Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development and Language Emergence: An Overview, Slides of Childhood Development

Download Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development and Language Emergence: An Overview and more Slides Childhood Development in PDF only on Docsity!

THE EMERGENCE OF

THOUGHT AND

LANGUAGE

Chapter Four

LECTURE OVERVIEW

• Cognitive Development
  • Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
• Information Processing
• Vygotsky’s Theory
• Language Development

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF

COGNITIVE

DEVELOPMENT

COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

• Piaget: children are like scientists
  • exploring environment
  • forming theories
• Schemes: psychological structures that

organize experience

• relate events, objects, and knowledge
• categories: ex. food = apple, rice
• with age comes more abstract categories

EQUILIBRATION

• Assimilation and accommodation are

usually in balance

• sometimes unbalanced: too much time accommodating and not enough time assimilating - too many categories, not enough experiences - changes with experience: new “theories”
• reorganization of schemes: equilibration

PIAGET’S THEORY

SENSORIMOTOR THINKING

• 6 substages

1. Exercising Reflexes

• increase in coordination

2. Learning to Adapt

• Primary Circular Reaction: re-creation of pleasant events

3. Making Interesting Events

• Secondary Circular Reaction: novel actions that are repeated

Con’t….

4. Behaving Intentionally

• means to an end
• combining schemes

5. Experimenting

• Tertiary Circular Reaction: repeat old schemes with new objects

6. Using Symbols

• beginning of talking and gesturing
• anticipating consequences to actions

Con’t….

• Appearance as Reality: appearance is

reality

• ex. costumes, make-up
• ex. scale models
• understanding alterations to an object do not necessarily change meaning of the object

EVALUATING THEORY

• Much support for theory
• Good for teaching and fostering

development by focusing on child’s ability

• encouraging development to next level
• Some criticisms………..

Con’t….

• Consistency in Performance
  • Piaget: each stage consists of an unified set of mental structures
  • Children may be delayed on some tasks, but advanced on others while in a certain stage - suggests that do not move through a stage in a fashion that pervades all tasks

EXTENDING PIAGET’S

THEORY

• Children: Naïve theories
  • attempt to explain a large number of phenomena with one theory
• Core Knowledge Hypothesis
  • born with rudimentary knowledge of world
  • expand knowledge through experiences

Con’t….

• Naïve Biology
  • Animate objects from inanimate objects
  • Infants/Preschoolers know:
    • Movement
    • Growth
    • Internal Parts
    • Inheritance

• Healing VS.

INFORMATION

PROCESSING