COGNITIVE THEORY

By L. Mukaro (PhD)
■ developed by Jean Piaget beginning about 1920.
■ Piaget observed and described children at different ages.
■ His theory is very broad, from birth through adolescence,
and includes concepts of language, scientific reasoning,
moral development, and memory.
Cognitivism

■ Emerged as a response to Behaviorism

■ Focused on the inner mental activities of human beings to understand
how people learn
■ Behaviorists saw humans as programmed animals, cognitivists viewed
them as rational beings.
■ Language acquisition is viewed in light of the child’s cognitive
development.
■ Language acquisition for Piaget is a mental and emotional process.
■ Piaget linked the development of language in a child to the child’s
cognitive development.
■ He believed that a child must have the understanding of a concept
before he can verbalize it.
■ For example, if a child says, “This car is bigger than that one”, he must
have the concept of size in his mind before commenting.
■ Piaget regarded cognitive development in a child as a pre-
requisite for language acquisition.
■ He believed that language was a way of reflecting a child’s
thought process and that language did not contribute to
development of thinking.
■ He argued that cognitive development preceded linguistic
development.
■ According to Piaget, children learn their initial rational
constructs through the environment i.e. by interaction with
other people.
■ Children develop language through a combination of
schemas (concepts for how to act and respond to the
world).
■ As these schemas gradually develop and become more
complex in the mind, language and vocabulary progress in
order for the child to handle the new schemas.
Piaget’s Assumptions About Children

■ Children construct their own knowledge in response to their

experiences.
■ Children learn many things on their own without the
intervention of older children or adults.
■ Children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need
rewards from adults to motivate learning.
■ Piaget was the first to say that children reason and think
differently at different stages in their life.
■ He believed that all children universally progress through
four different and distinct stages of cognitive development.
■ Language in children developed gradually as they move onto
the next stage.
Continuous vs. Discontinuous
Sources of continuity:
■ Assimilation: People translate incoming information into a
form they can understand.
■ Accommodation: People adapt current knowledge
structures in response to new experience.
■ Equilibration: People balance assimilation and
accommodation to create stable understanding.
Sources of discontinuity
There are distinct stages of cognitive development, with the following
properties;
■ Qualitative change: Children of different ages (and at different stages)
think in different ways.
■ Broad applicability: The type of thinking at each stage pervades topic
and content areas.
■ Brief transitions: Transitions to higher stages of thinking are not
necessarily continuous.
■ Invariant sequence: The sequences of stages are stable for all people
through all time. Stages are not skipped.
Piaget’s FOUR Stages

■ Sensorimotor Stage
■ Preoperational Stage
■ Concrete operations stage
■ Formal operations stage
Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)
■ Knowledge develops through sensory and motor abilities.
■ Children learn about physical objects and are concerned with motor skills.
Substage 1 (birth to 1 month)
■ Building knowledge through reflexes (grasping, sucking).
Substage 2 (1 to 4 months)
■ Reflexes are organized into larger, integrated behaviors (grasping a rattle and
bringing it to the mouth to suck).
Substage 3 (4 to 8 months)
■ Repetition of actions on the environment that bring out pleasing or interesting
results (banging a rattle).
Substage 4 (8 to 12 months)
■ Mentally representing objects when objects can no longer be seen,
thus achieving “object permanence.”
Substage 5 (12 to 18 months)
■ Actively and avidly exploring the possible uses to which objects can be
put: Banging a spoon or cup on high chair to make different sounds,
get attention.
Substage 6 (18 to 24 months)
■ Able to form enduring mental representations, as demonstrated by
“deferred imitation,” the repetition of others’ behaviors minutes,
hours, or days after it has occurred.
Preoperational Stage (2 – 7 years)
■ Knowledge is represented by language, mental imagery, and symbolic
thought.
■ This stage is marked by language acquisition and children develop
ability to think of symbols and forms words from ideas and vice versa.
■ Children also begin to understand concepts of time and space and of
addition and subtraction.
■ Children in this stage focus more on concrete physical situations and
have difficulty in handling abstract concepts.
■ Symbolic representations - the use of one object to stand for another.

■ Egocentrism: Looking at the world only from one’s own point of view.

■ Centration: Focusing on one dimension of objects or events and on

static states rather than transformations.
Concrete Operations Stage (7-12years)

■ Children can reason logically about concrete objects and events.

■ Children at this stage are able to group things in logical order
according to their names, numbers or sizes.
■ Children develop a much more logical and reasonable language
system.
■ They begin to understand the concepts of other people as well as
convey their own ideas and views.
Conservation concept - changing the appearance or arrangement of
objects does not change their key properties.
■ Highly abstract thinking and reasoning about hypothetical situations
still remains very difficult.
■ a child can do mental operations but only with real concrete objects,
events or situations.
Formal Operations Stage (12+)

■ Children can think deeply about concrete events and can reason
abstractly and hypothetically.
■ Ability to think abstractly and reason hypothetically.
■ Ability to reason systematically about all different outcomes.
■ Ability to engage in scientific thinking.
■ The stage is marked with the child thinking and communicating in a
more adult like manner.
So,
■ Over all Piaget argued that language basically represents a
skill of symbolic representation gradually acquired through
the stages of cognitive development.
■ Piaget’s view is in contrast of Chomsky’s theory of Universal
Grammar stating that a general mechanism in human brain
accounts for language acquisition; which he believed is far
too complex to be acquired simply through experience and
general cognitive processes.
■ Piaget believes that a child learns language by actively
participating in the learning process.
■ He was of the view that adults should assist the child by
providing appropriate props and vocabulary suiting the
child’s interest in order to facilitate the learning.
■ Piaget recommended that adults should not intervene in the
learning process without necessity.
Conclusion
■ It is evident that Piaget’s theory suggests some link
between cognitive development and language acquisition
and also explains the order in which certain aspects of
language are acquired.
But….
■ Piaget’s theory does not explain why language emerges in
the first place.