Piaget's Three Mountains Experiment

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Piaget's Three Mountains Experiment
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Variations on Three Mountain Experiments
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Semantic Relations in Two-Word Utterances
Relationship
Example
Agents action Action object Agent
object Action locative (location) Object
locative Possessor possessed Attribute
object Demonstrative object
Baby cry Eat cookie Bobby cookie Jump stair Teddy
bed Mommy sandwich Big dog There Daddy
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2 to 5 Year Language Explosion

• Prelinguistic crying signals, gooing, cooing,
  babbling, squeals, yells, inflection by 9
  months
• Holophrastic One word means many things.
  Starts about 1 year. 40 to 50 words by 18
  months, 300 words by 2 years.
• Telegraphic Two or three word phrases (Where
  go? More milk. No bath! Big boat.
  Mommys dress.). From about 18 to 24 months.
• Stage II Grammar Includes plurals,
  overgeneralizations. From about 2 to 3 years.
• Adult-like Speech Starts at about 5 to 6 years.

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Theories of Language Acquisition

• Social Learning Theories Language acquisition
  through imitation or modeling
• Reinforcement The child is conditioned to
  perform verbal behavior. (B.F. Skinner, 1957)
• Innateness We are pre-wired or
  preprogrammed to learn language through a
  language acquisition device (L.A.D.) in the
  brain. (Chomsky)
• Combined View Includes predisposition and input
  from the environment, but the child plays an
  active, creative role in learning language.
  Perception, cognition, motor, social and
  emotional factors are all involved.

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Summary of Early Childhood Cognitive Development

• Preoperational thinking, not yet logical, unable
  to see anothers viewpoint.
• Child has gone through language explosion,
  emerging with vocabulary of over 14,000 words,
  and syntactically correct usage.