Partido College

College of Education

Goa, Camarines Sur

METHODS
S/Y 2015 2016

Date of Report: January 13, 2016

ROSIE V. VALENCIA
Reporter
DR. RONALD ENCISO
Professor

MODULE 13: Cognitive Development of Infants and Toddlers

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and
the greatness which does not bow before children
Sensorimotor stage
An analysis of the 6 substages of the sensorimotor stage of Piagets cognitive
development shows that the development begins from reflexive behaviors to more refined
and more coordinated activities.
Cognitive development of infants evolves in orientation from becoming focused on
themselves to becoming object or word oriented from one that is action based to one that
is mentally based from one that does not involve much coordination of schemes to one
involving intentionality.
Piagets substages are termed circular because the adaptive behavior to the world
involves repeated actions. Circular reactions serves as the building blocks for
intelligence.
Primary circular reactions are oriented toward the infants own body, whereas secondary
circular reactions are aimed toward the environment including others.
Secondary circular reactions are repetitive actions that involve recreating events which 410 month oldbabies observe outside of their own bodies such as making their mobile crib
shake by kicking their legs.
Tertiary circular reactions seen from approximately 10-18 months is when a baby does
things over and over again.
From dropping the spoon many times in many different ways the baby discovers a pattern
object fall down---not up.
Acquiring the sense of object permanence is one of the infants most important
accomplishments according to Piagets. Object permanence is the understanding that the
objects continue to exist even when the objects are not immediately perceptible through
the senses.
Learning and Remembering
Do infants learn and remember?
Yes! Pavlovs classical conditioning and Skinners operant conditioning have been proven to
apply to infants.
All of us experience infantile amnesia the inability to recall events that happened when we
were very young (Spear 1979). Generally we can remember little or nothing that has happened to
us before the age of about 5 years and it is extremely rare for someone to recall many memories
before age 3 years. Reports of childhood memories usually involve memories of significant
events (e.g birth of a sibling or the death of a parent;Fivush and Hammond 1991)

Language Development
From day one infants appear to be programmed to tune in to their linguistic environment
with the specific goal of acquiring language.
Within the first years of life we humans seem to progress through the following stages in
producing language (Sternberg 2003)
1. Cooing, which comprises consonant largely vowel sounds
2. Babbling, which comprises consonant as well as vowel sounds to most peoples
ears the babbling of infants growing up among speakers from different language
groups sounds very similar.
3. One-word utterances; these utterances are limited in both vowels and the
consonants they utilize (Ingram 1999 cited by Sternberg 2003)
4. Two word-utterances and telegraphic speech.
5. Basic adult sentence structure (present by about age 4 years with continuing
vocabulary acquisition.
The infants utters his/her first word followed by one or two more and soon after yet a few more.
The infants uses these one-word utterances termed holophrasesto convey intentions desires and
demands. Usually the words are nouns describing familiar objects that the child observes (e.g.
book, ball, baby ) or wants (e.g. Mama, dada).
By 18 months of age children typically have vocabularies of 3 to 100 words ( Seigler
1986). Because the young childs vocabulary is very limited at this point in the development
process, the child overextend the meaning of words in his/her existing lexicon to cover things
and ideas for which a new word is lacking. For example the general term for any kind of four
legged animal may be doggie. In linguistic is called overextension error.
Language Acquisition Device
Noam Chomsky (1965, 1972), noted linguist claims that humans have an innate
language acquisition device (LAD). This LAD is a metaphorical organ that is responsible for
language learning. Just as a heart is designed to pump blood this language acquisition device is
preprogrammed to learn language whatever the language community children find themselves
in.
This means that we humans seem to be biologically preconfigured to be ready to
acquire language.