Fun with cognitive development.

[rivka]

Alex participated in another study at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory for Child Development this week. She's done this from time to time, and it's always a lot of fun. This time they were interested in the relationship between preschoolers' counting ability and their ability to compare quantities.

First they had Alex do some straight-up counting of animals on cards. Next they gave her cards with pictures of two kinds of animals interspersed. They asked her (for example) to count the giraffes, count the elephants, and then say whether most of the animals were giraffes or elephants.

If you'd asked me to predict the results before we entered the room, I would've said that Alex would do a decent job of counting but that she would have trouble making a relative comparison of quantities when the numbers were close. When I saw that the animals were scattered randomly across the card instead of being neatly lined up, I figured that she'd have trouble counting them accurately, too. (It's hard for a little kid to remember which ones they've already counted.) I was surprised to see that her ability to count a random array has significantly improved - she made two or three errors, but was only ever one off. And she didn't make any mistakes on the comparisons.

Afterward, the experimenter told me that so far (Alex was the 250-somethingth subject) they haven't found any relationship between counting ability and comparative estimation. Some kids are great counters but can't figure out which one has the most. Some kids can't really count very well at this age, but unfailingly say which are the most animals - even when it's a question of 8 versus 7. So it seems that these two number skills are completely separate developmental processes. Isn't that fascinating?

(Also fascinating, if you are a big old cognitive development geek: this paper (warning: PDF) reporting the results of the last study Alex was in, which shows how ridiculously good two-year-olds are at learning new words, even in challenging contexts.)

Last, but not least, there's been a new development this week that may have implications for this journal. Alex was hanging out by my side while I read LJ. I started to leave a comment in wiredferret's journal, and suddenly a little voice piped up, "Why did you write my name?" Oops. She's been able to recognize her name for a long time, but apparently now she's following along with my typing and picking out her name from a block of text. So that's a little... constraining.

Comments

[telerib.livejournal.com]

What was that cognitive development textbook you recommended, in lieu of the parenting guide du jour?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I think any developmental psychology textbook written for college students is more useful than the parenting guide du jour. (I'd say "developmental psychology" rather than "cognitive development" because emotional and physical development aspects are critical to parenting choices as well.)

Two books written for parents that are good guides to cognitive development are Einstein Never Used Flash Cards and The Scientist In The Crib. The Einstein book pushes a particular agenda (not trying to make your kid into a baby genius) but makes its argument by providing a ton of useful cognitive development information, including, amusingly, directions for replicating famous developmental psychology experiments at home. The other book is more straight-up descriptive.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Elena reads over my shoulder when I type sometimes - she'll say "that says 'can'" or stuff like that - short words. I think she's noticed her own name once or twice. Not long and we'll have to really start being careful about stuff like that. Yikes.

Initials work. Maybe I'll go back to calling her the Electric Kid. (E and K happen to be her first and middle initials too, so it all works out.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I think it's so amazingly cool that Elena is reading.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

We are carefully Not Pushing, and there are only certain books she'll consider reading. Some/most she still recites from memory, but she's starting to clue in to the fact that what she's saying relates to those letters at the bottom of the page.

And her sense of phonics is really developing too. We have a lot of "puh-puh-puh, what letter makes that sound?" And yesterday she said "C - what does C sound like? Kuh-kuh-kuh." Just last month, she would have assumed that C would sound like ssssss, because that's the initial sound of the letter name.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

It's so interesting to compare the processes the girls are following. Alex has known letter sounds for a while - she has a computer game where she's supposed to look at a picture and figure out the starting initial, and she's really good at that. But she can't sound out a word at all - she couldn't pick out "can" and read it, like Elena can. It's fascinating to me because I think of what Alex knows about phonics as a precondition to reading, except that it sounds like Elena is reading before she knows all the phonics rules.

And yeah, the memorized books thing is big here too. Lately when I'm reading I've noticed that she'll mouth the words or say them under her breath while I read them.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

And Elena is new to phonics, but definitely doing the whole-word recognition thing. She asks us a lot what something says, and usually we ask her to spell it for us - not to sound it out, but because we're too lazy to go see what she's pointing at. Yesterday was the flour and sugar canisters in the kitchen. When she got to Brown Sugar, she recognized that she had just seen that second word on the White Sugar ("You almost told me that!"... instead of "already") and when we got to the Powdered Sugar, she supplied the second word without prompting. Now, whether she remembers it today..... who knows. ;)

[ailbhe]

Heh, this is what Linnea did until she, um, stopped. But definitely whole words came before phonics, by about a year. I think she stopped doing whole words to figure out phonics.

(My favourite was the day she and radegund's son sat on the sofa, carefully explained to each other that they couldn't read, and, that established, read a book together).

[naomikritzer]

When Molly was in her last year of preschool, during the fall parent-teacher conference her teacher told us that she sometimes made notes about what kids were doing during the day, but she had to be careful what she wrote when Molly was nearby because if Molly saw her write her name, she'd start craning her neck and asking, "What are you writing about me?" She was particularly impressed that Molly read her name upside-down. (Ed's comment: "Well, of course! All the INTERESTING stuff people write about you is going to be upside-down, from your vantage point...")

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, the comment (http://wiredferret.livejournal.com/1460989.html?thread=4141821#t4141821) Alex asked about was one I felt perfectly comfortable reading aloud to her. But they ain't all like that.

Pet names

[hazelchaz]

I used to refer to missmea as Precious Angel or Precious Darling, but not around her. (And usually in an ironic fashion, I must admit.)

Maybe a pet name here that you don't use out loud?

[selki.livejournal.com]

these two number skills are completely separate developmental processes. Isn't that fascinating?

Yes!