Key Child Development Terms: Definitions and Stages
Key Child Development Terms
Kangaroo Care: Method of skin-to-skin contact in which a newborn is laid face down between the mother’s breasts for an hour or so at a time after birth.
Parturition: The act or process of giving birth.
Temperament: Characteristic disposition or style of approaching and reacting to situations.
Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
Disorganized-Disoriented Attachment: Pattern in which an infant, after separation from the primary caregiver, shows contradictory, repetitious, or misdirected behaviors on his return.
Sensorimotor: Piaget’s first stage in cognitive development, in which infants learn through sense and motor activity.
Object Permanence: Piaget’s term for the understanding that a person or object still exists when out of sight.
Habituation: Type of learning in which familiarity with a stimulus reduces, slows, or stops a response.
Circular Reactions: Piaget’s term for processes by which an infant learns to reproduce desired occurrences originally discovered by chance.
Implicit Memory: Unconscious recall, generally of habits and skills; sometimes called procedural memory.
Explicit Memory: Intentional and conscious memory, generally of facts, names, and events.
Working Memory: Short-term storage of information being actively processed.
Cross Modal Transfer: Ability to use information gained by one sense to guide another.
Pre-linguistic Speech: Forerunner of linguistic speech; utterance of sounds that are not words. Includes crying, cooing, babbling, and accidental and deliberate imitation of sound without understanding their meaning.
Holophrase: Single word that conveys a complete thought.
Linguistic Speech: Verbal expression designed to convey meaning.
Telegraphic Speech: Early form of sentence use consisting of only a few essential words.
Syntax: Rules for forming sentences in a particular language.
Child Directed Speech: Form of speech often used in talking to babies or toddlers; includes slow, simplified speech, a high-pitched tone, exaggerated vowel sounds, short words and sentences, and much repetition; also called parentese or motherese.
Cooing:
Babbling
Neonatal Period: First 4 weeks of life, a time of transition from intrauterine dependency to independent experiment.
Fine Motor Skills: Physical skills that involve the small muscles and eye-hand coordination.
Autism:
Monozygotic Twins: Twins resulting from the division of a single zygote after fertilization; also called identical twins; they are genetically similar.
Germinal Stage: First 2 weeks of prenatal development, characterized by rapid cell division, blastocyst formation, and implantation in the wall of the uterus.
Embryonic Stage: Second stage of gestation (2 to 8 weeks), characterized by rapid growth and development of major body systems and organs.
Gestation: Period of development between conception and birth.
Genes: Small segments of DNA located in definite positions on chromosomes; functional units of heredity.
Down Syndrome: Chromosomal disorder characterized by moderate-to-severe mental retardation and by such physical signs as a downward-sloping skin fold at the inner corners of the eyes. Also called trisomy-21.
Attachment: Reciprocal, enduring tie between two people—especially between infant and caregiver—each of whom contributes to the quality of the relationships.
Trust vs. Mistrust
Dishabituation: Increase in responsiveness after presentation of new stimulus.
Cephalocaudal Principle: Principle that development proceeds in a head-to-tail direction, that is, that upper parts of the body develop before lower parts of the trunk.
Proximodistal Principle: Principle that development proceeds from within to without, that is, that parts of the body near the center develop before the extremities.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: Sudden and unexplained death of an apparently healthy infant.
Teratogen: Environmental agent, such as a virus, a drug, or radiation, that can interfere with normal prenatal development and cause development abnormalities.
Fetal Stage: Final stage of gestation (from 8 weeks to birth), characterized by increased differentiation of body parts and greatly enlarged body size.
DNA: Chemical that carries inherited instructions for the development of cellular forms of life.
Chromosomes: Coils of DNA that consist of genes.