SUPPORTING MTB-
MLE DEVELOPMENTAL
LEARNING THEORIES
Jean Piaget's Theory on Child Language
Development
From his research into children's language and
thinking, Jean Piaget based his theory on the idea
that children do not think like adults.
Piaget's theory describes the mental structures or
"schemas" of children as they develop from infants to
adults. He concluded that through their interactions
with their environment, children actively construct
their own understanding of the world.
Piaget's theory purports that children's
language reflects the development of their
logical thinking and reasoning skills in
"periods" or stages, with each period
having a specific name and age reference.
Sensory Motor Period
According to Piaget's theory, children
are bu. basic "action schemas, such
as sucking and grasping.
. During the sensory-motor period, children's language is
"egocentric": they talk either for themselves or "for the pleasure
of associating anyone who happens to be there with the
activity of the moment."
. In his book "The Language and Thought of the
Child, Piaget describes two functions of children's
language: the "egocentric" and the "socialized."
Pre Operational Period
• Piaget observed that during this period (between the
ages of 2 and 7 years), children’s language makes rapid
progress.
• The development of their mental schemas lets them
quickly "accommodate" new words and situations.
• From using single words (for example, “milk”), they begin
to construct simple sentences (for example, “mommy go
out”).
• Piaget's theory describes children’s language as
“symbolic,” allowing them to venture beyond the “here
and now” and to talk about such things as the past, the
future, people, feelings and events. During this time,
children’s language often shows instances of of what
Piaget termed “animism” and “egocentrism.
Animism and
Egocentrism
• “Animism” refers to young children's
tendency to consider everything,
including inanimate objects, to be alive.
• Since they see things purely from their own
perspective, children's language
also reflects their "egocentrism," whereby they
attribute phenomena with the
same feelings and intentions as their own.
• Piaget’s theory also describes “moral
realism” as a characteristic of
children’s language development at this stage,
since young children tend to
focus on the extent of any damage caused by
a person's actions, without
taking into account whether that person had
good or bad intentions.
The
Operational
Period
• Piaget’s theory divides this period into two
parts: the “period of
concrete operations” (7 to 11 years) and the
“period of formal
operations” (11 years to adulthood).
• According to Piaget, children’s language
development at this
stage reveals the movement of their thinking
from immature to
mature and from illogical to logical.
• Children's language also reflects their ability to
“de-centre,” or
view things from a perspective other than their
own. It is at this
point that children's language starts to become
"socialized,"
showing characteristics such as questions,
answers, criticisms
and commands.
Expert
Insight
Some experts, such as Margaret Donaldson,
Professor of
Developmental Psychology, have argued that the
clear-cut ages
and stages forming the basis of Piaget's theory are
actually
quite blurred and blend into each other. In her book,
"Children's
Minds,"
• Donaldson suggests that Piaget may have
underestimated
children's language and thinking abilities by not
giving enough
consideration to the contexts he provided for
children when
conducting his research.
Chomsky's
Stages of
Language
Development
the 1950s, Noam Chomsky’s linguistic
theories fundamentally changed the ways
in
which humans looked at language
development and use.
• Chomsky identified an innateness to
language development that previous
linguists had overlooked.
• These innate components, Chomsky
said,
affect how humans develop from
preverbal
babies into advanced language-using
adults
Innateness
Noam Chomsky published a criticism of the behaviourist
theory in 1957.
• In addition to some of the arguments listed above, he
focused particularly on the impoverished language
input children receive.
• Adults do not typically speak in grammatically complete
sentences. In addition, what the child hears is only a
small sample of language.Chomsky concluded that children must
have an inborn faculty
for language acquisition.
• According to this theory, the process is biologically
determined - the human species has evolved a brain whose
neural circuits contain linguistic information at birth.
• The child's natural predisposition to learn language is triggered
by hearing speech and the child's brain is able to interpret what
s/he hears according to the underlying principles or structures it
already contains. Chomsky did not suggest that an English child is
born
knowing anything specific about English, of course.
• He stated that all human languages share common
principles. (For example, they all have words for things
and actions - nouns and verbs.)
• It is the child's task to establish how the specific
language s/he hears expresses these underlying
principles.
Language
Development
Starts at
Birth
Chomsky proposed that all humans and
some primates have innate
predispositions
to develop the ability to use language.
• He referred to this predisposition as a
Language Acquisition Device, or LAD.
According to Chomsky, then, the first
stage
of language development occurs
immediately upon birth, when infants are
preverbal, but possess an innate LAD
that
will set them up to developing a
language.
Emerging
Language
Through
Universal
Grammar
• Chomsky also suggested that a significant
component of
humans’ LAD was something he termed a Universal
Grammar,
or UG, a sort of innate framework of rules on which
language
develops.
• As toddlers, humans start to pick up on the
language use of
those around them, organizing it according to the
rules of UG.
• For example young toddlers tend to quickly respond
to
questions with “yes” or “no,” regardless of what was
asked.
• This feature of UG suggests questions be answered
when they
are asked.
