Relationship between language and thought

• Piaget's belief


  Language depends on thought
• Piaget's suggested understanding of concept development


  1. Development of a schema

  2. Child starts to express thoughts in words
• Meaning of children using existing knowledge


  Develop their language skills
• Cognitive development


  • Children can only start to use language correctly when they have grown to a certain stage of cognitive development
  • They may be able to imitate words, but won't be "using" the word in communication until they understand it
• Piaget's theory of language development stages


  1. Sensorimotor stage

  2. Preoperational stage

  3. Concrete operational stage

  4. Formal operational stage
• Sensorimotor stage


  • Babies are discovering what their bodies can do, including ability to make sounds
  • Babies learn to copy the sounds they hear others making
• Preoperational stage


  • Children are egocentric and focused on themselves
  • They use language to voice their internal thoughts, rather than to communicate with other people
• When Piage's participants were his own children, he may have allowed his personal biases to affect his judgement
• This lack of objectivity would have effected the validity of his findings
• Because Piaget's sample was very small, and much of his research was based on observing his own children, his findings cannot be generalised because they cannot be said to apply to all children
• Paget's theory appears to match real world observations of childhood language development
• Babies may imitate words, but they are nonsense and cant use them to communicate unless they have a schema
• Children will be corrected on mistakes they make with language, this can be seen as schema development
• Piaget could be argued to have face validity
• There is not a significant amount of research evidence to support Piaget's ideas
• This is partly due to the difficulty in objectively studying internal cognitive processes such as schemas, especially in participants who cannot self report (talk)
• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has more experimental evidence, suggesting that how we think and perceive the world depends on words we use
• Concrete operational stage


  Ability to use language has developed a lot but it is only used to talk about actual, concrete things
• Formal operational stage


  Language can be used to talk about abstract, theoretical ideas
• Piaget believed that while all children move through these stages, some people do not get to the formal operational stage
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis


  Suggests that thinking depends on language, and that we can only think about concepts we are able to express in words
• If a culture's language lacks the words for a concept


  The people who only speak that language cannot understand the concept in the same way as a culture that has those words
• Language


  • May lead us to focus on certain ways of seeing and understanding things
  • May make some ways of thinking easier and more likely than others
  • May lead to memory bias, where the ability to recall or retrieve certain information is increased or decreased
• Evidence for Sapir-Whorf hypothesis


  • Studying indigenous (native) languages
  • Whorf compared Native American languages with English
  • Hopi's use of different types of words for time
  • Eskimo's large number of words for snow
• Eskimos have about the same number of words for snow as English speakers do and Whorf had never even met anyone from the Hopi tribe
• Books and instruction manuals can be translated into a completely different language without developing a whole new meaning for the reader
• People who grow up without a language, or who lose the ability to speak (such as stroke victims) are still able to think