Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Chapter Five- Essay Assignment In Piaget’s theory is a general, unifying story of how biology and experience sculpt cognitive development. Piaget stressed that children actively construct their own cognitive worlds. As the infant or child seeks to construct an understanding of the world, the developing brain creates schemes. In Piaget’s theory, a baby’s scheme is structured by simple actions that can be preformed on objects, such as sucking looking and grasping. Assimilation occurs when children use their existing scheme to deal with new information or experiences. Accommodation occurs when children adjust their schemes to take new information and experiences into account. Assimilation and accommodation operate even in very young infants. Newborns reflexively suck everything that touches their lops they assimilate all sorts of objects into their sucking scheme. Organization in Piaget’s theory is the grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher- order system. Assimilation and accommodation always take the child to a higher cognitive or disequilibrium. The equilibration is the name Piaget gave to this mechanism by which children shift from one stage of thought to the next. Cognition is qualitatively different in one stage compared with another. The sensorimotor stage is the first of Piaget’s stages, which lasts from birth to two years of age. During this stage of cognitive development, infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical, motoric actions which is called “sensorimotor.” There are six substages provided by Piaget, the first substage is simple reflexes and last birth to one month old. Simple reflexes are the coordination of sensation and action through reflexive behaviors. In the first habits and primary circular reactions, is the second substage and lasts from one month to four months of age. In the first habits and primary circular reactions is the coordination of sensation and two types of schemes; habits and primary circular reactions. In the third substage or the secondary circular reactions lasts from four months to eight months. In the third substage, the infants become more object- orientated moving beyond selfpreoccupation, repeat actions that bring interesting or pleasurable results. In the fourth substage called the coordination of secondary circular reactions lasts eight months to twelve months. In the coordination of secondary circular reactions is the coordination of vision and touch- hand eye coordination of schemes and intentionality. In the fifth level of substage, the tertiary circular reactions, novelty and curiosity last twelve months to eighteen months old. In the tertiary circular reactions, novelty and curiosity infants becomes intrigued by many properties of objects and by the man things they make happens to object, they experiment with new behavior. In the internalization of schemes, the sixth substage lasts from eighteen months to twenty-four months of age. In the sixth substage the infants develop the ability to use primitive symbols and from enduring mental representations. Object permeance is the Piagetian term for understanding that objects and events continue to exist even when they cannot directly be seen or heard or touched. The data do not always support his explanation, in Piaget’s theory is an important feature in the progression into substage four which is the infants inclination to look for a hidden object in a familiar location rather than look for the object in a new location. An A-not-B error is the term used to describe this common mistake. The evidence indicates that A-not-B errors are sensitive to the delay between hiding the object at B and the infants attempt to find it. Perceptual development and expectations are arguing by a number of theorists, stating that infants perceptional abilities are highly developed at every early stage. In considering the big issues of whether nature or nurture plays the more important role in infant development. Elizabeth Spelke comes down clearly on the side of nature, a position often referred to as nativist. Spelke endorses a core knowledge approach, which states that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems. The core knowledge is the theory that infants as young as four months of age are more likely to make visually guided reaches toward a puppet who has acted as a helper, rather than toward a puppet who has acted as hinderer to other efforts to achieve such goals. In criticizing the core knowledge approach, the British development psychologists Mark Johnson says that the infants studied by Spelke and other advocates of core knowledge already have accumulated hundreds and, in some cases, even thousands of hours of experience. Language is a form of a communication whether spoken, written or signed that is bases on a system of symbols. Language consists of the words used by a community and the rules for varying and combining them. Infinite generativity is the ability to produce and comprehend an endless number of meaningful sentences using a finite set of words and rules. Phonology is the second system of the language, including the sounds that are used and how they may be combined. Phonology provides a basis for constructing a large and expandable set of words out of two or three dozen phenomes. A phoneme is the basic unit of sound in a language it is the smallest unit of sound that effects meaning. Morphology referred to the units of meaning involved in word formulation. A morpheme is a minimal unit of meaning, it is a word or part of a word that cannot be broken into smaller meaning parts. Syntax involves the way words are combined to form acceptable phrases and sentences. Semantics refer to the meaning of words and sentences. Pragmatics are a final set of language rules, are the appropriate use of language in different contexts. Kuhl’s research has demonstrated that from birth up to about six months of age, infants are “citizens of the world.” They recognize when sounds changes most of the time, no matter what language the syllables come from. Richard Allen recently emphasized that statistical learning- which involves no instruction, reinforcement, or feedback, and is a powerful learning mechanism in infant development. Long before infants speak recognizable words, and they produce a number of vocalizations. Crying begins from the beginning since birth babies in the back of the throat and usually express pleasure during interaction with the caregiver. Babbling begins usually in the middle of the first year. Infants babbling influences the behavior of their caregivers, creating social interaction that facilitates their own communicative development. Infants understanding words and language before they start speaking. As early as five months of age, infants recognize their name when someone says it. On average infants understand about fifty words at thirteen months, but they can’t say this many word until about eighteen months old can speak about fifty words and must two years old can speak about two hundred words this is called a vocabulary spurt. Broca’s area is the brains frontal lobe that is involved in speech production. An area in the brains’ left hemisphere that is involved in language comprehension in the Wernicke’s Area. Aphasia is the loss or impairment of language ability caused by brain damage. The language acquisition device or commonly known as the LAD, is Chomsky’s term that describes a biological endowment enabling the child to detect the features and rules of language, including phonology, syntax and semantics. Michael Tomaselle stresses that young children are intensely interested in their social world and that early in their development they can understand the intentions of the other people. Researchers have also found that the child’s vocabulary development is linked to the families socioeconomic status and the type of talk that parents direct to their children.