PS220 Unit 7 Early Childhood Cognition Paper Example

The Crayon Box Full of Candles: A PS220 Unit 7 Early Childhood Cognition and Language Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS220: Child and Adolescent Psychology

Unit 7 Early Childhood Cognition and Language Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Maya and the task observations are composite; the research cited is real.

Conservation: Taller Means More

When Maya was four, her mother filled a pair of matching short glasses to the same line and Maya agreed they were the same. Then her mother poured one into a tall, thin glass while she watched. Asked which had more, Maya pointed to the tall glass. Asked why, she said, "It's higher." Piaget would say she had not yet grasped conservation, that an amount survives a change of container (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Preoperational children center on one striking feature, here height, and do not yet coordinate it with width or mentally reverse the pouring. Children typically master liquid conservation in middle childhood.

False Belief: Knowing What Others Think

Her preschool teacher, who was taking a child development class, tried another task. She showed Maya a crayon box and asked what was inside; Maya said crayons. The teacher opened it to reveal birthday candles, closed it and asked what her friend Diego, who had not seen inside, would think was in the box. Maya said, "Crayons, but it's really candles." She then correctly said that before she looked, she had thought it held crayons too.

This is a version of the false-belief tasks developed to test theory of mind, the understanding that others have beliefs that may differ from reality. Wimmer and Perner (1983) found that most three-year-olds in their story-based task predicted that a character would act on what the child knew rather than on the character's mistaken belief, while most children by five or six answered correctly. Maya's answer shows she understood that Diego's belief would come from what he had seen.

Maya could not yet see that the juice stayed the same, but she could see that Diego would think the box held crayons.

Language in Two Languages

At four, Maya's English and Spanish had both grown. Counted separately, she knew fewer English words than her monolingual cousin. Counted together, her vocabulary was comparable, which matches research on bilingual toddlers showing that vocabulary in each language reflects the share of input in that language while total vocabulary is similar to monolinguals' (Hoff et al., 2012). Her code switching, using a Spanish word inside an English sentence, followed patterns rather than random mixing, typically filling a gap with the word she knew best.

Some research suggests bilingual experience may support aspects of executive function, such as switching attention, though findings have been mixed and debated (Bialystok, 2011). For Maya's family, the more practical finding is that bilingualism did not slow her overall language growth.

What the Tasks Show Together

Maya at four reasoned well about other people's minds but not yet about quantities that change shape. Her language was growing in two systems shaped by the people who spoke to her. Early childhood development is not one ladder but several, climbed at different paces.

References

Bialystok, E. (2011). Reshaping the mind: The benefits of bilingualism. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(4), 229-235. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025406

Hoff, E., Core, C., Place, S., Rumiche, R., Señor, M., & Parra, M. (2012). Dual language exposure and early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 39(1), 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000910000759

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The psychology of the child. Basic Books.

Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103-128. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(83)90004-5