jean piagets theory

• Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who became internationally known for his pioneering studies of the mental development of children.
• Jean Piaget defined four discrete stages of development through which a child passes.
• Jean Piaget’s fundamental assumption about children was that from birth onward they are active mentally as well as physically, and that their activity greatly contributes to their own development.
• Jean Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact to produce cognitive development.
• Jean Piaget proposed two basic functions that are central to cognitive growth: Adaptation and Organization.
• Between 2 and 3, a child identifies body parts, calls self “me” instead of name, combines nouns and verbs, has a 450-word vocabulary, uses short sentences, matches 3-4 colors, knows big and little, likes to hear the same story repeated, forms some plurals, and answers “where” questions.
• Between 3 and 4, a child can tell a story, has a sentence length of 4-5 words, vocabulary about 1000 words, knows last name, name of street, several nursery rhymes.
• Adaptation is the tendency to respond to the demands of the environment in ways that meet one’s goals.
• Organization is the tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge.
• Jean Piaget depicted development as involving both continuities and discontinuities.
• The main source of continuity in Jean Piaget’s theory are three processes: assimilation, accommodation and equilibration.
• Assimilation is the process by which people incorporate incoming information into concepts they already understand.
• Accommodation is the process by which people adapt their current understandings in response to new experiences.
• Equilibration is the process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding.
• In the Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 years), infants' intelligence develops, and is expressed, through their sensory and motor abilities.
• Infants use their sensory and motor abilities to perceive and explore the world around them.
• Throughout the sensorimotor period, infants live largely in the here and now.
• Children’s intelligence is bound to their immediate perceptions and actions.
• Infants are born with many reflexes and these reflexes and perceptual abilities are essential tools for building intelligence.
• At 8 months children manifest object permanence.
• Reflexive schemes are a substage of the Sensorimotor stage, characterized by newborn reflexes (birth to 1 month).
• Primary circular reaction is a substage of the Sensorimotor stage, where infants start to gain voluntary control over their actions by repeating chance behaviors that lead to satisfying results (1to 4 months).
• Skinner proposed that language, just like any other behavior is acquired through operant conditioning.
• As a baby makes sounds, parents reinforce those that are most like words with smiles, hugs, and speech in return.
• Some behaviorists rely on imitation to explain how children rapidly acquire complex utterances.
• Although imitation and reinforcement contribute to early language development, they are best viewed as supporting rather than fully explaining.
• Noam Chomsky was the first to recognize that even small children assume much responsibility for their own language learning.
• His theory regards the young child’s amazing language skill as etched into the structure of the human brain.
• Chomsky believed that the rules of sentence organization are much too complex to be directly taught to or independently discovered by a young child.
• Chomsky argued that all children have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a biologically based innate system that contains a set of rules common to all languages.
• It permits children, not matter which language they hear, to speak in a rule-oriented fashion as soon as they have picked up enough words.
• House in the left hemisphere of the cortex are the two language-specific structures namely the Broca’s area and the Wernicke’s area.
• Broca’s area, located in the frontal lobe, controls language production.
• Wernicke’s area, located in the temporal lobe, is responsible for interpreting language.
• As children acquire language, the brain becomes increasingly specialized for language processing.
• In recent years, new ideas about language development have arise emphasizing interactions between inner capacities and environmental influences.
• The theory stresses the social context of language learning.
• An active child, well endowed for acquiring language, observes and participates in social exchanges.
• From these experiences, children gradually build a communication system that relates the form and content of language to its social meaning.
• According to this view, native capacity, a strong desire to interact with others, and a rich language and social environment combine to assist children in discovering the functions and regularities of language.