Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CHARACTERISTICS
Early Childhood: Physical and
Cognitive Development
Growth Patterns
Growth Patterns
• Growth rate
-Slows during preschool years
-Girls and boys gain 2 to 3 inches in height per year
-Weight gains remain fairly even at about 4 to 6 pounds per year
-Children become “slender” as height increases
-Boys become slightly taller and heavier than girls
• Brain
-Brain develops more quickly than any other organ during childhood
-At 2 years, brain is 75% of adult weight
-At 5 years, brain is 90% of adult weight
• Plasticity
-Brain’s ability to compensate for injuries to particular
parts of the brain
-Greatest at 1 to 2 years of age
• Diarrhea
-kills nearly 2 million children under the age of 5 each year
-is due to unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation/hygiene
• Lead exposure
-Consuming lead
-Breathing in dust from paint with lead in it
-Drinking tap water with lead in it
• Boys
-More likely than girls to incur accidental injuries at all ages
and in all socioeconomic groups
• Poor children
-Five times as likely to die from fires
-More than twice as likely to die in motor vehicle accidents
• Egocentrism
-One-dimensional thinking
-Think parents are aware of everything that is happening to
them
-Piaget used “three-mountains” test to measure it
Fig. 7-4, p. 144
Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage (cont’d)
• Precausal
-Unless preoperational children know the natural causes of an
event, their reasons are likely to be based egocentrically and
not based on science.
• Transductive reasoning
-Children reason by going from one specific isolated event to
another.
• Animism
-Attribution of life and intentions to inanimate objects
• Artificialism
-Assumes environmental factors such as rain and thunder have
been designed and made by people
Jean Piaget’s Preoperational Stage (cont’d)
• Scaffolding
-Temporary support provided by a parent or teacher to
learning children
-Guidance by adult decreases as child is capable of carrying
out task on their own
• Children’s programming
– Shows mild to moderate effects on preschoolers’ cognitive
development
• Sesame Street
– Regular viewing increases children’s learning of numbers,
letters, and cognitive skills
Theory of Mind
Theory of Mind
• Preschoolers can accurately predict and explain human
action and emotion in terms of mental states.
• Appearance-reality distinction
-Understanding the difference between real events and mental
events
Development of Memory
Development of Memory
• By age 4, children can remember events from 1 1/2
years earlier.
• Scripts
-Young children form scripts when describing what happens
during a particular event.
-Script becomes more elaborate as it is told
• Autobiographical memory (episodic memory)
-Memory or specific events is facilitated by children talking
about them with others
• Parental interest and questioning increases
preschooler’s memory.
Development of Memory (cont’d)
• When preschoolers are younger, they remember more
than they reported.
• Rehearsal
-Memory strategy using repetition; engaged in around 5 years
• Fast-mapping
-Process where child quickly attaches a new word to its
appropriate concept
• Whole-object assumption
-Assume that words refer to whole objects and not to their
component parts or characteristics
• Contrast assumption
-The assumption that objects have only one label
Development of Grammar
• Children’s sentence structure increases during 3rd year
of life
• Overregularization
-Children acquire grammatical rules as they learn language;
young ages apply rules rigidly
-Reflects accurate knowledge of grammar