Foreign Perspectives

Understanding minds is the shortest chapter in the Erica Cox notes at just over three pages vs six pages for most of the preceeding chapters which certainly sounds good in terms of being able to learn the content.

Understanding a theory of mind is the realisation that others have views, opinions, feelings, etc. that are different from ours. Examining the development of a theory of mind was originally looked at by Premack & Woodruff who showed monkeys videos and then had them select a “what next” photo; Dennett pointed out that this was really flakey in terms of methodology as they could be working it out for themselves rather than considering what the actor might do next. Therefore, the attention moved on to Sally/Anne tasks where Wimmer & Perner found that 3 year olds couldn’t do it, by 4 or 5 half of them could and almost all 6 to 9 year olds managed it. Gopnik & Astington used the deceptive Smartie tube and found that children of around 4 got the right result ie recognised the false belief.

Moving on from this the second order theory of mind kicks in around 6 to 8. This is the ability to attribute beliefs about beliefs. Sulivan found that children from 5 to 9 could distinguish between the lie about having cleaned the room and the joke about eating the peas. Theory of mind generally is related to improved social interaction (Astington & Jenkins) and obviously facilitates social manipulation (Sutton et al re bullies).

Other means of looking at the development of a theory of mind include examining behaviour and talk, investigating cognitive skilla and research into environmental factors. Wellman & Bartsch investigated children from 2 to 5 and noted the trend of moving from talking about others desires to talking about their beliefs. Repacholi & Gopnik considered this via the broccoli experiment. On the cognitive skills front Charman et al examined joint attention which predicted future theory of mind knowledge and Meltzoff looked at understanding intentions through comparing actions following watching an adult fail and watching a machine fail at a task.

Social factors affecting theory of mind development include: language ability & number of siblings (particularly the number of older siblings), interaction with adults, how the mother spoke in terms of asking the child how the victim felt, age, gender (girls are slightly better), and speaking generally (deaf studies of deaf parents & children vs hearing parents & deaf children). Which all support Vygotsky’s learning through social interaction.

Overall, it looks like a reasonable chapter to revise and answer questions on.

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Although executive functions in childhood: development and disorder is probably one of the more complex chapters, the notes on it are amongst the shortest. Executive function refers to those activities that are under conscious control rather than being habitual or automatic functions that we do. Things tend to move from executive function activities to automated ones over time eg when you started to read it was very much an executive function but everyone reading this will be doing it pretty much automatically. This activity is handles by the prefrontal cortex. It’s generally divided into cognitive flexibility, planning and working memory and inhibitory control. Hughes et al looked at this using the Tower of London task which revealed good correlation between poor scores on the task and poor communication skills and high anti-social behaviour.

The development of executive function in children has been looked at by a number of researchers. The Stroop task (colours and colour names mixed up eg RED). Diamond discovered some inhibitory control at 9 months and improvement at 10 months. Piaget’s A-not-B and the go/nogo (press a button when a letter that’s not “X” appears) are also used. There are variants of this for children who can’t read eg the fist and pointing hand however they are more complex and it takes a 4 year old to pass them. Casey et al looked at these using fMRI scans which showed that children, as you would expect, needed more brain power dedicated to them than adults do. Finally, there’s the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test with different shapes and colours.

Executive disfunction is a massive field of study throwing up peculiar effects. Children with poor inhibitory control tend to be more distractible, less able to control emotions, more impulsive, etc. and have difficulty in social situations and tasks needing concentration. ADHD involves distractibility, impulsivity and hyperactivity; they have delayed myelination of the prefrontal cortex and low levels of dopamine. Since it’s hard to pick this up before age 6, Parker & Asher looked at pre-schoolers who are classed as disruptive and found that basically it was downhill from there.

Overall, a surprisingly short set of notes for what’s quite a massive field but presumably we’ll be picking this up in somewhat more detail at level 3. I can’t believe that the next installment on understanding minds is the last one to be done!

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The development of children’s understanding of grammar kicks off with a run-through of the definitions of some linguistic terminology before moving on to look at the development of spoken language, learning word endings and finally learning word order. Obviously this whole chapter is very much English-specific.

There’s not a whole lot of terminology but I suspect it would be quite confusing if you weren’t from a linguistic background. Phonology is the structure of speech sounds. Grammar is broken into morphology (how words are formed eg through compounding) and syntax (the structure of sentences). The chapter on first words looked at studies that showed when children recognised the specific phonology structure of their own language. Inflections (word endings) aren’t used a whole lot in English outside the likes of “-ed” and “-ing” endings.

Chomsky is the main researcher in this area and has the view that children have an inate understanding (his language acquisition device). They can understand all languages because their is a universal grammar which they adapt to their native language. Pinker on the other hand feels that children deduce the rules for themselves.

The development of spoken language proceeds through a number of phases. One word utterances are common early in the second year with two-word utterances coming around 21 months (just before the vocabulary spurt). In the early stages they speak in telegraphic speech ie with no elements of grammar such as link words. By the age of 4 the various elements of grammar have been learnt.

Learning about word endings has two basic theories. The dual route theory of Pinker & Prince considers that there is both a rule system (eg “add S for plural”) and a memory system (for irregularities). The single route theory of Rumelhart & McClelland comes from the neural network studies. There seems to be more evidence in support of the single route model through examination of the types of errors which children make (eg the occasional production of irregular inflections for regular words supports the single route model) and how they explain generalisation of inflections to new words. Marchman looked at this. Studies of the acquisition of German which has lots of regular inflections by Szagun tend to support the single route model. Studies by Pinker of deveopmental disorders could support the dual route model but then they also support the single route one.

Learning about word order seems quite an interesting field. As Brown & Hanlon found, parents rarely correct their children’s grammatical mistakes. Chomsky argued from this that they needed to rely on inate linguistic knowledge (his universal grammar). Tomasello felt that children gradually built up grammatical knowledge through learning (eg about nouns and verbs). Studies in this area are extremely time consuming as most diary studies are. Elman looking at computer simulations found that starting with simpler grammatical structures and working up worked well which implies that using “motherese” (child directed speech) is a good thing (but note that this isn’t used universally).

Quite a nice chapter to revise though that simplicity might mean more complex questions. Only two more chapters to go: executive functions and understanding minds which, hopefully, I’ll get to over the course of today. So far, it looks like I’m going to be close to achieving my target of getting the revision chapters down to ten pages (which’ll be appearing as a PDF on the site when I’ve completed them all).

Copyright © 2004-2010 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

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