Chapter 2

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Chapter 2 Cognitive and Linguistic Development

• Supplemental Lectures

2
Piagets Preoperational Stage

• The preoperational stage emerges when the child
  is about 2 years old and continues until the
  child is about 6 or 7. Hence, we are likely to
  see characteristics of this stage in most
  preschoolers, as well as in many children in
  kindergarten and the early elementary grades. 

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• 1. Language Use of language in both social
  communication and mental representation of the
  world.
• Example A child can express his/her needs and
  desires to others.
• Example A child can think about an object
  simply by thinking about the word for that
  object.

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• 2.Preoperational egocentrism An inability to
  view situations from another persons
  perspective.
• Example Children may have trouble understanding
  why they must share their toys with a guest, or
  why they must be careful not to hurt someone
  elses feelings
• Example Children may play games together
  without ever checking to be sure that they are
  all playing according to the same rules
• Example Children may exhibit egocentric speech,
  saying things without really considering the
  perspective of the listener

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• 3. Confusion between physical and psychological
  events Confusing external, physical objects
  with ones own internal, mental ideas.
• This characteristic takes two forms
• Animism Children attribute psychological
  qualities such as thoughts and feelings to
  inanimate objects.
• Example A child who accidentally bumps his head
  on a table spanks the table to punish it.
• Example A child expresses a concern that a doll
  is sad or in pain when its leg is torn off

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Piagets Preoperational Stage 

• Realism Children believe that their thoughts
  and ideas have physical reality.
• Example A child has an imaginary playmate.
• Example A child worries that monsters and
  bogeymen lurk in the basement.
• Example A child finds nightmares realistic and
  terrifying.

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Piagets Preoperational Stage 

• 4. Lack of conservation A lack of understanding
  that, when nothing is added or taken away, amount
  stays the same regardless of alterations in shape
  or arrangement.
• Example When water is poured from a tall, thin
  glass into a short, fat one, a child believes
  that there is a different amount of water (either
  less or more) than before.

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• Example Two rows of six pennies each are placed
  in front of a child, like this
• O O O O O O
• O O O O O O
• The child agrees that both rows contain the same
  number of pennies. The pennies in the second row
  are then spread farther apart, so that the two
  rows now look like this

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• O O O O O O
• O O O O O O
• The child is now likely to say that the second
  row has more pennies than the first row because
  the coins are spread farther out or the row is
  longer. Without the realization that the number
  of objects is constant despite changes in
  arrangement (i.e., without conservation of
  number), preoperational children have a limited
  understanding of the concept of number itself.

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• 5. Centration Focusing on one dimension of an
  object to the exclusion of other dimensions.
• Example When explaining why water poured from a
  tall, thin glass into a short, fat glass is now
  less than it was before, a child says that the
  water in the first glass is taller. The child
  does not recognize that the first glass is also
  thinner and that height compensates for width.

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• Example During the conservation of number task
  just described, a child justifies the conclusion
  that the second row has more pennies by saying
  that its longer, without acknowledging that the
  pennies are also spread farther apart.
•  

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• 6. Inability to reason about transformations
  Difficulty thinking about change processes.
  Preoperational children tend to focus on static
  situations.
• Example In the conservation tasks just
  described, a child doesnt take into account the
  fact that the same amount of water was merely
  poured into a different glass and that the
  pennies in one row were simply spread farther
  apart.

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• Example A child has trouble arranging a series
  of pictures of a pencil to show its various
  positions as it is held in a vertical position
  and then allowed to fall (Sund, 1976).
• Example A child resists the idea of
  caterpillars becoming butterflies through the
  process of metamorphosis he/she may instead
  insist that the caterpillars crawled away and
  butterflies came to replace them (Harris, 1986).

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• 7. Irreversibility Difficulty recognizing that
  transformations can be undone, or reversed.
• Example A child does not comprehend that
  subtraction is the reverse of (i.e., it undoes)
  addition. The child is therefore likely to learn
  2 3 5 and 5 3 2 as two separate,
  unrelated number facts.

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Piagets Preoperational Stage

• 8. Single classification An inability to
  classify an object as being a member of two
  categories at the same time.
• Example A child is shown 10 wooden beads, of
  which 8 are brown and 2 are white. When asked,
  Are there more brown beads or more wooden
  beads? the child says that there are more brown
  beads.
• Example A child denies that a mother can also
  be a teacher.

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• In general, the preoperational stage is
  characterized by rudimentary but immature logical
  thought processes.