What language reveals about children's categories of personhood (original) (raw)
Related papers
2009
We are familiar with children and childhood; as adults, we constantly encounter them in everyday contexts related to the family, school, leisure time, and other areas of life. We remember our own childhood and what it was like to be a child, but in a strangely ambivalent way. We know so little about the child inside us. It seems likely enough that this child within us is more than just a segment or an episode in our life story. There seem to be peculiar obstacles that block our ability to relate to this child. At the same time, the children outside us often seem to be extraterrestrial beings, "aliens". Relating to the child within us is mysteriously difficult; the children around us are puzzling strangers. If this is true, then the question arises why in our culture relating both to the child within us and to the children around us is so difficult.
2006
Constructions The most abstract constructions that English-speaking children use early in development have mostly been studied from an adult perspective—using constructions defined from an adult model. We follow suit here, but the truth is that many of the constructions listed here probably should be differentiated in a more fine-grained way (as families of subconstructions) once the necessary empirical work is done. Identificationals, Attributives, and Possessives Among the earliest utterance-level constructions used by many English-speaking children are those that serve to identify an object or to attribute to it some property, including a possessor or simple location (Lieven, Pine, & Dresner-Barnes, 1992). In adult language, these would almost invariably require some form of the coplua, to be, although children do not always supply it. Quite often, these constructions revolve around one or a few specific words. Most common for the identification function are such things as It’s a...
The Significance of the Emergence of Language and Symbol in the Development of the Young Infant
In this paper I have suggested that the mother–child dyad is the foundation for integrity between the psychic self and the physical self, and the capacity of these to relate to the external environment. I have also argued that the development of language and symbol are creative agents in the development of consciousness in the young infant, and that the emergence of language and symbol are an expression of the opening of a potential space which allows differentiation from the mother and facilitates the infant's ability to distinguish fantasy from fact and self from other.
Focus, Goals, and Description of the Course. This class provides a graduate-level course in cognitive development. We focus on two related issues: theories of cognitive development, and development in core domains (eg, language, space, time, and social cognition). Our focus will be primarily on the development of children's thinking, although we will also discuss occasionally cognitive development in other periods of the lifespan (eg, aging).
A theoretical developmental model: Self-image in children
1985
In this chapter, we present a model of psychological development that may be considered "paradoxical" when compared with the usual conceptualizations. This conceptualization is presented in terms of Piagetian theory, from which it derives, but from which it diverges considerably on numerous points.
2002
Perhaps more than any other developmental achievement, word-learning stands at the very intersection of language and cognition. Early word-learning represents infants' entrance into a truly symbolic system and brings with it a means to establish reference. To succeed, infants must identify the relevant linguistic units, identify their corresponding concepts, and establish a mapping between the two. But how do infants begin to map words to concepts, and thus establish their meaning? How do they discover that different types of words (e.g., "dog" (noun), "fluffy" (adjective), "begging" (verb) refer to different aspects of the same scene (e.g, a standard poodle, seated on its hind legs and holding its front paws in the air)? We have proposed that infants begin the task of word-learning with a broad, universal expectation linking novel words to a broad range of commonalities, and that this initial expectation is subsequently fine-tuned on the basis of their experience with the objects and events they encounter and the native language under acquisition. In this chapter, we examine this proposal, in light of recent evidence with infants and young children. Introduction Infants across the world's communities are exposed to vastly different experiences. Consider, for example, one infant being raised in a remote region of the Guatemalan rainforest, another growing up in the mountains of rural Switzerland, and a third being raised in Brooklyn, NY. Each infant will live in a world that is unimaginable to the other, surrounded by objects and events that are foreign to the other, and immersed in a language that the other cannot begin to understand. Yet despite these vast Early word learning 2 differences in experience, infants across the world display striking similarities in the most fundamental aspects of their conceptual and language development. Within the first year of life, each of these infants will begin to establish systematic links between words and the concepts to which they refer. On the conceptual side, they will begin to form categories of objects that capture both the similarities and differences among the objects they encounter. Most of these early object categories will be at the basic level (i.e., dog) and the more inclusive global level (i.e., animal). Infants will begin to use these early object categories as an inductive base to support inferences about new objects that they encounter. They will also begin to relate categories to one another, implicitly, on the basis of taxonomic (e.g., dogs are a kind of animal), thematic (e.g., dogs chase tennis balls), functional (e.g., dogs can pull children on sleds) and other relations. Infants' early object and event categories will provide a core of conceptual continuity from infancy through adulthood. Concurrent with these conceptual advances, infants in each community will make remarkably rapid strides in language acquisition. Even before they begin to understand the words of their native language, infants show a special interest in the sounds of language. Newborns respond to the emotional tone carried by the melody of human speech (Fernald, 1992a, b), and prefer speech sounds to other
Handbook of child psychology and developmental science: Theory and method, Vol. 1, 7th ed
2015
Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically.. .. He was. .. almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand
British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1996
This paper reviews and evaluates various theories of the origins of theory of mind in infancy. In what a theory of mind consists is first considered. It is argued that any theory of mind has t w o important features. Firstly, a theory of mind recognizes, at least, the existence of psychological relations between agents and objects, including some relations which involve 'action at a distance'. Secondly, in a theory of mind, self and other are equivalent in that both can act equally as agents of psychological relations. Any theory of the development of theory of mind must explicate h o w it is possible t o acquire an understanding of these t w o features. With this requirement in mind, four main types of recent theories are considered -modularity theories, Piagetian theories, matching theories, and intersubjectivity theories. While n o decision is made amongst these theories, suggestions for further improvement in theorizing o n this topic are presented.