significance of overextensions and underextensions in the learning of word meaning, and describe evidence that young children do not simply mimic phrases they hear.
10. Explain Chomsky's theory of an inborn grammar-learning mechanism, noting several types of studies that support his theory, and describe evidence for the critical-period hypothesis.
11. Describe how the way in which adults speak to children is consistent with the social-learning theory of language development.
12. Summarize attempts to teach apes language, and compare the language-learning achievements of apes and children.