TRANSCRIPTS
word long; for example, Mama, Dada, milk, cat. But by their second birthday, children are beginning to use two-word utterances. And between two and three years old, children are speaking in sentences. Children’s vocabulary develops rapidly at this stage, and the average five-year-old will have a vocabulary of between 10,000 and 15,000 words. I’d like to remind you at this point that all the ages we’ve been looking at are approximate. Individual children develop at different speeds.
So far, we’ve been looking at the development of
speaking and vocabulary. But we must remember that children’s language development is restricted to the concepts they are capable of understanding. So now, I’d like to examine the connection between language acquisition and cognitive development.
The psychologist, Piaget … that’s P-I-A-G-E-T,
identified three stages of cognitive development in children: preoperational, concrete operations and formal operations.
According to Piaget, children between two and
seven or eight are at the preoperational stage – when they have difficulty grasping abstract concepts, like time, and the difference between fantasy and reality. Their language development reflects this.
However, between the ages of seven and eleven,
children enter the period of concrete operations – when they learn how to understand and express abstract ideas based on concrete objects, for example, drawing maps and telling the time.
And, finally, at the age of about eleven or twelve,
in the period of formal operations, children’s language has developed to match their ability to argue logically using abstract ideas.
Unit 1, Lesson 1.4, Exercise E≤1.9
Lecture 4 Good morning. Everybody ready? Good. Now, today I’ll be looking at the historical origins of psychology and some of the key developments that have led to its current scientific status. The scientific approach to the study of the mind is based on empiricism; the theory that we can only know things through physical and observable evidence, and you will see that a number of early theories have been validated by modern experimental research.
Let’s start in 435 BC, when Alcmaeon … that’s
spelt, A-L-C-M-A-E-O-N, who was born in Croton, in Southern Italy, experimented with anatomical dissection and discovered the optic nerve.
Alcmaeon theorized that the brain was connected to the rest of the body through currents of energy. This is a surprisingly modern description of the nervous system.
Now moving on five hundred years to 129 AD, we
come to Galen, who was a physician, born in Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Galen’s studies of anatomy led him to identify the cranial nerves, in the brain, and the cerebro-spinal fluid, which irrigates the brain and the nervous system. This is another early discovery that’s still valid today.
For well over a thousand years after Galen’s
discoveries, there was very little scientific investigation into the structure of the brain. However, in the 16th
century, the Belgian anatomist,
Andreas Vesalius (that’s V-E-S-A-L-I-U-S), who lived between 1514 and 1564, continued Galen’s work and wrote a complete textbook about human anatomy based on his dissections of the body.
A hundred and fifty years later, in 1690, the
British empiricist, John Locke, argued that our perception of the world depends entirely on our sensory experiences; but he added that we also have a mental faculty that allows us to reflect on what we experience. This theory was supported later by the work of the psychologist, Wundt, as we’ll see in a minute.
Let’s continue now to look at the physical study
of the brain. The German physiologist, Franz Joseph Gall, who lived from 1758–1828, believed that different parts of the brain were responsible for producing particular behaviours. His theory that the shape of the skull reflected the personality of an individual has been disproved; but his fundamental assumption that certain areas of the brain have specific functions is now supported by modern neuropsychology.
I’ll conclude by mentioning Wilhelm Wundt,
who founded the first laboratory dedicated to psychological research in 1879. Wundt is important in the history of psychology because, in addition to researching the physical effects of stimuli on behaviour, he asked the subjects of his experiments to reflect on and report their experiences. This combination of scientific experimentation and introspection was a forerunner to modern approaches to psychotherapy.
Unit 1, Lesson 1.4, Exercise E≤1.10
Lecture 5 In this morning’s lecture, I’m going to compare two types of conditioning, also known as
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