23rd November 2023

Cognitive and Language Development

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Rather than attempting to explain individual differences (why some children are more intelligent than others), Piaget was interested in how intelligence changes as children grow. He called this genetic epistemology. According to Piaget, cognitive development occurs through the interaction of innate capacities with environmental events and progresses through a series of hierarchical, qualitatively different stages. These stages, he thought, were invariant (all children pass through these stages in the same sequence) and universal (stages are the same for everyone irrespective of culture). The principal cognitive structure that changes when a child passes through these stages is called schema, which, in other words, is the basic building block or the unit of intelligent behaviour. Underlying the schema changes are the processes of assimilation, accommodation and equilibration. 

Assimilation is how we incorporate new information into the existing schemas. In other words, when we assimilate, we do not change or ‘stretch’ the existing schema. For example, babies will reflexively suck a nipple and other similar objects, such as a finger. But to learn to suck from a bottle or to drink from a cup, the initial sucking reflex must be modified through accommodation. Accommodation is the process of changing the schema to fit the new information. Equilibration, conversely, is the process of seeking the ‘mental balance’ that the child attains by fitting the world into its existing schema (assimilation) or changing its schema to fit the world (accommodation). 

Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development

Sensorimotor stage of cognitive development – subdivisions

Key concepts in different stages of cognitive development

Sensorimotor

Object permanence – The critical achievement of the sensorimotor stage is the development of object permanence. This entails the child’s ability to understand that objects have an existence independent of the child’s involvement with them. Children learn to differentiate themselves from the world and are able to maintain a mental image of an object, even when it is not present and visible. When an object is dropped in front of them, they look down to the ground to search for the object. The attainment of object permanence marks the transition from sensorimotor to the preoperational stage of cognitive development. The ‘Hiding object’ experiment is associated with this stage, which is related to object permanence.

Symbolisation – At about 18 months, infants begin to develop mental symbols and to use words, a process known as symbolisation. Infants are able to create a visual image of a ball or a mental symbol of the word ball to stand for or signify the real object.

Preoperational

Deferred imitation – This is the ability to imitate or reproduce something that’s been perceived but is no longer present.

Representational play – Make-believe play involves using one object as though it were another.

Semiotic function – With this ability, children can represent something – such as an object, an event or a concept – with a signifier that serves a representative function. Drawing is a semiotic function initially done as a playful exercise but eventually signifying something else in the real world.

Children in the preoperational stage can not deal with moral dilemmas; they have a sense of immanent justice, the belief that punishment for bad deeds is inevitable. Children also use a type of magical thinking called phenomenalistic causality, in which events that occur together are thought to cause one another (e.g. thunder causes lightning, and bad thoughts cause accidents). In addition, children use animistic thinking, which endows physical events and objects with life-like psychological attributes such as feelings and intentions. Preoperational children are egocentric; that is, they see the world from their own standpoint and can not appreciate that other people might see things differently. The ‘Swiss mountain scene’ test was used to demonstrate egocentrism in preoperational children. 

Concrete operational

Egocentric thoughts are replaced by operational thoughts, which involve dealing with a wide array of information outside the child. Therefore, children can now see things from someone else’s perspective. They also begin to use limited logical thought processes and can serialise, order and group things into classes on the basis of common characteristics.

Syllogistic reasoning – Where the logical conclusion is formed from two premises; for example, all horses are mammals, and all mammals are warm-blooded. Therefore, all horses are warm-blooded.

Conservation – It entails the ability to recognise that although the shape of the objects may change, the objects still maintain or conserve other characteristics that enable them to be recognised as the same. For example, if a ball of clay is rolled into a long, thin shape like a sausage, concrete operational children recognise that each shape contains the same amount of clay.

Formal operational

The stage is so named because the young person’s thinking begins to operate in a formal, highly logical, systematic, and symbolic manner. This stage is characterised by the ability to think abstractly, to reason deductively, and to define concepts. 

Hypothetico-deductive thinking – This is the highest organisation of cognition that enables persons to make a hypothesis or proposition and test it against reality. Deductive reasoning moves from the general to the particular and is a more complicated process than inductive reasoning, which moves from the particular to the general.

Implications of Piaget’s theory

• Hospitalised children in the sensorimotor stage have not achieved object permanence. Therefore, they can benefit immensely when they can have their parents stay with them during a hospital admission, relieving their separation anxiety. 
• Children in the preoperational stage do not understand cause and effect; they may interpret physical illness as punishment for bad thoughts or actions. They also lack the concept of reversibility. They find it difficult to understand that broken bones mend or shed blood is replaced.
• Adolescents may appear overly abstract, which is a normal developmental outcome rather than pathological. Adults, on the other hand, may regress cognitively as well as emotionally under stress. Their thinking can become preoperational, egocentric, and sometimes animistic.
• Piaget’s theory has implications in psychotherapy, especially important in cognitive therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy and developmentally-based psychotherapy.
• In education, concepts of readiness (limits set on learning by a child’s developmental stage), curriculum (what should be taught) and teaching method (how it should be taught) are reliant on Piaget’s model of cognitive development.

References

• Sadock, B. J., & Sadock, V. A. (2007). Kaplan & Sadock’s synopsis of psychiatry: Behavioural sciences/clinical psychiatry (11th ed.). Wolters Kluwer. 
• Gross, R. (2020). Psychology: the science of mind and behaviour (8th ed.). Hodder.
• Piaget, J. (1973) the child’s conception of the world. Paladin.

Other Theories of Cognitive Development

Vygotsy’s theory

Vygotsky agrees with Piaget that development does not occur in a vacuum – knowledge is constructed as a result of the child’s active interaction with the environment. However, for Piaget, that environment is asocial. Vygotsky described the development of a child as largely related to the different cultural tools handed down to them by other people. Hence, cognitive development is thoroughly social (social constructivist theory). His aim was to spell out how the higher mental functions of a child, like reasoning, understanding, planning and remembering, arise out of the child’s social experiences. He considered cognitive development in terms of three levels – cultural, interpersonal and individual.

• Children inherit cultural tools of different kinds, technological (clocks, bicycles, computers and other physical objects), psychological (symbols, language, maths and science, for example) and values (speed, efficiency, power, etc.). The most essential cultural tool is language.
• On an interpersonal level, the ability to reason and think for ourselves is essentially a social process. For Vygotsky, cognitive development involves an active internalisation of problem-solving processes that take place as a result of mutual interaction between children and those with whom they have regular contact with, for example, parents, friends, teachers, etc. 

The concept of a zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding are important parts of Vygotsky’s model. ZPD defines those functions that are in the process of maturing – ‘buds and flowers rather than fruits of development’. Scaffolding is the guidance and support adults provide to help the child attain knowledge and skills. 

Bruner’s theory

Jermome Bruner extended Vygotsky’s ideas and applied them in the context of education. He agreed with Piaget that children are actively curious, explorative and capable of adapting to their environment, and their underlying cognitive structure matures over time so they can think about and organise their world in increasingly complex ways. Like Vygotsky, Bruner stressed interpersonal communications, the impact of culture and the role of language in this process of maturation.

Information-processing approach

The information-processing (IP) approach sees development as occurring quite independently of social interaction. This approach grew out of Piaget’s theory and in contrast to theories by Vygotsky and Bruner. They believe there are psychological structures in people’s minds that explain their behaviour and are essentially independent of the individual’s social interactions, social practices and cultural environment. The merit of this approach is that it examined more closely than Piaget how major cognitive processes like memory and attention come into play when children deal with particular tasks and problems.

References

• Sadock, B. J., & Sadock, V. A. (2007). Kaplan & Sadock’s synopsis of psychiatry: Behavioural sciences/clinical psychiatry (11th ed.). Wolters Kluwer. 
• Gross, R. (2020). Psychology: the science of mind and behaviour (8th ed.). Hodder.
• Schaffer, H.R. (2004) Introducing Child Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Language Development

‘Language is a set of arbitrary symbols which, taken together, makes it possible for a creature with limited power of discrimination and a limited memory to transmit and understand an infinite variety of messages.’ – Roger Brown

Language has a set of rules in grammar, which consists of phonology, semantics and syntax. 

• Phonology – A language’s sound system. Basic sounds are called phones (or phonetic segments). English has 46 phones (Solso, 1995).
• Semantics – The meaning of language – Morphemes are a language’s basic units of meaning and consist mainly of words. Other morphemes are prefixes (such as ‘pre’ and ‘re’) and suffixes (word endings such as ‘s’ to make it plural).
• Syntax – Combining words into phrases and sentences. One example of syntax is word order, which is crucial for understanding language development. 

Stages in language development

It is generally agreed that language development follows a universal timetable, irrespective of the culture or languages spoken. All children pass through these stages at around the same ages. But language is slower to develop in boys, in twins, in large families, in those from lower social classes and in those that lack speech stimulation, e.g. deaf and neglected children. 

Prelinguistic stage (0-12 months)

In their first year, babies are prelinguistic. They make various sounds with their vocal organs (including crying) long before they can talk. By 1 month, babies are able to distinguish between phonemes (such as ‘ba’ and ‘pa’) and other sounds even though these may be acoustically almost identical. This perceptual ability (categorical speech perception) is probably innate. By six weeks, the child starts cooing. By six months, babbling is seen. Babbling is the repetitive production of speech sounds. Spontaneous babbling refers to the situation when the child enjoys making these sounds alone. All babies around the same age, irrespective of the culture, start bubbling. Even the deaf babies of the deaf-mute parents start babbling but stop at 9 to 10 months. The phonemic expansion refers to the expansion of the production of phonemes even if such phonemes are not seen in the native language.

One-word stage (12-18 months)

By the age of one, children produce their first words. Earliest words are context-bound – sometimes, they do not have any communicative purpose but are used as performatives to refer to actions. A child says ‘teddy’ only when the teddy is thrown up into the air while playing; thus, teddy refers to the ‘throwing’ action rather than the doll. In this stage, the child is holophrastic. In holophrastic speech, a single word is used to convey a much more complex message, such as ‘milk’ is used to convey ‘I want milk’ or ‘I have spilt my milk’.

Stage of two-word sentences

Like one word stage, two word stage is universal, Brown (1973) divides the two-word stage into stage one grammar and stage two grammar. 

Stage one grammar (18-30 months)

Here, the child’s speech is essentially telegraphic. Only those words that convey the most information are used. Purely grammatical terms such as verb ‘to be’ plurals and possessives are omitted. For example, children will say ‘there cow’ to convey the underlying message ‘there is a cow’. At this age, adults interact with children in a ‘motherese’ – short, simple, paraphrased language directed at infants. An important characteristic of telegraphic speech is maintaining a rigid ‘word order’ to seemingly preserve the word’s meaning. Word order is not as rigidly maintained in adult speech. 

Stage two grammar (30 months – 4/5 years)

At this stage, the child’s vocabulary grows rapidly, and sentences become longer and more complex. Stage two grammar begins with using purely grammatical words like the use of ‘to be’ verbs and conjunctions. By the age of 5, children usually speak grammatically correctly, imitating adults. By the age of 13, English-speaking children have a vocabulary of 20,000 words, and by the age of 20, this will have risen to 50,000 or more. 

Summary

6 weeks – Cooing.

3 months – Babbling.

12 months – Speaks two to three words.

18 months – Speaks up to 40 words.

24 months – Telegraphic speech, vocabulary of more than 240 words.

60 months – Language like adults.

Theories of language development

Operant conditioning theory

According to B.F. Skinner, verbal behaviour evidently came into existence when, through a critical step in the evolution of the human species, the vocal musculature became susceptible to operant conditioning. He argued that prelinguistic vocalisations like cooing and babbling were inborn, but adults shape the baby’s sound into words by reinforcing those that approximate the form of real words. Through selective reinforcement, correct grammar is reinforced, and incorrect grammar is ignored. He also believed that imitation plays an important role in babies’ language acquisition.

LAD theory

Although language cannot develop without some form of environmental input, Noam Chomsky believes that environmental factors could never explain language development adequately. He proposed the existence of an innate language acquisition device (LAD), whereby children are born already programmed to formulate and understand all types of sentences even though they have never heard them before. Chomsky’s theory led some researchers to believe there are ‘language genes’ in humans; unfortunately, no such search has been fruitful yet. The concept of transformational grammar (TG) is part of Chomsky’s theory; TG entails knowing how to transform a sentence’s meaning into the words that make it up (and vice versa).

Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) 

According to Bruner, learning a language consists of learning not only the grammar of a particular language but also how to realise one’s intentions by the appropriate use of that grammar. The emphasis on intent requires a far more active role from adults in helping the child’s language acquisition. Adults, primarily mothers, provide the input for LAD, and she herself acts as a LASS. 

Sociolinguistic theory of language codes

Basil Bernstein’s sociolinguistic theory of language codes refers to discrete ‘codes of language’. It primarily examined the ‘elongated’ and ‘restricted’ codes and how these were used in significantly different ways in households of different social classes, with ‘working class’ households almost exclusively using the restricted code. Restricted language code is characterised by short, incomplete sentences, which tend to be context-dependent, focus on the present, and have little room for expressing abstract thinking. The elaborate language code is characterised by longer, complex sentences that are context-independent. It focuses on the past and future and allows for the expression of abstract thought. 

References

• Gross, R. (2020). Psychology: the science of mind and behaviour (8th ed.). Hodder. 
• Sadock, B. J., & Sadock, V. A. (2007). Kaplan & Sadock’s synopsis of psychiatry: Behavioural sciences/clinical psychiatry (11th ed.). Wolters Kluwer. 
• Gross, R (2012). Key studies in Psychology (6th ed.). Hodder.