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The first phase of childhood, lasting from age 3 through kindergarten, or about age 5.
Early childhood
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The second phase of childhood, covering the elementary school years, from about age 6 to 11.
Middle childhood
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The area at the uppermost front of the brain, responsible for reasoning and planning our actions.
Frontal lobes
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Physical abilities that involve large muscle movements, such as running and jumping.
Gross motor skills
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Physical abilities that involve small, coordinated movements, such as drawing and writing one's name.
Fine motor skills
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The ratio of weight to height; the main indicator of overweight or underweight.
Body mass index (BMI)
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A body mass index at or above the 95th percentile compared to the U.S. norms established for children in the 1970s.
Childhood obesity
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In Piaget's theory, the type of cognition characteristic of children aged 2 to 7, marked by an inability to step back from one's immediate perceptions and think conceptually.
Preoperational thinking
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In Piaget's framework, the type of cognition characteristic of children aged 8 to 11, marked by the ability to reason about the world in a more logical, adult way.
Concrete operational thinking
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Piagetian tasks that involve changing the shape of a substance to see whether children can go beyond the way that substance visually appears to understand that the amount is still the same.
Conservation tasks
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In Piaget's conservation tasks the concrete operational child's knowledge that a specific change in the way a given substance looks can be reversed.
Reversibility
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In Piaget's conservation tasks, the preoperational child's tendency to fix on the most visually striking feature of a substance and not take other dimensions into account.
Centering
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In Piaget's conservation tasks, the concrete operational child's ability to look at several dimensions of an object or substance.
Decentering
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The understanding that a general category can encompass several subordinate elements.
Class inclusion
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The ability to put objects in order according to some principle, such as size.
Seriation
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In Piaget's theory, the preoperational child's inability to grasp that a person's core "self" stays the same despite changes in external appearance.
Identity constancy
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In Piaget's theory, the preoperational child's belief that inanimate objects are alive.
Animism
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In Piaget's theory, the preoperational child's belief that human beings make everything in nature.
Artificialism
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In Piaget's theory, the preoperational child's inability to understand that other people have different points of view from their own.
Egocentrism
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In Vygotsky's theory, the gap between a child's ability to solve a problem totally on his own and his potential knowledge if taught by a more accomplished person.
Zone of proximal development
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The process of teaching new skills by entering a child's zone of proximal development and tailoring one's efforts to that person's competence level.
Scaffolding
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A perspective on cognition in which the process of thinking is divided into steps, components, or stages much like those a computer operates.
Information-processing theory
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In information-processing theory, the limited-capacity gateway system, containing all the material that we can keep in awareness at a single time. The material in this system is either processed for more permanent storage or lost.
Working memory
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Any frontal-lobe ability that allows us to inhibit our responses and to plan and direct our thinking.
Executive functions
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A learning strategy in which people repeat information to embed it in memory.
Rehearsal
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A learning strategy in which people manage their awareness so as to attend only to what is relevant and to filter out unneeded information.
Selective attention
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The most common childhood learning disorder in the U.S., disproportionately affecting boys, characterized by excessive restlessness and distractibility at home and at school.
Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
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In Vygotsky's theory, the way by which human beings learn to regulate their behavior and master cognitive challenges, through silently repeating information or talking to themselves.
Inner speech
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The sound units that convey meaning in a given language - for example, in English, the c sound of cat and the b sound of bat.
Phoneme
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The smallest unit of meaning in a particular language - for example, boys contains two: boy and the plural suffix s.
Morpheme
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The average number of morphemes per sentence.
Mean length of utterance (MLU)
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The ystem of grammatical rules in a particular language.
Syntax
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The meaning system of a language - that is, what the words stand for.
Semantics
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An error in early language development, in which young children apply the rules for plurals and past tenses even to exceptions, so irregular forms sound like regular forms.
Overregularization
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An error in early language development in which young children apply verbal labels too broadly - for example, all four legged animals may be called dog.
Overextension
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An error in early language development in which young children apply verbal labels too narrowly - for example, only my dog is a dog. Other people's must be called something else.
Underextension
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Recollections of events and experiences that make up one's life history.
Autobiographical memories
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Children's first cognitive understanding, which appears at about age 4, that other people have different beliefs and perspectives from their own.
Theory of mind
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