Midterm 2 Study Questions

The midterm on Monday, February 25 will be based on lectures and readings (assigned through February 18). You will need to answer 4 of 5 short essay (1/2 page) and 1 of 2 long essay (1 page) questions. The following study questions should be useful in guiding your preparation for the exam. Note that these questions are not intended to exhaust all of the possible topics that might be covered on the exam.

1) Describe Gelman’s counting principles. What evidence is there that young children’s counting conforms to these principles?

2) Evaluate the evidence that young infants are sensitive to numerical information.

3) Explain the differences between conceptual, procedural, and utilizational competence.

4) Young children's pretend play reveals important developments in symbolic functioning. Four such developments are decontextualization, object substitution, self-other substitution, and symbol socialization. Give an example that illustrates the meaning of each.

5) Evaluate DeLoache’s research on children's understanding of scale models. What is her explanation for children’s difficulties with scale models and what evidence is there for or against it? What alternative explanations have been proposed? What does the evidence reveal about these other explanations?

6) Describe how self-recognition has been measured in human infants. Is self-recognition an isolated developmental phenomenon or does it relate to other important developments in infancy?

7) What is self regulation? How is it measured in young children? How does it change with age? What factors affect the development of self regulation?

8) What is delay of gratification? What factors/strategies affect the ability to delay gratification? What is the relation between the ability to delay and later social and cognitive development?

9) How do the self descriptions of children change from early childhood to middle childhood?

10) In what ways could interpersonal understanding (the ability to draw inferences about the intentions of others) help infants avoid mapping object labels to the wrong referents in the world? Are such abilities limited to the domain of language or do they extend to other domains as well?

11) Explain the difference between an overextension and an underextension in children’s early language. Give an example of each. Do overextensions occur in children’s comprehension as well as production? Explain why there is or is not a difference between production and comprehension.

12) What are overregularizations and what do they illustrate about grammatical development?

13) What is the “constraints” approach to semantic development? Are constraints specific to language or do they reflect more general properties of the cognitive system (or don’t we know)?

14) Can language learning be fully explained by mechanisms of imitation and reinforcement? Why or why not?

15) What evidence suggests that there is a strong biological-maturational basis to language learning?