ChapTer 3 Development Over the Life Span 89telegraphic speech A
child’s first word combi-
nations, which omit (as
a telegram did) unneces-
sary words.Between the ages of 18 months and 2 years,
toddlers begin to produce words in two- or
three-word combinations (“Mama here,” “go
’way bug,” “my toy”).The child’s first combi-
nations of words have been described as tele-
graphic speech. When people had to pay for
every word in a telegram, they quickly learned
to drop unnecessary articles (a, an, or the) and
auxiliary verbs (is or are). Similarly, the two-word
sentences of toddlers omit articles, word end-
ings, auxiliary verbs, and other parts of speech,
yet these sentences are remarkably accurate in
conveying meaning. Children use two-word sen-
tences to locate things (“there toy”), make de-
mands (“more milk”), negate actions (“no want,”
“all gone milk”), describe events (“Bambi go,”
“hit ball”), describe objects (“pretty dress”), show
possession (“Mama dress”), and ask questions
(“where Daddy?”). Pretty good for a little kid,
don’t you think?
By the age of 6, the average child has a vocab-
ulary of between 8,000 and 14,000 words, mean-
ing that children acquire several new words a day
between the ages of 2 and 6. (When did you last
learn and use several new words in a day?) They
absorb new words as they hear them, inferring
their meaning from their knowledge of grammati-
cal contexts and from the social contexts in which
they hear the words used (Golinkoff & Hirsh-
Pasek, 2006; Rice, 1990).Recite & Review
Recite: Use your human capacity for language to speak aloud what you have learned about the
characteristics of language; the debate between Chomsky and his critics over whether there is an
innate universal grammar and the evidence for each side’s view; the importance of gestures; and
telegraphic speech.
Review: Next, reread this section.now take this Quick Quiz:
- The central distinction between human language and other communication systems is that lan-
guage (a) allows for the generation of an infinite number of new utterances, (b) is spoken, (c) is
learned only after explicit training, (d) is only constructed of meaningful elements. - Some of Chomsky’s critics believe that instead of figuring out grammatical rules when acquiring
language, children learn __.
Answers:
Study and Review at MyPsychLabthe probability that any given word or syllable will follow another one.2. a 1.You are about to learn...
• how Piaget described the stages of cognitive
development.
• modern approaches to children’s mental
development.
Cognitive Development
Children do not think the way adults do. For most
of the first year of life, if something is out of sight,
it’s out of mind: If you cover a baby’s favorite
rattle with a cloth, the baby thinks the rattle has
vanished and stops looking for it. And a 4-year-
old may protest that a sibling has more fruit juice
when it is only the shapes of the glasses that differ,
not the amount of juice.
Yet children are smart in their own way.
Like good little scientists, they are always testing
their child-sized theories about how things work
(Gopnik, 2009). When your toddler throws her
spoon on the floor for the sixth time as you try to
feed her, and you say, “That’s enough! I will not
pick up your spoon again!” the child will imme-
diately test your claim. Are you serious? Are you
angry? What will happen if she throws the spoon
again? She is not doing this to drive you crazy.
Rather, she is learning that her desires and yours
can differ, and that sometimes those differences
are important and sometimes they are not.
How and why does children’s thinking
change? In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Jean
Piaget [Zhan Pee-ah-ZHAY] (1896–1980) pro-
posed that children’s cognitive abilities unfold
naturally, like the blooming of a flower, almost
independent of what else is happening in their
lives. Piaget caused a revolution in thinking about
how thinking develops. His great insight was that
children’s errors are as interesting as their correct