Cognitive Development: Building a Foundation for Language

Howard Gardner developed his theory of multiple intelligences to recognize that humans have several types of intelligences. This theory has significantly influenced educational practices by recognizing that children learn differently and through many avenues.

Jean Piaget came to understand that many actions of living creatures are adaptations to their environments and that these actions help creatures organize their environments.

1. According to Piaget, four basic concepts underlie cognitive organization: schema, assimilation, accommodation and equilibrium.

2. Humans continually use assimilation and accommodation to accept new stimuli, reshape existing schemata and create new schemata throughout their lives.

Piaget described four stages of intellectual development from birth through late adolescence: sensorimotor intelligence, preoperational thought, concrete operations, and formal operations.

1. Each stage builds on the preceding stage so that development is a continuing process of qualitative changes in a person’s schemata.

The six substages of the sensorimotor stage prepare children for the challenges and expressive opportunities inherent in speech and language development.

1. We need to consider how perception works with cognition in helping establish a foundation for language. Perception refers to the processes by which the person selects, organizes, integrates and interprets sensory stimuli.

   1. Distancing is a basic perceptual principle affecting those cognitive changes that apparently precede and lay the foundation for language acquisition. This principle allows children to relate to stimuli from a greater and greater distance and ultimately moves the child’s experience with her environment from her hands and mouth to her brain.

   2. Language represents the ultimate perceptual distance. The ability to use words in place of things is called

2. Three concepts and three behaviors that Piaget believed are central to increasingly advanced intellectual functioning as children change. See Table 3.3 on p. 69 for a summary of the development of each concept and behavior throughout each substage.

   1. Concepts: object permanence, causality, means/end

   2. Behaviors: imitation, play, communication

3. Piaget did not have access to modern research methodologies, so his theories were based on observations. Today’s researchers have tried to verify Piaget’s observations about what happens during the sensorimotor stage and when.

   1. There is consensus that Piaget’s general time frame for the maturity of cognitive abilities is, for the most part, on target.

   2. Results suggest that children exhibit some cognitive abilities at much earlier stages than Piaget indicated.

   3. It seems fair to conclude, based on recent research evidence, that early knowledge is not the product of sensorimotor experiences only, that some cognitive abilities are genetically determined, and that others may be influenced at least as much by innate perceptual abilities and experiences as by direct environmental contact.

4. Table 3.6 on p. 86 contains a brief summary of key events of cognitive development that are related, or appear to be related, to language development.

5. Piaget’s higher cognitive stages include continued cognitive attainments with relationships to language. Clues to the knowledge and skills in thinking and language that are expected from children, as well as attained by children, are offered if their curricula are investigated.

6. Whereas Piaget believed that the child operates independently to construct knowledge through her actions on the environment, especially during the early stages of cognitive development, Vygotsky was convinced that the child’s cognitive development is heavily influenced by her environment and by her culture from the very beginning of knowledge acquisition. Another basic difference between Piaget and Vygotsky is that, rather than the predictable stage-by-stage manner of cognitive development that Piaget proposed, Vygotsky argued that while each child experiences progressive changes in the way she thinks and behaves as a cognitive creature, the progression is continuous rather than stage-by-stage.

7. Vygotsky’s view of intellectual development is generally consistent with the dominant view of language development today, the social interactionist view.

8. Vygotsky believes that human children are born with fundamental cognitive and perceptual abilities, including capacities for memory and attending. The nature of cognitive development changes radically, however, as soon as the child can mentally represent the environmental phenomena he is experiencing.

   1. This mental representation includes, as a primary component, language.

   2. Once private speech is developed, the child’s mental abilities will be shaped into the higher-order cognitive processes on an intelligence that clearly separates human beings from animals with lesser cognitive abilities.

      1. Piaget referred to this self-directed talk as egocentric speech, which he believed is nonsocial and relatively purposeless.

      2. Vygotsky believed that when children speak to themselves, they are guiding themselves through their actions. Private speech is a first step toward more elaborate cognitive skills.

      3. As the child gets older, the nature of self-directed talking changes.

      4. The weight of the research evidence relative to self-directed talking comes down heavily on the side of Vygotsky.

   3. Vygotsky believed that children learn how to do things, and they learn how to process their thoughts in ways that appropriately reflect the culture in which they live, by interacting with adults who already know how things should be done and how to think in ways that are culturally acceptable. These tasks fall into what is called the zone of proximal development.

      1. Within this zone are those tasks with which the child needs help, and the help typically comes in the form of language.

      2. Researchers have identified at least two attributes of these dialogues they believe are crucial in transferring the adult’s cognitive competence to the child’s cognitive development: intersubjectivity and

   4. According to the dynamic systems theory, the uniqueness of each child and his environment is particularly important in development of cognition. The real-time interactions of all the components of the child and his environment have an additive effect where context-specific interactions in the past and present set up the conditions for subsequent interactions.

      1. The shape bias explains that young children generalize novel names to new instances that match in shape, which helps children learn new words.

   5. Perception refers to the processes by which a person selects, organizes, integrates and interprets the sensory stimuli received. Perception cannot be completely separated from cognition.

      1. Children perceive sensory information and store and use those characteristics, such as shape, when responding to new experiences.

      2. Visual and tactile stimuli play a great role in establishing the bond between adult and child.

         1. Vision is the first sensory system children control. Some have concluded that the child is genetically preprogrammed for visual coupling with his mother while being fed, and infants show strong interest in the human face.

         2. There has been much speculation about what joint attention might suggest about bonding in the child/caregiver relationship.

            1. Research has shown that as infants, children with autism frequently show disturbances of visual attention and gaze patterning.

         3. Children seem to be especially attracted to sound, especially the human voice and speech. Research shows that infants show a greater interest in human speech than in other noises.

         4. Newborn infants have significant perceptual abilities, including the ability to distinguish between speech and non-speech sounds, a preference for speech, recognization of his mother’s voice very early, and awareness of differences between sounds to which he was exposed while in the uterus and sounds to which he was not exposed.

         5. Children and adults use both auditory and visual information to determine speech sounds, although language experience impacts auditory-visual speech perception.

            1. The McGurk effect allows for an example of this relationship.

         6. Executive functions refer to a set of control processes in the human brain that allow us to maintain attention, inhibit irrelevant associations and use working memory. Interrelationships between executive functions, language and academic skills are complex and not well understood, but associations have been made between executive functions and social competence, moral conduct, school readiness and theory of mind.

            1. Attention and memory co-occur in any learning situation and language is highly associated with attention and working memory.

               1. Difficulties in controlled attention and working memory result in poor performance when attention must be divided.

            2. Research about the relationship between bilingual experience and executive function indicates that bilingual children are more advanced in their ability to focus attention in the presence of competing information.

            3. The development of executive function and language have been associated with advances in theory of mind.

               1. There is some evidence that bilingual speakers have advanced theory of mind in comparison to monolingual preschoolers.

            4. Research suggests that bilingualism does not adversely affect cognitive development but, in fact, strengthens it. Bilingual children perform better than monolingual children on a number of cognitive tasks, including selective attention, forming concepts and reasoning analytically. In addition, children who speak two or more language are more cognitively agile or flexible than children who speak just one language.

            5. There is disagreement about what might happen in the earliest phases of development if the child is exposed to two or more languages.

               1. According to the limited capacity hypothesis, the child has the innate ability to acquire one language completely, but she does not have the ability to acquire two or more languages simultaneously without suffering some reduction in competence in one or both languages.

               2. An opposing view is that the child does have the cognitive capacity to acquire two languages at the same time with no ill effects.

            6. The differences between a subtractive bilingual environment versus an additive bilingual environment might affect the impact of acquiring two languages on cognition.

            7. Language competence is an important prerequisite to learning to read, so it is particularly difficult for bilingual children whose first or second language is weak to learn to read effectively in the weak language.