While children are structuring their knowledge about the world; Schemas use techniques of assimilation, adaptation, organization, balancing and balancing.
Schemas: Schemas are organized behavior or thought patterns. As the baby or child tries to structure his or her understanding of the world, the brain creates schemas. These schemas are actions or mental designs that organize information. Behavioral schemas develop in childhood. Babies develop their schemas on objects through actions such as sucking, looking, and catching. Older children have strategies and plans for problem solving. As adults, we create various schemas in many areas, from driving to budgeting.
We use our schemas with the concepts of assimilation and adaptation.
Assimilation: Coping with new information or experiences. It is a concept that proposes that existing schemas are used for learning.
Adaptation: Children are changes in their existing schemas in order to learn new information and experience.
For example, when children are born, They adopt sucking behavior by bringing every object to their mouth, but over time they gain the awareness that not every object will be sucked, this is an example of compliance behavior.
Organization: Children organize their experiences with their thoughts in order to understand the world. It is the grouping of separate behaviors and thoughts into a higher system. By seeing how to use a hammer, the child also gets an idea about how to use a sledgehammer, which is a large hammer.
Balance and Developmental Stages: While trying to understand the world, the child inevitably experiences cognitive conflict or imbalance. Complex situations create imbalance. The search for internal balance motivates the child for change and assimilates old and new schemas by developing new schemas.
The baby perceives the world with simple reflexes and does this with sucking and searching reflexes.
Object Permanence. : It is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. If you put a five-month-old child's toy behind an object, the child will not be able to perceive that it is behind the object. object permanence over time It continues to develop with age.
Heredity or Environment?
Whether heredity or environmental factors are more effective in the development of babies has created debates for years. Research has proven that hereditary factors play a more effective role than environmental factors.
Of course, the environment and stimuli have a vital impact on the child's development. Environmental factors affect cognitive development, but they cannot exceed the limits set by genetics. We cannot leave children's development to genetic factors alone.
Stimulus diversity (games and toys) is very important for the baby. The toys chosen should be those that appeal to more than one sense. These contribute significantly to the senses of colour, sound and touch. It is useful to get advice from experts about choosing the right toy for the child.
Learning, Remembering and Conceptualization
It will be useful to explain learning in five subcategories.
Conditioning: Conditioning has taught researchers a lot, especially about indicating what infants perceive. For example, it has been observed that babies suck faster when they are conditioned with music that stimulates sucking behavior.
Attention: It is the concentration of mental powers on a specific thing. Attention is present even in newborn babies.
What should not be ignored in attention is the adaptation process. Constantly repeating the same thing to babies causes distraction. As children grow, their attention span also increases.
Memory: It is the name given to the entire situation in which the organism preserves information over time. As development continues, memory also improves. A twenty-month-old baby's memory will remember earlier than an eight-month-old baby. The vast majority of us do not remember the events of the first three years of our lives. The reason for this is what we call infantile amnesia. It is caused by the fact that our prefrontal lobe and hippocampus are not developed enough.
Imitation: One of the most basic factors in learning for babies is imitation. According to research, newborn babies can imitate even when they are a few days old. As children grow, they expand their imitation attitudes.
Concept Formation and Classification: Babies' There are also concepts. Researchers have observed that three-month-old babies group similar-looking objects together, indicating that classification occurs even in the first years of life. As children grow, their concept formation and classification skills also develop.
Individual Differences
Every born child is special. However, it is known that children will also show mental and physical differences. To give an example of the main differences, girls talk earlier than boys, this is due to hormonal differences. While one child may walk at 10 months, another may walk at 14 months. Such differences are individual differences and the most important determinants are genetic factors.
Language Development
Language is a form of communication that can be verbal, written or signed, based on symbol systems. It contains the words a society uses and the rules that combine and modify them. We need language to talk to others, listen to them, read and write. Our language helps us describe past events in detail and make plans for the future. It allows us to transfer our knowledge from one generation to another and create a rich cultural heritage.
Language has some rules and systems. Language is a highly measured and orderly concept. The smallest units of a language are phonemes, which determine the sounds used and how they combine. Every baby can produce vowels in all languages at birth. It has the capacity to produce the eight vowels in Turkish as well as the vowels in Korean. Over time, he will imitate the sounds he hears in his immediate environment and forget other sounds. As the baby's development continues, he will notice certain connections between sounds and repeat them, such as b-a ba-ba.
Phonemes combine to form morphemes. This is the area where the word carries its basic meaning. Now the child has begun to understand which word means what.
After the morphemes are formed, it is time for syntax. It is formed by combining words and valid phrases to form sentences. As children grow up, they begin to make larger and more meaningful sentences. 'come' is a sentence and a half. A year-old child can say it meaningfully. However, it takes a lot of time and stages for the sentence "daddy, let's play football together".
Babies begin to use gestures to show or point to an object when they are 8-12 months old. He may point to the bottle to eat food or point to a dog to show interest. Problems pointing and gesturing are key indicators of autism, but autism may not be diagnosed for up to three years. It is useful to be alert on this issue. Not communicating is the most distinctive feature of autism. In a study, it was observed that the gestures of children of families with high socio-economic status were more pronounced than those of families with low socio-economic status. Factors causing this situation: education, stimulus variety and conscious parental attitudes.
It has been determined that children understand about fifty words at the age of thirteen months and can speak these words at the age of eighteen months. The first words mostly consist of words such as important people (parents), toys (ball), animals (woof, woof).
When the developing child reaches 18-24 months, they gain the ability to use two-word expressions such as 'look at the dog.' , where is the ball?
Biological and Environmental Factors in Language Development
Biological Factors: The ability to speak and understand is a function of our nervous system. In addition, it also requires other audio-related hardware. The nervous systems and vocal equipment of our ancestors have changed over thousands of years.
Scientists have proven that some parts of our brain were used for language. This discovery was made by examining people with brain injuries. The brocha region, located in the left frontal region of our brain and used for word extraction, is the Wernicke region, located in the left hemisphere, which plays an active role in understanding language. Damage to these two regions causes aphasia, which we call language loss or damage. While damage to Broca's area makes it difficult to convey words as desired, damage to Wernicke's area weakens individuals' understanding and causes them to speak fluent but incomprehensible.
Famous linguist Noam Chomsky stated that children are born biologically equipped to learn languages. r. Children's developmental stages and studies prove the accuracy of this theory.
Environmental Factors: When a baby says 'mother-ne', the mother embraces the baby and shows love. The child who learns this will call his mother more and receive love. Experts in the behavioral school argue that language is formed little by little and is learned as a complex action, such as playing the piano.
It has been observed that babies whose mothers talk more often have significantly larger vocabularies. Better predictors of children's vocabulary development were the mother's language and literacy skills and mothers' use of a wide range of different words. For example, when mothers use more diverse words when talking to their children, the development of their children's vocabulary is more efficient. However, it was not found to be related to the mother's total amount of talking. The conclusion to be drawn here is quality, not duration. For example, when a child says "puppy", it will be more beneficial for the child if the mother says "yes, the puppy eats meat".
According to a study, the children of mothers who read books daily to their children aged 14-24 months are much stronger than children who are not read to regularly when they reach the 36th month. It has been observed that there is language development and cognitive development.
Suggestions for Parents for Language Development
1) Be an effective speaking partner. Talk to your baby.
2) Talk to your baby as if he/she understands you. Your baby will notice your interest.
3) Don't forget your emotions when talking to your child. Children feel emotions more than we think.
4) As your child grows up, he will start to tell you his problems and share his feelings with you, this is where Be a good listener.
5) Stay away from gender stereotypes. This often has a negative impact on 3-5 year old children who are starting to form their sexual identity.
Thanks for reading. thank you.
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