Developmental Psychology

Achieve Test Prep: Developmental Psychology

demonstrate this ability to some extent. An infant may hear a sound and look in the wrong direction when attempting to find the source of the sound. Between three and six months of age, infants begin to correctly match sounds to their sources. Cross-modal perception is the ability to imagine one sense when using another. For example, passing a favorite restaurant one can imagine a favorite dish and how it tastes, thus integrating sight and taste or smell and taste. Infants are able to do this, to an extent. The skill develops as the child grows and matures. It is believed that infants less than six months old can categorize objects based on different characteristics, such as shape, size, color, number, density, etc. In conjunction, it is theorized that 12- month-old children can distinguish between types of animals of the same species. For example, a child who grows up with two dogs knows the difference between the dogs. children master most levels of spoken language by the age of four or five. Regardless of language or culture, all children appear to transition through the same learning-language stages. One of the first stages of language development is crying. As language capabilities develop, children begin to babble nonsense syllables and phonemes. A phoneme is a unit of sound at the beginning stages of language all children babble similar phonemes. Phonemes are shaped and molded as children are exposed to different languages. Noam Chomsky was a prominent language psychologist who was the first to see evidence that all babies are born with mechanics for language learning. Children who are exposed to sign language begin to use hand babbling long before using verbal babbling and eventually learns to sign. The neural pathways for kinesthetic language develop before the neural pathways for verbal language. During the first year of life, children start to narrow phonemes to those of the languages they are exposed to the most, including manual (signed) languages. Words and signs are added rapidly to the point that, by approximately 20 months of age, children have vocabulary of about 20 words. In the subsequent years, a child’s vocabulary expands to thousands of words and hundreds of signs. The skill of usage of these words and signs varies with children overextending or underextending. If a child underextends a word, they may use the word to refer to a family dog and no other dog. On the other hand, if a child overextends a word, they may use the word ‘dog’ to refer to all four-legged animals. How fast and how well a child learns language is affected by the communication between those who around the child the most. The high-pitched and simplified Language Development: Children are born with the innate mechanics to learn any language. Generally speaking,

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