From Neurons to Neighborhoods The Science of Early Childhood Development (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 125-163
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From page 125... ...
Academic skills at school entry can, in turn, be traced to capabilities seen during the preschool years and the experiences in and out of the home that foster their development. Children's cognitive skills before they enter kindergarten show strong associations with achievement in elementary and high school (Hess and Hahn, 1974; Stevenson and Newman, 1986)
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From page 126... ...
The transition from a newborn who can barely keep his eyes focused on a book to a preschooler who laughs and cries when his parent reads or tells a story, moves his fingers along a page and pretends to read, and, in some cases, can read himself is equally impressive. Almost all children learn to talk without explicit instruction, suggesting that language acquisition is a relatively resilient process, although they do not all learn to talk well, suggesting that language acquisition includes some more fragile elements.
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From page 127... ...
Unlike many areas of developmental research, language acquisition studies have been conducted across the globe, although typically the studies focus on a small number of children in each culture (see Slobin, 1985~. Language Learning is a Resilient Process Language learning turns out to be remarkably similar across cultures.
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From page 128... ...
For example, in some cultures, children are commonly spoken to directly as participants in conversation; in other cultures, children primarily overhear talk that is directed toward others. Despite large differences of this sort, children proceed quite uniformly with the task of language learning (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984~.
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From page 129... ...
, once placed in supportive families, children develop language even with the added challenge, in most of the cases that have been studied, of learning a new language. Thus, language learning is apparently a very robust process.
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From page 130... ...
It is important to point out, however, that deaf children who cannot learn spoken language do indeed communicate even if their hearing parents do not expose them to conventional sign language until later in life. Such children have no usable linguistic input, although in other respects their home environments are quite typical.
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From page 131... ...
. These characteristics are not found in the spontaneous gestures their hearing parents use when communicating with them, and thus may be the default system that children themselves bring to the language-learning situation.
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From page 132... ...
Nevertheless, normal language development is observed in most twin pairs, although mild delays are common (Mogford,1988~. As an example of variation in input created by internal or organic factors, children who have intermittent conductive hearing losses that cause their intake of linguistic input to vary in amount and pattern, for the most part, acquire language normally (Klein and Rapin, 1988~.
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From page 133... ...
The inverse is true, as well: language difficulties do not inevitably imply cognitive difficulties. For example, children with specific language impairment, by definition, have no cognitive disabilities but do have difficulty learning language.
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From page 134... ...
For example, deaf children of hearing parents, as mentioned earlier, are typically not exposed to a conventional sign language at birth and may not receive their first exposure to such a system until adolescence or later. These individuals thus provide an excellent "experiment of nature" to test the effects of learning a first language at varying times in the life course.
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From page 135... ...
. Impressively, these findings are robust across languages, including sign languages (although there appears to be more right-hemisphere involvement in processing a sign language like American Sign Language than in processing a spoken language like English)
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From page 136... ...
Moreover, these phenomena are the anchor points for theories of language development that take into account the resilience of language learning within more normal ranges of both environmental and organic variation. The Impact of Linguistic Input on Language Learning and Language Production As noted earlier, conventional language input is not essential for a young child to develop a language-like system and use it to communicate with others.
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From page 137... ...
Although differences in mother's talk are associated with their social class, it is critical to recognize that other characteristics that can be more easily targeted by early interventions are as strongly related to children's accomplishments as the advantages conferred by socioeconomic status. A composite of parental behaviors that included "just talking," "trying to be nice," "telling children about things," "giving children choices," and "listening" accounted for over 60 percent of the variance in the rate of children's vocabulary growth and vocabulary use and almost 60 percent of the variance in their IQ scores at age 3 (Hart and Risley, 1995~.
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From page 138... ...
Furthermore, taking vocabulary as an example, the individual differences that characterize children at school entry are enormous. In one large, longitudinal study, children tested at kindergarten when they were 5 years
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From page 139... ...
With each passing year, the gap widens and, at some point, may become insurmountable for all practical purposes. The studies just described explore the effects of linguistic input on child output by examining the natural range of variation found in mother talk to children.
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From page 140... ...
Enriched input may be important, again, not for direct benefits to language learning, but, in this instance, for the indirect effects it has on parent-child interaction. It is clear that, under typical circumstances, parents do not need to arrange linguistic inputs according to a particular plan in order for language learning to proceed on course.
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From page 141... ...
This figure is somewhat higher than previous estimates, in part because earlier studies have relied on clinically referred children. Studies relying principally on clinically referred children also report a lower percentage of girls with specific language impairment than was reported in the epidemiological study.
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From page 142... ...
found that language delay at age 2 is highly heritable and that language delay is much more heritable than individual differences within the normal range of language ability. These findings suggest that extreme language delay is qualitatively different from typical language learning, and that it reflects a strong genetic contribution.
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From page 143... ...
In recent years, an approach developed by Tallal, Merzenich, and their colleagues has attracted considerable attention (Merzenich et al., 1996; Tallal et al., 1996~. This treatment approach is based on earlier findings that children with specific language impairment have significant difficulty on tasks requiring them to process auditory information that is presented rapidly, and auditory information in
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From page 144... ...
Most, if not all, children with specific language impairment have a history of slow, protracted language development (Trauner et al., 1995~. Virtually all such children come from the ranks of the latetalking.
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From page 145... ...
. children with family members who have a language-related problem or a history of such a problem are less likely to outgrow their language difficulties and more likely to be diagnosed as having a specific language impairment (Tallal et al., 1989; Tomblin, 1989; van der Lely and Stollwerck, 1996; Weismer et al., 1994~.
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From page 146... ...
We first portray aspects of early cognitive development and learning that proceed apace for almost all children who grow up in supportive early environments. We then describe aspects of early learning that are characterized by individual differences and discuss the debate about early learning and sensitive periods.
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From page 147... ...
COMMUNICATING AND LEARNING 147 Children from birth to age 5 engage in making sense of the world on many levels: language, human interactions, counting and quantification, spatial reasoning, physical causality, problem solving, categorization. Indeed, even preverbal infants show surprisingly sophisticated understandings in each of these areas.
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From page 148... ...
148 FR OM NE UR ONS TO NEIGHB ORHO ODS These results suggest that 18-month-olds situate people, but not machines, within a psychological framework that differentiates between the surface behavior of people and a deeper level involving goals and intentions. This feature of imitative learning, which appears to be unique to human beings (see Tomasello, 1996)
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From page 149... ...
Unfortunately, the majority of research on cognitive development, particularly during the earliest years of life, has focused on the identification of universal patterns. By the time children are on the verge of school entry, however, research exploring individual differences becomes more prominent.
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From page 150... ...
Consider, as a contrasting example, studies of sensitive periods in language acquisition. The most successful of these studies exploit certain experiments of nature, in which children are effectively barred from linguistic input (for example, due to deafness in a nonsigning environment)
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From page 151... ...
. Another quite different example of the importance of early sequences concerns the implications of impoverished verbal communication for development of reasoning about others' mental states.
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From page 152... ...
The authors also suggest the possibility of a neurobiological basis for these group differences in performance, as deaf children who have been restricted in early conversational exposure differ in their patterns of language-related brain activity from both hearing adults and deaf native signers (Marschark, 1993; Neville et al., 1997~. Findings such as these certainly do not argue for a sensitive period of development.
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From page 153... ...
Individual differences in facets of behavior that are closely aligned with motivational tendencies can be detected as early as 6 months of age (see MacTurk and Morgan, 1995 and Morgan and Harmon, 1984 for reviews)
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From page 154... ...
, children who responded negatively to failure as 4-year-olds were found to have significantly lower expectations for success and poorer appraisals of their abilities as third and fourth graders than did the children whose motivation was not impaired as preschoolers. In sum, many aspects of achievement motivation fail to show individual differences prior to school entry, suggesting that young children either lack the cognitive abilities or experiences that can lead some to give up easily, anticipate poor performance, and disparage their abilities.
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From page 155... ...
For example, there is no credible scientific foundation to the popular belief that listening to classical music will raise a child's IQ (see Box 6-2~. Rather, it appears that, just as the vast majority of children all around the world grow up in homes and communities that provide them with the inputs they need to develop language, most grow up in environments that support their natural inclinations and abilities to learn.
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From page 156... ...
156 FR OM NE UR ONS TO NEIGHB ORHO ODS child who is taught to recite the alphabet and a child who is read to every night and becomes interested in letters and words because they are associated with the joy of being in her father's lap, seeing beautiful pictures, and hearing a wonderful story. As with every other task of early development that we have discussed, the elements that support early learning revolve around relationships and the resources they provide for children.
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From page 157... ...
Cognitive outcomes have, in fact, been a central focus of research on the effects of child care and more comprehensive early interventions. There is ample documentation in this literature of early environmental influences on concurrent cognitive development and, in some cases, on later learning and such important outcomes as special education placement and staying at grade level in school (see Chapters 11 and 13~.
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From page 158... ...
Japanese students, for example, are more reluctant than their counterparts in the United States to ask questions because this suggests that they did not work hard enough to understand the material or that they are implicitly criticizing the teachers' ability to communicate information (see Greenfield and Cocking, 1994~. Parents' beliefs about when and how children learn school-related skills and the social rules that guide learning interactions termed "funds of knowledge" are also based in culture (Moll et al., 1992)
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From page 159... ...
Indeed, there is good evidence to suggest that the long-term prediction of academic achievement, school dropout, and even adult literacy from the socioeconomic status of one's family during the early childhood years is attributable to the effects of social class on early school achievement (Stipek, in press)
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From page 160... ...
They do, however, further illustrate the importance of narrowing the gap prior to school entry between children whose families occupy different economic niches in society. ~ ~ ~ 1 ~ 1 ~ Measurement Issues The learning capacities of young children, discovered by researchers over the past 30 years, complicate efforts to measure early intellectual and cognitive development.
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From page 161... ...
Children with autism also display failures to engage in protodeclarative pointing, low rates of direct eye contact with others, low levels of pretend play, language delays, and deficits in reasoning about others' mental states (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Tager-Flusberg, 1989~. The research on early biological insults, reviewed in Chapter 8, further calls attention to the importance of assessing the attention, memory, and abstract thinking abilities that appear to be affected by a number of these insults, as well as by prolonged exposure to stress.
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From page 162... ...
and the extent to which normal functioning can be approached remains unclear (as illustrated by children with specific language impairments)
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From page 163... ...
Teacher and parent ratings reflect how adults, not children, think about what it means to be competent, nice, or fun to play with (Rubin et al., 1998~. Direct observation helps get beyond problems of adult interpretation, and it has been a staple of research on early peer relations.
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