Developmental Psychology

4.7 Sensory Coordination When we are smelling something, we are usually seeing what we are smelling. The senses are not used one at a time. They are used together so that there is a better understanding to the environment one is in. An infant’s ability to understand the environment around them is called intermodal perception . Some infants have the ability to exhibit intermodal perception to some degree. Some infants may hear a sound and will look in the opposite direction or somewhere not even in the same direction when they are looking for the sound and where it came one. The cross-modal perception is known as the ability to be able to imagine a single sense while using another sense. The cross- modal perception begins and continues to develop as a child matures and physically grows. Some believe that babies who are less than 6 months of age have the ability to categorize items that are based on different characteristics. Characteristics they organize them by is size, color, the shape, howmany of the item there is, etc. Around 12 months of age or 1 year old, some children can actually tell the difference between animals within a particular species. 4.8 Language Development When babies are born, they have the ability to learn any language. By the time a child turns approximately 4 or 5 years old, they have mastered the multiple levels of a spoken language. This is regardless of what language the child learns to speak or what culture they come from. They all appear to have the ability to transition through the same language learning stages. When being able to learn a language, children will first start babbling. These are usually non- recognizable syllables. A phoneme is known as the unit of sound that occurs at the beginning stage of language development. The phoneme’s will usually mold within a child as they are exposed to different languages. Prominent language psychologist, Noam Chomsky saw evidence that all babies, no matter their culture, have the mechanics to learn languages. Chomsky also believed that children who are subjected to sign language will learn to hand babble prior to learning verbal babbling. Children who are exposed to sign language also will eventually learn to sign. Neural pathways of kinesthetic language will develop prior to the pathways of verbal language. Usually, during the first year of a child’s life, they will start to narrow down phonemes to the specific language that they are exposed to, which includes sign language. By the 20 th month of development, children will keep adding more words to their vocabulary. At this age, children will have a developed vocabulary of at least 20 words. Further down development, hundreds and thousands of words are added to a child’s vocabulary. The use of words and signs will vary when children are either overextending or underextending. When a child overextends a word, this mean that when they use a certain word such as dog, they are referring to all four-legged animals. When a child underextends a word, they may refer to a dog in their family, but won’t refer to another family’s animal as a dog. The extent a child learns a language is depending on how much verbal interaction the child is projected to. For example, a child whose parents or family do not communicate with the child much, may not develop communication skills as much as a child would whose parents talk with their child and stimulate hem. Complex communication may be when a child creates high pitched sounds and the sounds that a mother produces as well as the phonemes create the complex communications.

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