Everyday life is characterized by conscious purpose. From reaching for food todesigning an experiment, our actions are directed at goals. This purpose revealsitself partly in our conscious awareness and partly in the organization of ourthoughts and actions. Cognition is the process involved in thinking and mentalactivity, such as attention, memory and problem solving.
Much past and presenttheory has emphasized the parallels between the articulated prepositionalstructure of language and the structure of an internal code or language ofthought. In this paper I will discuss language and cognition and two famoustheorist who were both influential in forming a more scientific approach toanalyzing the process of cognitive development. Jean Piaget There are those thatsay that Jean Piaget was the first to take children`s thinking seriously. Although Piaget never thought of himself as a child psychologist his realinterest was epistemology, the theory of knowledge, which, like physics, wasconsidered a branch of philosophy until Piaget came along and made it a science(2000). Children and their reasoning process fascinated Piaget. He began tosuspect that observing how the child`s mind develops might discover the key tohuman knowledge.
Piaget`s insight opened a new window into the inner workings ofthe mind. Jean Piaget has made major theoretical and practical contributions toour understanding of the origins and evolution of knowledge. Stages of ChildhoodDevelopment In his work Piaget identified stages of mental growth. He theorizedthat all children progressed through stages of cognitive development. Hediscovered that children think and reason differently at different periods intheir lives. Piaget believed that everyone passed through a sequence of fourqualitatively distinct stages.
They are sensorimotor, preoperational, concreteoperational and formal operational. In the sensorimotor stage, occurring frombirth to age 2, the child is concerned with gaining motor control and learningabout physical objects. This stage promotes that thought is based primarily onaction. Every time an infant does any action such as holding a bottle orlearning to turn over, they are learning more about their bodies and how itrelates to them and their environment. Piaget maintains that there are sixsub-stages in the sensorimotor stage although children pass through three majorachievements. In the preoperational stage, from ages 2 to 7, the child ispreoccupied with verbal skills.
At this point the child can name objects andreason intuitively. Piaget has divided this stage into the preoperational phaseand the intuitive phase. In the preoperational phase children use language andtry to make sense of the world but have a much less sophisticated mode ofthought than adults. They need to test thoughts with reality on a daily basisand do not appear to be able to learn from generalizations made by adults. Inthe intuitive phase the child slowly moves away from drawing conclusions basedsolely on concrete experiences with objects. However, the conclusions drawn arebased on rather vague impressions and perceptual judgments.
It becomes possibleto carry on a conversation with a child. Children develop the ability toclassify objects on the basis of different criteria. At this stage childrenlearn to count and use the concept of numbers. In the concrete operationalstage, from ages 7 to 12, the child begins to deal with abstract concepts suchas numbers and relationships.
It is here that children learn mastery of classes,relations, numbers and how to reason. In this stage a person can do mentaloperations but only with real concrete objects, events or situations. Logicalreasons are understood. For example, a concrete operational person canunderstand the need to go to bed early when it is necessary to rise early thenext morning.
A pre-operational child, on the other hand, does not understandthis logic and substitutes the psychological reason, “I want to stay up. Finally, in the formal operational stage, age 12 to 15, the child begins toreason logically and systematically. The last stage deals with the mastery ofthought (Evans, 1973). A formal operational thinker can do abstract thinking andstarts to enjoy abstract thought. The formal operational thinker is able tothink ahead to plan the solution path. Finally, the formal operational person iscapable of meta-cognition, that is, thinking about thinking.
A central componentof Piaget`s developmental theory of learning and thinking is that both involvethe participation of the learner. Knowledge is not merely transmitted verballybut must be constructed and reconstructed by the learner. Piaget asserted thatfor a child to know and construct knowledge of the world the child must act onobjects and it is this action that provides knowledge of those objects (Sigel,1977). The ability to learn any cognitive content is always related to theirstage of intellectual development.
Children who are at a certain stage cannot betaught the concepts of a higher stage. Intellectual growth involves threefundamental processes: assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration. Assimilation involves the incorporation of new events into pre-existingcognitive structures. Accommodation means existing structures change toaccommodate to the new information. This dual process,assimilation-accommodation, enables the child to form schema. Equilibrationinvolves the person striking a balance between himself and the environment,between assimilation and accommodation.
When a child experiences a new event,disequilibrium sets in until he is able to assimilate and accommodate the newinformation and thus attain equilibrium. There are many types of equilibriumbetween assimilation and accommodation that vary with the levels of developmentand the problems to be solved. For Piaget, equilibration is the major factor inexplaining why some children advance more quickly in the development of logicalintelligence than do others (Lavatelli, 1973 pg 40). About Lev Vygotsky LevVygotsky, a Russian psychologist and philosopher in the 1930`s, is most oftenassociated with the social constructivist theory. He emphasizes the influencesof cultural and social contexts in learning and supports a discovery model oflearning.
This type of model places the teacher in an active role while thestudents` mental abilities develop naturally through various paths of discovery. He argued for the inclusion within psychology of the study of consciousness,however he rejected introspection as a method. He maintained that a study of themind, as opposed to just behavior, was necessary to distinguish human beingsfrom lower animals. There are some interesting facts about Lev Vygotsky. Onefact is that he was one of the earliest critics of Piaget’s theory.
Another factis that he died at age thirty-three from tuberculosis cutting his career short. And finally, his works were banned in Russia until after his death because ofhis reference to western culture. Piaget`s theories maintained that there couldbe no understanding of a child’s development if there was no understanding ofthe culture that child was raised under. He believed that thinking patterns arenot totally due to our biology; they are products of our interactions incultural situations and other social activities.
He believed that the history ofthe child and the history of the child’s culture must be understood tounderstand the child. That cognitive development occurs when childreninternalize the tools that are taught through the social interactions. It isthrough social activities that children learn cultural tools and socialinventions. These include language, counting systems, writing, art, and music.
Vygotsky maintained that adults have the responsibility to share their greatercollective knowledge with the younger generations. Vygotsky`s theories had threegeneral claims: (a) The claim that human social and psychological processes arefundamentally shaped by cultural tools; (b) The claim that higher mentalfunctioning in the individual emerges out of social processes; and (c) thedevelopmental method Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which is the conceptthat the potential of the child is limited to a specific time span. According toVygotsky`s theory the Zone of Proximal Development problem-solving skills oftasks can be placed into three categories. These are as follows: (a) thoseperformed independently by the student; (b) those that cannot be performed evenwith help; and (c) those that fall between the two extremes, the tasks that canbe performed with help from others. Vygotsky`s ZPD emphasizes his belief thatlearning is, fundamentally, a socially mediated activity.
There are two parts toZPD, scaffolding and subjectivity. Scaffolding is the help given to a child thatsupports the child-s learning. Scaffolding is similar to scaffoldingaround a building; it can be taken away after the need for it has ended. When achild is shown how to do something and, can now, accomplish this task on itsown. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is the arrival at a point of sharedunderstanding, especially when two individuals have had differing viewpoints onan issue.
The people around the student greatly affect the way he or she seesthe world. The type and quality of these tools (i. e. people) surrounding thechild greatly determine the pattern and rate of development of the child. Arguments and Comparisons Egocentric speech is contrasted with socializedspeech. In other words it is non-social, non-communicative to others.
It isspoken for the sake of saying it. It is usually found in three to five yearolds. Egocentric speech is split into three categories. They are repetition,monologue (thinking aloud) and dual/collective monologue.
Vygotsky argues thatspeech moves from communicative ?social speech¦ to inner egocentricspeech. Piaget proposes the opposite. He believes that children begin by voicinga personal dialogue and move to social speech. Piaget argues that egocentricspeech goes away with maturity while Vygotsky claims that it becomesinternalized as an adult. Vygotsky found that a child spoke egocentrically whenhe was grasping or remedying a situation. Comparisons of Piaget (PG) andVygotsky (VG) beliefs on egocentric speech are as follows: (PG)- Development ofthinking- Language moves from individual to social.
(VG)-Development ofthinking- Language moves from the social to the individual. (PG)-Egocentric Speech is simply an accompaniment to a child-s actions (VG)-Egocentric speech is not accompaniment: it helps child to reason (PG)-Egocentric speech appears first, dies out and is replaced by socialized speech(VG) – Egocentric speech is not first: it gives voice to internalized?social¦ or ?inner¦ speech. Egocentric speech doesn-twither; it evolves upwards into inner speech (PG) – Three key observations aboutegocentric speech T It is audible and not whispered T It occurs whena child thinks the others understand his egocentric talk T It occurs whenchildren act together on a task, not alone (VG)- His experiments seriouslychallenged Piaget-s three key observations about egocentric speech InThought and Language, Vygotsky (1962) analyzed Piaget’s work. Vygotsky believedthat Piaget had developed a clinical method that revolutionized the study ofchildren’s language and thought. However, Vygotsky also asserted that there weresome flaws in Piaget’s methods.
Piaget combined psychology and philosophy eventhough he tried to avoid theorizing. He overlooked the role of the child’sactivity with relation to thought processes. Vygotsky also disagreed withPiaget’s assumption that development could not be impeded or accelerated throughinstruction. In summary, Vygotsky was critical of Piaget’s assumption thatdevelopmental growth was independent of experience and based on a universalcharacteristic of stages. Vygotsky believed that intellectual development wascontinually evolving without an end point and not completed in stages as Piagettheorized. Although Vygotsky was critical of Piaget, he realized the importanceof the information that Piaget gathered.
In spite of his criticisms, Vygotskybuilt his educational theories on the strengths of Piaget’s. BibliographyEvans, R. (1973). Jean Piaget: The Man and His Ideas. New York: E.
P. Dutton& Co. , Inc Lavatelli, C. (1973). Piaget`s Theory Applied to an EarlyChildhood Curriculum. Boston: American Science and Engineering, Inc.
Piaget,Jean, (2000) Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia http://encarta. msn. com1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Vygotsky, Lev (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA. MIT PressPsychology
