ENG511 Final Term Highlighted Notes

Lesson-23 · COGNITIVE PROCESSES · Topic-133: Cognitive Processes

We saw that parents provide a structured environment for children who are acquiring language. Although some of these speech adaptations facilitate development, they are not sufficient to explain language acquisition. To benefit from these language lessons, children must have certain cognitive prerequisites. These include procedures for registering, storing, and analyzing linguistic information. A simple analogy may be helpful here. Suppose you are taking a course in philosophy. The instructor is well prepared, lectures well, and is available when students have problems. Although all of these characteristics are beneficial, they do not guarantee the desired learning outcome. A course in philosophy typically requires students to think abstractly and write analytical essays. Students who lack these skills may have considerable difficulty even if the course material is presented in an organized fashion. The same is true for the child learning language. A structured environment is helpful only if the child has the ability to take advantage of the structure that is provided.

Topic-134: Operating Principles

One of the most productive approaches to the question has been Slobin’s work on operating principles. We may think of operating principles as children’s preferred ways of taking in (or operating on) information. These principles have proven useful in explaining certain patterns in early child grammar. For instance, children in virtually all languages use fixed word order to create meanings, even though some languages have much freer word order than others.

One problem with the notion of operating principles is that it is open to the charge of circularity. The evidence for operating principles is found in children’s language patterns, and then the principles are assumed to account for the patterns. Independent evidence of these operating principles would be helpful. It might be possible to see evidence of these principles in cognitive domains other than language, but, as written, they tend to be fairly specific to language. Slobin is noncommittal on the question of whether these processes are specific to language (modular) or whether they can be understood in terms of general cognitive processes. We turn now to cognitive processes that are more clearly independent of language.

Topic-135: Sensorimotor Schemata

Another way of characterizing the child’s cognitive system comes from the work of Piaget who expresses the belief that children undergo several qualitative shifts in their thinking throughout development. Piaget refers to the first 2 years as the sensorimotor period of development because the schemata the child uses to organize experience are directly related to taking in sensory information and acting on it. Sensorimotor schemata include banging, sucking, and throwing. The major development that culminates near the end of the sensorimotor period is the acquisition of object permanence, the notion that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be perceived. Once object permanence is acquired, the child is no longer at the mercy of immediate stimuli but can respond on the basis of stimuli no longer present. We would certainly anticipate that developments of this magnitude would be related to the child’s language development. More specifically, we can make two predictions about child language. One is that the very young infant, who has not yet acquired object permanence, should use words that refer to concrete objects in the immediate environment, especially those that the child easily manipulates. This appears to be the case because early child language consists of a large number of ‘‘here and now’’ words.

Topic-136: Whole Object Bias and Taxonomic Bias

Clearly adults present children with a simplified and orderly pattern of data that would seem to facilitate vocabulary development. The question to be pursued here is not whether such adaptations are necessary for normal language acquisition but whether they are sufficient. As children are exposed to adult words for objects, many referents are possible for these words. It seems unlikely that children explore every possible meaning of a given word, given what we have learned about the speed of lexical acquisition. Adult naming practices help the child, but some theorists believe that the child must have certain expectations about word learning to benefit maximally from these lessons. The notion of a cognitive constraint is that children are constrained to consider only some of these possibilities or at least to give priority to them over others. A subsequent study presented children with novel labels for objects for which they already had labels, such as claw for hammer. In this instance, the children interpreted the novel term as applying to only one part of the object.

Research on cognitive prerequisites for language development has proceeded on the assumption that certain cognitive processes must be in place for the child to benefit from structured language lessons. We have considered two types of cognitive processes that may assist or guide language development. Operating principles are preferred ways of taking in linguistic information. Sensorimotor schemata are ways of organizing the world that emerge in the first two years of life. The general prediction that the cognitive position makes is that children with a given cognitive prerequisite should acquire corresponding aspects of language more rapidly than those without the prerequisite. Studies of sensorimotor schemata, however, suggest that cognitive processes do not emerge prior to language but rather simultaneously with language. In addition, we have discussed the role of cognitive constraints in children’s vocabulary acquisition. Considerable evidence suggests that constraints guide children’s acquisition of lexical items. There is continued debate regarding the best way to characterize these constraints. Finally, we saw that in certain individuals there are dissociations between language and cognition: relatively strong cognitive skills with weak linguistic skills or relatively strong linguistic skills with weak cognitive skills. These observations suggest that cognitive development, although it is generally associated with language development, may not be either necessary or sufficient for it.

When children encounter a new label, they prefer to attach the label to the entire object rather than to part of the object. To return to the earlier example, when someone points to an object and says dog, the child assumes that the word is a label for the entire object rather than the dog’s tail.

Whole object bias in developmental psychology: For example, if a child is shown and given the label "truck", the child will assume truck refers to the whole object instead of the tires, doors, colors or other parts. If a researcher points to an object while simultaneously saying a new name, children will assume that the new label refers to the whole object. Ellen Markman pioneered work in this field. Her studies suggest that even in cases where color or dynamic activities are made salient to children, they will still interpret the new word as a label for whole objects. Furthermore, infants hold a primitive theory of the physical world that is guided by three constraints on the behavior of physical bodies: objects must move as wholes, objects move independently of each other, and objects move on connected paths. It is suggested that these three constraints help guide children’s interpretations of scenes, and, in turn, explain how the whole object bias reflects the nonlinguistic status of objects.

In addition, children seem to use a taxonomic bias: they will assume that the object label is a taxonomic category rather than a name for an individual dog. For example, they will assume that dog is a label for a group of animals, not just Fido. Ordinarily, children focus on thematic relations between objects when categorizing. If given milk, a spoon, or a car, children will group each item with a cow, soup, or a stop sign, respectively. However, when children hear a new label they shift their attention to taxonomic relationships, even though they consider thematic relations to be a good way of organizing the objects themselves. Instead of cow being linked to milk, it would be linked to pig or horse. The new word is assumed to refer to other objects within the same taxonomic category. Ellen Markman’s early work showed this constraint at work. When twoand three-year-olds were presented with two basic-level objects, two different kinds of dogs, and a third thematically related object, dog food, they showed a tendency to select a dog and dog food; however, if one of the dogs was labeled with an unfamiliar word, the children were more likely to select the two dogs.

Topic-137: Mutual Exclusivity Bias

It refers to the fact that a child who knows the name of a particular object will then generally reject applying a second name to that object. Several experimental studies by Markman and Wachtel have supported the notion that children use mutual exclusivity in acquiring new words. In one, 3-year-old children were presented with pairs of objects. One member of each pair was an object for which the child already had a label (such as a banana, toy cow, or spoon), and the other was an object for which the child did not have a label (such as a lemon wedge press or a pair of tongs). The children were then asked by a puppet to show me the x (x was a nonsense syllable). The children were much more likely to select the novel object. A subsequent study presented children with novel labels for objects for which they already had labels, such as claw for hammer. In this instance, the children interpreted the novel term as applying to only one part of the object.

Topic-138: Impairments of Language and Cognition

Our knowledge of the relationships between language and cognition has also been advanced by studies of children and adolescents with cognitive or linguistic impairments. The notion that a close relationship exists between language and cognition has generally been supported by studies of individuals with Down syndrome (reviewed by Rosenberg, 1982; but see Rondal, 1993). These individuals tend to have language delays that are proportionate to the severity of their cognitive disability. However, in certain individuals, there can be significant discrepancies between the level of cognitive functioning and the level of linguistic functioning.