PIAGET

Article 1.
Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who studied the development of
cognitive processes from infancy through adulthood. Piaget often spoke about
the relationship between cognitive development and language skills, but he was
never exclusively focused on childhood language development. Piaget's
theories have been extremely influential on psychologists studying early
childhood.

The Sensorimotor Stage

According to Piaget's theory, all children develop cognitive abilities such as
language in four stages. In the sensorimotor stage, which lasts until the child is
around 2 years old, the emphasis is on movement and physical reactions. Small
babies don't realize they can control their own bodies, so much of their play is
initially based on figuring out how to perform basic motor activities like opening
the fingers or waving the legs followed by more complex tasks like crawling and
finally walking. At this early stage in cognitive development, Piaget saw
language skills as basically physical. The baby experiments with what her
mouth can do just as she experiments with what her hands can do. In the
process she learns how to imitate some of the sounds she hears her parents
making and in what context those sounds should be made.
The Preoperational Stage
The preoperational stage begins at around 2 years and lasts until the child is 6
or 7. The defining feature of this stage, in Piaget's view, is egocentricity. The
child seems to talk constantly, but much of what he says does not need to be
said out loud. For instance, the child might describe what he is doing even
though others can easily see what he is doing. He shows no awareness of the
possibility that others have a viewpoint of their own. Piaget sees little distinction
at this stage of development between talking with others and thinking aloud.

The Concrete Operational Stage

The concrete operational stage begins around age 7 and lasts until at least age
11 or 12. At this stage, the child is capable of using logic and of solving
problems in the form of stories as long as the story deals only with facts rather
than abstract ideas. Language at this stage is used to refer to specific and
concrete facts, not mental concepts. Piaget believed that some people remain
in this stage for the remainder of their lives, even though a child in this stage
has not yet reached full cognitive maturity.
The Formal Operational Stage
The formal operational stage begins at age 11 or 12 at the earliest. At this
stage, the child can start to use abstract reason and to make a mental
distinction between her self and an idea she is considering. Children who have
reached this stage can use language to express and debate abstract theoretical
concepts such as those found in mathematics, philosophy or logic. Piaget
believed that these four stages of cognitive and linguistic development were
universal and that no children ever skipped over one of the four steps.
Article 2.
The Language and Thought of the Child
(1926)
Jean Piaget

In the same way that Alfred Kinsey spent years collecting specimens of
and writing about the gall wasp before he launched himself on the study
of human sexuality, Jean Piaget was a master of natural-world
observation before he turned his mind to human matters. As a child and
teenager the wandered the hills, streams and mountains of western Switzerland
collecting snails, and later wrote his Doctor's thesis on the mollusks of the
Valais mountains.

What he learned in these years to observe first and classify later - set him up
well for examining the subject of child thought, which had attracted plenty of
theories but not a great deal solid scientific observation of actual children.
Entering the field, his main wish was that his conclusions be drawn from the
facts, however difficult or paradoxical they seemed. Adding to his methodical
skills was for a scientist an unusually good grasp of philosophy. Child
psychology was a tangle epistemological questions, yet he decided to focus on
very down to earth issues such as 'Why does a child talk, and who is she talking
to?' and 'Why does she ask so many questions?'.

If there were answers, he knew they could benefit teachers greatly, and it was
for them mainly that he wrote The Language and Thought of the Child. As
Edouard Claparede notes in his preface, most explorers of the child mind had
focused on a quantitative nature of child psychology it was thought that
children are how they are because they have less of the mental abilities of the
adult and commit more errors. But Piaget believed that it was not a matter of
children having less or more of something they are fundamentally different in
the way they think. Communication problems exist between adults and children
not because of gaps in information, but due to the quite different ways each
have of seeing themselves within their worlds.

Why a child talks

In the opening pages, Piaget asks what he admits is a strange question: What
are the needs which a child tends to satisfy when he talks? Any sane person
would say that the purpose of language is to communicate with others, but if
this was the case, he wondered, why did children talk when there was no one
around, and why did even adults talk to themselves, whether internally or
muttering aloud? It was clear that language could not be reduced to the one
function of simply communicating thought.

Piaget conducted his research at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, opened in

1912 for the study of the child and teacher training. There he observed children
of four and six, taking down everything they said while they worked and played,
 and the book includes transcripts of their 'conversations'.

What Piaget quickly discovered and what every parent could confirm is that
when children speak, a lot of the time they are not talking to anyone in
particular. They are thinking aloud. He identified two types of speech, egocentric
and socialized. Within the egocentric type were three patterns:

Repetition speech not directed to people, the saying of words for the simple
pleasure of it.
Monologue whole commentaries which follow the child's actions or play.
Collective monologue when children are talking apparently together, yet are
not really taking account of what the others are saying. (A room of ten children
seated at different tables may be noisy with talk, but in fact are all really talking
to themselves.)

He noted that until a certain age (seven, he thought), a child has no 'verbal
continence', but must say anything that comes into his head. A kindergarten or
nursery, he wrote, is a society in which, strictly speaking, individual and social
life are not differentiated. Because the child believes themselves to be the
center of the universe, there is no need for the idea of privacy or witholding
views in sensitivity to others. The adult, in contrast, because of his comparative
lack of egocentricity, has adapted to a fully socialized speech pattern in which
many things are left unsaid. Only madmen and children, as it were, say
whatever they think, because only they really matter. It was for this reason that
a child is able to talk all the time in the presence of his friends, but never be
able to see things from their point of view.

Part of the reason for the egocentricity of the child is that a significant part of
their language involves gesture, movements and sounds. As these are not
words, they cannot express everything, so the child must remain partly a
prisoner of their own minds. We can understand this when we appreciate that
the greater an adult's mastery of language, the more likely he or she will be able
to understand, or at least be aware of, the views of others. Language, in fact,
takes a person beyond themselves, which is why human culture puts such
stress on teaching it to children - it enables them to eventually move out of
egocentric thinking.

Different thinking, different worlds

Piaget borrowed a distinction from psychoanalysis about two types of thought:

Directed or intelligent thought is that which has an aim, adapts that aim to
reality, and can communicate it in language. This thinking is based on
experience and logic.
Undirected or autistic thought involves aims which are not conscious and not
adapted to reality, based on satisfaction of desires rather than establishing truth.
The language of this sort of thinking is images, myths and symbols.

For the directed mind, water has certain properties and obeys certain laws. It is
conceived of conceptually as well as materially. To the autistic mind, water is
only relevant in relation to desires or needs: it is something that can be drunk or
seen or enjoyed

These distinctions helped Piaget appreciate the development of the child's

thought up to the age of 11. From 3-7 the child was largely egocentric and had
elements of autistic thought, but from 7 to 11 egocentric logic made way for
perceptual intelligence.

Piaget set up experiments in which children were asked to relate a story they
had been told or to explain back something, such as the working of a tap, that
had been shown to them. Before they were 7, children did not really care if the
people they were relating to understood the story or the mechanism. They can
describe, but not analyze. But from 7-8 onwards, children do not assume that
another person will know what they mean and attempt to give a faithful account
of something to be objective. Until then, a childs egocentrism does not allow
them to be objective. What they cant explain or don't know they make up. But
at 7-8 the child knows what it means to give a correct rendering of the truth
that is, the difference between invention and reality.

Piaget noticed that children think in terms of 'schemas', which allow them to
focus on the whole of a message without having to make sense of every detail.
When they hear something they do not understand, children do not try to
analyze the sentence structure or words, but try to grasp or create an overall
meaning. He noted that the trend in mental development is always from the
syncretic to the analytical to see the whole first, before gaining the ability to
break things down into parts or categorize. Prior to ages 7 or 8, the child's mind
is largely syncretic, but later develops powers of analysis which mark the shift
from the juvenile to the adult mind.

Child logic

Piaget wondered: Why do children, particularly those under 7, fantasize and

dream and use their imagination so much?

He observed that because they do not engage in deductive or analytical

thought, there is no reason to make a firm demarcation between 'the real' and
'the not real'. As their minds do not work in terms of causality and evidence,
everything seems possible.

When a child asks, 'What would happen if I were an angel?', to an adult the
question is not worth pursuing because we know it can't be real. But for a child,
anything is not only possible, it is explainable, since no objective logic is
required. To satisfy their mind, all that is required is a motivation e.g. The ball
wanted to roll down the hill, so it did. At age 6, a boy might feel that a river flows
down a hill because it wants to. A year later, he will explain it in terms of 'water
always flows downhill, so that is why the river is flowing down this hill here'.

'The world of make believe' as we so superiorly tag it, has to the younger child a
feel of cold, hard reality, because within it everything makes sense according to
its own intentions and motivations. In fact, as Piaget wryly observes, the child's
world seems to work so well that, according to its own understanding, logic is
not required to support it.

Why do many young children incessantly ask 'Why?' Because they want to
know the intention of everyone and everything, even if it is inanimate, not
realizing that only some things have intentions. Later, when the child can
appreciate that most things are caused rather than intended, her questions
become about causality. The time of a child's life before she understands cause
and effect precausality coincides with the time of egocentrism.

Adults often find it difficult to understand children because they have forgotten
that the child exists in a completely different mind in which logic plays no role.
You cannot make a child think in the same way as you before they are certain
age. At each age, a child gains a certain equilibrium in relation to their
environment. That is, the way they think and perceive at age 5 perfectly
explains their world. But that way does not do when they are 8. Just as humans
grow physically and adjust to their environment according to their bodies, so
they adjust intellectually. As Piaget puts it, need creates consciousness.

***

In later writings, Piaget explored the final stage of mental development,

beginning at age 11 or 12. The teenager's ability to reason, think abstractly,
make judgments and consider future possibilities made them essentially the
same as an adult. From this point on it was a matter of increases in ability rather
qualitative changes.

Final comments

Despite some questions about the precise timings, Piaget's stages of child
development have largely stood the test of time, and his impact on pre-school
and school education has been great.

Yet Piaget never considered himself a child psychologist, and was more
accurately a scientist focused on theories of knowledge. His observation of
children led to broader theories on communication and cognition, because what
he learned about the child's mind threw the adult's into clearer view. For
instance, it was not only children who used schemas to make sense of the
world we adults also have to accommodate and assimilate new information by
conforming it to what we know already.

Piaget invented the field of 'genetic epistemology', which means how theories of
knowledge evolve or change in relation to new information. Given that the
construction of knowledge is such a human, psychological endeavor, it made it
all the more important to be rigorously objective about the admission of new
facts. For Piaget, a person's mind is a relatively arbitrary creation, formed in
such a way that reality could be explained according to that person's own model
of the world. In education, he believed, you had to take account of these models
rather than simply shoving facts down a person's throat, otherwise information
would not be assimilated. Such a method of education resulted in dull
conformists who were uncomfortable with change, and Piaget was ahead of his
time in suggesting that we should educate people to be innovative and inventive
thinkers who were both aware of the subjectivity of their own minds, yet mature
enough to accommodate new facts. His initial experiments observing the
language and thought of the child, therefore, led to great insights into how as
adults we process knowledge and create new understanding.

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