people don’t usually have well-paid jobs or a lot of money. So it’s very common for young people to turn to crime to finance their drug habit. And what crimes do they commit? Many start by stealing from family and friends, and move on to shoplifting and pickpocketing. But many young people get their supplies of drugs by becoming drug dealers themselves, distributing narcotics amongst their friends and contacts over wider and wider networks and receiving drugs in payment.


Transcript ≤1.8 Lecture 3


Good morning to you all. In the first part of today’s lecture, I’m going to trace language acquisition from infancy (0–2 years) through to 5 years. In the second part, I’ll be relating language acquisition to Piaget’s three stages of cognitive development, ending with pre-adolescence (11–12 years).


First, let’s look at the prelinguistic stage. This is the period from birth until babies start to produce recognizable words. As soon as they’re born, babies make their first sounds … they cry. Crying is our first form of vocalization. We can’t call it language; but babies have different cries to express different needs and emotions: hunger, frustration and tiredness. Now we’ll examine the prelinguistic stage in more detail.


From as early as a week old, babies recognize


their mother’s voice; and experiments have demonstrated that at two months, babies in an English-speaking context can distinguish between sounds like ‘ba’ and ‘pa’. Just a little later, at three months, babies will make sounds in response to adults speaking to them. Between five and eight months, infants show signs of understanding simple vocabulary by looking at objects when adults name them.


Now we’ll move on to look at the linguistic stage of development. Infants don’t usually begin to use words until they are between ten and twenty months. Their first utterances are usually only one 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


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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.


Transcript ≤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,


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