How Do Babies Think If They Can't Use Words? It's a pretty complex question that cannot be answered with a simple phrase. Throughout this article, we will present to you all the researches and studies that were conducted to understand babies' behavior.
It's a well-known fact that a child needs to master in a short time many skills that are necessary for an independent life. He must learn how to speak, how to read, how to write and count, how to control his emotions and actions, and rearrange them in accordance with the situation. So how do children learn these skills? What are the difficulties they face during this? And how to help them deal with those difficulties?
Babies Cannot Change Their Behavior According To What They See.
How does the mind of a baby who does not know how to speak,
work?
Is it disordered or does it have some basic grounds for separating
things according to particular criteria? Do small children know how to
think? It's well known that thinking reflects using words in an internal
dialogue with one's self. Still, it is also established that many of our
decisions come from impulses that are difficult to formulate with
words.
Knowledge about the world around us has different forms. Some are
based on emotions or on the summation and statistical assessment of
previous experience, while others are axiomatic ideas about the
structure of the surrounding world, which are predetermined by our
cognitive system. Researcher René Baillargeon
has shown experimentally that young children are surprised when
physical laws are violated.
Now, in the second test, René placed a box in the middle of the rail that would stop the car. When the babies noticed the box, René set the screen down again and hid the box behind it. Normally, the car would hit the box and stop, however, before starting the test, an assistant of the researcher, took the box without the babies noticing. When the car slid, it went behind the screen without stopping.
Children were extremely surprised that the car continued to move despite the obstacle. The assistant put the box back again, and then René took the screen up to reveal that the box was indeed blocking the way.
Children notice changes! 4-month-old babies look longer at an object that has changed color than at one that has changed hue, even if, from a physical point of view, both colors are equally different from the original.
This is a video summarizing the experiment.
Mom's Behavior Is An Anchor For Unformed Emotions
At the very beginning of our lives, we have a very simple emotional assessment of events, either good or bad, expected or not expected. With age, we have to interpret our state, for instance, wonder why exactly we experience negative emotions. It is difficult for a child to understand what his feelings are connected with. Parents provide tools for interpreting events for children. Reacting to the child's emotional manifestations, the mother mirrors them, that is, reflects their meaning with facial expressions and voice tone, and gives an interpretation to emotions. "You are crying because you are probably tired or want to eat." The more the mother seeks to match the context, the more the behavior of the child in such circumstances becomes more accurate in its interpretations. The child remembers this information and over time begins to rely on it: "I feel bad because I want to sleep" or "I feel good because I'm playing an interesting game."
Negative states begin to be experienced and expressed in different ways, which makes it possible to more accurately solve life's tasks. If we compare the crying of a newborn, a four-month-old, and a one-year-old baby, you will notice that with age, much more shades and intonations appear. This makes life easier for parents, the child has more and more forms of expressing emotions for different situations, and it becomes easier to recognize them. The mother influences how the child evaluates events, this is called Social Referential Assessment. An event that should evoke a particular emotion in a child, The mother's interpretation of this event, can cause completely different feelings.
The mother's readiness to respond to the child's emotions allows him to
learn to compare, analyze and predict his feelings, and also react to
future events. It also improves the emotional attachment associated with
the feeling that the mother will help in any situation. If the mother
makes a decision focusing on the feelings of her child, then the
probability of him forming a reliable attachment is much higher than if
she behaves inconsistently.
Unreliable attachment to parents at an early age influences further human behavior. For example, school kids behave aggressively, adults find them difficult to deal with, and as a result, an unwanted type of behavior is formed. A securely attached child is better at determining which adult to trust. He knows how to use his own emotions as signals more effectively, and compare them with his experience. A child with insecure attachment does not trust his emotions, and it is more difficult for him to cope with failure - since he does not rely on more successful experiences. Attachment is completed between the ages of nine months and over a year.
Children Learn Syntax Very Early
Young children never begin to pronounce entire phrases; it is only between 9 and 15 months that they begin to pronounce individual words. At about 18 months of age, they begin to build two-word phrases that look like complete sentences. The child begins to understand speech a little earlier than independently built phrases, he also knows a lot about the structure of sentences. Previously, scientists believed that it is very difficult for children who do not have any information about the language, to learn the subtle features of the language. In French “Jean does not speak French” sounds like “Jean (ne) parle pas français” (“ne” is often overlooked). In the infinitive, the negative particle “pas” is shifted from its position after the verb to before it: “pas parler français” (“do not speak French”). It turns out from a very young age, children build words in the right order.
Just as there is a visual system in our brain, there is also a system that is responsible for language proficiency, but it does not develop immediately. Some elements are formed only by the age of seven. Therefore, the range of meanings that a small child can express is limited compared to older children.
The Crisis Of Two Years Old
Behavior control integrates cognitive, emotional, and volitional aspects and unites all human resources to provide purposeful actions. In early childhood, behavior control is focused on the organization of individual purposeful movements; with age, people become able to organize complex motor movements and plan all their behavior to achieve a goal. Cognitive control is the organization of cognitive processes associated with thinking, cognition, retention, and distribution of attention, in addition to the planning of purposeful actions. The function of emotional control regulates emotional manifestations, thanks to it, a person analyzes what he and other people are experiencing, and coordinates emotional manifestations.
Many parents notice that at the age of two, children become very violent, uncontrollable, and capricious. This is a crisis moment when the restructuring of the regulation system takes place. A transition from the external regulation system, when parents controlled the child's state and behavior, to independent control. Although this transition is not easy for both the child and the parents, after it will come another transition to a new level. The child is able to coordinate his state, plans, and intentions with other people and uses speech to regulate his behavior and the behavior of others. The next stage of restructuring the behavior system begins at the moment when the child goes to school, where he masters new social roles that require heightened self-control and regulation of behavior. At this point, the child is able to obey the rules and control impulsive behavior - for example, when he sees an attractive object and immediately wants to grab it.
Learning problems aren't always about laziness.
Children who have difficulty in learning writing, counting, or reading are often thought to be lazy or unwilling to learn. However, they may have peculiarities in the development of certain mental functions that do not allow them to easily master school skills and make this process very energy-intensive, as if they had to rake a snowdrift with a tablespoon.
Learning disabilities are included in the International Classification of Diseases and are defined as developmental disorders that arise from an impairment in the processing of cognitive information, which is largely the result of biological dysfunction. There are two types of classification to learning difficulties. The first is based on school subjects: difficulties in mastering reading (dyslexia), writing (dysgraphia), and counting (dyscalculia). The second is related to the analysis of the mechanisms of problems. Neuropsychologists found out about the underdevelopment of what functions leads to similar difficulties. In a child with insufficiently developed programming and control functions in mathematics, we will see repetitions when writing numbers and signs. In writing tasks, the child can repeat or skip letters and syllables, write words together, or start sentences with lowercase letters.
Children with weakness in the right hemispheric functions that manage the processing of visual-spatial information often have poor handwriting, it is difficult for them to visualize a sheet of paper, they may confuse similar letters. Children with auditory processing problems often confuse similar-sounding consonants: B and P, D and T.
Dyslexics children suffer from a function related to speech, which only affects the reading, - the ability to distinguish individual sounds in a speech that can be correlated with the letters. To a person who can write in a language with alphabetic writing, it seems that the word "cat" is divided into separate sounds. But if we put these sounds together, we will not get words. A dyslexic hears and perceives a word as one sound. If you ask him to swap the first sounds of words, he will not accomplish this task, or it will be challenging for him to do it. Dyslexia is well inherited. One of the ways to rehabilitate dyslexia is the correct step-by-step learning to read.
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