Today our topic of discussion is- Processing sensory information
Processing sensory information
The ability to organize sensory input for use is known as ‘sensory processing’. It allows children to communicate effectively with the
world. When a child starts to discover the world, they experience several different sensory inputs. Their senses are coming alive. The knowledge continues to flow through their senses. They begin to learn to how to coordinate and act on this knowledge (Ayers, 1972). It helps to develop particular areas like-
– take information through all the senses
– organize and interpret all sensory information
– answer the detail in a purposeful manner.
For instance, if someone bumps to something, sensory system quickly organizes and interprets the information and responds by shifting body weight to maintain balance. A healthy sensory system is a prerequisite to intelligence, academic learning and social behaviour.
Sensory perception and both internal & external senses help us navigate our world (Hoyer & Plude, 1980).
The following categories (which were coded on the basis of the participant children’s activities) can be discussed under the theme ‘processing sensory information’ which is an integrated part of child cognitive development.
(a)Pretend play
(b)Using gestures and facial expressions
(c) Rote learning
(d)Shapes and colour recognition
(e)Picture recognition
(f)Sleep talking
a)Pretend play: Pretend play or make believe play represent a vital traits of a child’s cognitive and social development. It involves playful manipulation of ideas and emotions.
Children engage themselves in pretend play from the age 2 to 6 or seven years old.
Hughes (2010) in his study demonstrates that children take on diverse roles through pretend play, which gives them the unique opportunity to develop social skills (such as communication, problem solving and empathy). Russ (2004) in a longitudinal study found that early imaginative play is associated with increased creative performance in future. Pretend play increases child’s cognitive flexibility and creativity.
The following data are the examples of child pretend play collected during the observational period of this research-
• Child Anna-
-Anna plays with her dolls and pretends to be their mother. When Anna cries her parents take her to lap. Like that, Anna sometimes brings her doll to her father and says. C:/baba beibi kaḍche, okekolenao to./=(The baby is crying, please take her to your
lap.)
-Anna takes a veil (dupatta), wraps a doll with it and keeps it on her lap. Then she says – C:/amar koleiſſak ſuyeace./- (Ishraaq is sleeping on my lap. Ishraaq is Anna’s cousin
brother.)
-Anna makes imaginary things out of building blocks and gives them names. Like, she made a lollipop (kind of) shaped thing and said to her brother-
C:/baiya ajo ei ciken ta kao./= (Brother please come and have this chicken). Similarly,
she makes imaginary house, snake, and table with blocks every day.
-Anna spends hours playing with her new “toy kitchen. She makes food in it, sometimes
brings real rice from the kitchen, and pretends cooking it. For her kitchen she asks for things like-chopping board, knife, onions, pans with leads, vegetables, glasses, plates, dust bin, coffee, tea etc. Everyday she takes a different doll from her toy shelf and makes it her guest. She pretends to serve and make them eat what she has cooked.
C:/bofo fobai khabar dibo./=(Everybody take your seats please, I will serve food.)
Child Sunny-
-Sunny took two big bowls and one spoon, then called K to show him that he can cook with them. K asked Sunny what he was cooking, he said,
C:/ran, hamba/=(leg piece of the cow, maybe he saw that in his grandparents’ place). -Sunny plays with his toy animals and broken toy parts a lot.
He tries to arrange a race between animals and cars. Sometimes Sunny parks cars in one long line, he says he is parking them in the garage.
-He draws round or almost round shape and calls it a /bhut/= (ghost), and if he draws shirt
and pant over it, he calls it /baba/= (Father).
-Sunny speaks very little and uses gestures more; his pretend plays are mostly soundless plays. So a person who is observing him has to comprehend most of his pretend playsby seeing what he is doing
Child Ikra-
-Ikra plays with her dolls and tries to do things that her mother does with her.
C:/afo mata thik kore muc’e dei./= (Let me wipe your head properly.)
C:/aro ektu kao nahole rag korbo./=(Eat a little more or I’ll be angry.)
C:/moja hoyeche khabar?/=(Is the food tasty?) etc.
-She refers to all the girl dolls as her daughter and boy dolls as a son. Ikra imitates their mother-daughter joint activities through her play.
C:/norco kæno cul acranor fomoy?/=(Why are you moving your head so much when
I am combing your hair?)
She tells to her dolls-C:/darao tomar fidar ta ani./=(Wait, let me bring your feeding
bottle). She even hugs them with great love and pampers them like the way her mother
pampers her.
• Child Fuko-
-When Fuko was 1 and half years old, he used to take cell phone (he found near him) and acted as if he was talking to someone-
C:/hao, ke?/(Hello, Who is it?). He used to do the same thing every day. At that time he could not talk fluently, but he imitated and acted out things that attracted him from his surrounding environment.
• Child Simmy-
Simmi sometimes pretended as if she was one of the Barbie princesses from the Disney “Princess’ cartoon. She has long gowns, she asks her mother to give her one of them, and then she becomes the princess and acts out like the characters of that cartoon.
When Simmy turned four, she wore her grandmother’s saree and pretended to be her grandmother. She used to tell her mother-
C:/mom, ami to didar moto hoye gelam./= (Mom, I am looking like grandmother.)
She becomes happy if her mother agrees that she is looking like her mother or any other person she pretends to be. During the observation sessions I realized that children who were more extroverts and out spoken spent time in pretend plays more.
Moreover, children who spent more quality time with his/her parent (or parents) showed diversities in creativity and pretending. When I was interviewing the parents, Ikra’s mother told that Ikra’s pretend play expanded and depended on her day today experiences.
Now she plays imitating the experiences gathered from everyday observations of her surrounding environment and their foreign country visits. Ikra’s mother said when they returned from Malaysia, Ikra’s brother pretended to be an immigration officer and Ikra became a passenger.
Ikra’s brother was asking for passport and Ikra pretended to be taking it out from her side bag. Again, Ikra was a toy store cashier and her brother acted as a customer, buying toys for his children. In these cases, both of the children pretended to play the characters they have already experienced in their lives.
Research has shown that the children’s environments foster pretend play early and frequently. Parents who speak to their children about the features of nature and social problems on a regular basis, or who read or tell stories at bedtime seem to be more likely to foster pretend play (Shmukler, 1981; Singer & Singer, 2005). So, it can be said that children who explore the world more, gather more experiences and their imaginary plays become more creative and diverse.
b) Using gestures and facial expressions:
Gesture is a non-verbal means of expression that involves hands, arms and other parts of body motions. It doesn’t only complement language development but also enhances child’s ability to communicate. Gesture is a bridge from pre-verbal communication to speech (Singleton & Saks, 2015).
When children are stuck in conveying a message or a thought because of limited vocabularies, gestures allow them to easily express it. Gesture begins at around 10 months of age, when infants are not yet able to produce intelligible speech (Bates et al., 1989).
Research shows that early use of gestures later helps to improve the development of children’s vocabulary child’s vocabulary; it also found that children’s gesture tends to continues to precede and predict the development of children’s language when they reach the two word stage; thus gesture and speech combination accurately predict the first two word combination utterance’ stage (Rowe & Goldin- Meadow, 2009).
Among the two types of gestures (informative and communicative) children usually use communicative gestures as they are intentionally and meaningfully produced to modify speech. Indexical (deictic) and iconic (lexical) gestures are the two most frequently used gesture types that help children to intensify their speech; such as- pointing ‘this’ and “that”, expressing feelings of cold or hot etc.
I have observed that, all the participating children use gesture frequently with their everyday language communication without any extra effort. Since 9 months and above, they started using gestures and it is continued even after they turned five, but in different forms, it became a part of their day to day language expression still today in different stages and forms. It is a part of their day to day language expressions and it did not require any special
attention either. Whenever they lack in verbal language production (starting from pre- linguistic stage), they substituted or added hands or body gestures and facial expressions along.
Ikra’s mother said that when Ikra was one year old, she couldn’t always make others understand what she wanted.
Then she used hand gestures with meaningless or single word utterances. Like- if she saw someone drinking water and she also wanted to have it too, she pointed to the person and made sounds like “uh!” or “umm’. Now she is five years old and she can describe events or incidents and tell stories, while she talks, she uses lots of gestures and facial expressions to make others understand the story or the incident better.
Like, if she wants to say that the playing area was too big, she would spread her hands out to make the appropriate size or raise her eyebrows to express her amusement.
Child Anna also used (still uses) lots of gestures.
Most of the times (age 2 years and above) Anna did not answer to questions in words. She used gestures and body languages. Like, if mother asked her how she brushes her teeth, she opened her mouth and showed with her fingers how the brush moves.
Similarly, she would show how hair is combed, food is taken, how she splashes water with a mug when she takes bath etc. Now when she is five and half years old, gestures are integral part of her language use. It might be telling stories, describing anything or explaining something.
For example, if she bumps her head and hurt herself in her parents’ bedroom, she would go to that room and stand on that particular place to show others how she hurt herself with that object.
Though my observations show that early use of gestures are not as specific, clear, neat or expressive like gestures become later at the age of 2.5 or above. But gestures complete any expressions and meanings take absolute form when children use gestures with
Simmi’s mother told that she also talks in sleep and she talks about mobile games of (‘girls’ dress up’), what her sisters tell her, what did they do during the day, how will she become like them when she will grow up etc.
Simmi’s elder sister loves to dress up nicely and does face make up too, Simmi follows her and her sleep talk reflects that too. Mro’s mother said that he shouts at night ‘where is my car?’ as he has fascination of toy cars.
It can be concluded by saying that, children talks in sleep about their everyday activities and what they experiences mainly. I have seen that children who have elder siblings differ in their subject matters of sleep talks (as Anna or Ikra).
But one thing is sure; sleep talk is environmentally and contextually influenced and characterized. Every child shows this ability of ‘sleep talking’, it is another cognitive development working on children’s thinking and memorization abilities.
Sleep talking is normal and completely a harmless developmental issue for any growing child until their sleep talk reflects their terrors or nightmares. Children’s regular terrified sleep talk is another issue and it should be taken care of differently and with care.
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