Exam 12: Middle Childhood: Cognitive Development

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Answers will vary. By the age of six, the child's vocabulary has expanded to nearly 10,000 words. By seven to nine years of age, most children realize that words can have different meanings, and they become entertained by riddles and jokes that require semantic sophistication. (Remember the joke at the beginning of the section on cognitive development.) By the age of eight or nine, children are able to form "tag questions," in which the question is tagged on to the end of a declarative sentence, such as "You want more ice cream, don't you?" and "You're sick, aren't you?" (Weckerly et al., 2004).Children make subtle advances in articulation and in the capacity to use complex grammar. Preschoolers have difficulty understanding passive sentences such as "The truck was hit by the car," but children in the middle years have less difficulty interpreting them (Aschermann et al., 2004).During these years, children develop the ability to use connectives, as illustrated by the sentence "I'll eat my spinach, but I don't want to." They also learn to form indirect object-direct object constructions (e.g., "She showed her sister the toy.").