Language, Thought and Communication

• Piaget's theory: language depends on thought
• Piaget believes that children develop language in 4 stages: sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational
• In the sensorimotor stage, babies are discovering what their bodies can do, and this includes the ability to make sounds. Babies then learn to copy the sounds they hear others making (mimicry)
• In the preoperational stage, children are egocentric and focused on themselves. They use language to voice their internal thoughts, rather than to communicate with other people
• In the concrete operational stage, the ability to use language has developed a lot but is only used to talk about concrete things
• In the formal operational stage, language can be used to talk about abstract, theoretical ideas
• Piaget believed that while all children move through the stages, some people do not get to the formal operational stage
• Piaget did all of his observations on his own. When the participants in his research were his own children, they were unlikely to realise they were being observed. This means that their behaviour was probably natural. However, his research would be more reliable if he had carried out his observations with another researcher, so that they could compare the results afterwards to check if they were similar and had inter-observer reliability
• When Piaget's participants were his own children, he may have allowed his personal biases to affect his judgement. The lack of objectivity would affect 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
• There is more research to support other theories about language and thought, including the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that our thoughts and behaviour are affected and formed by the language we speak
• Cultures with different languages and vocabulary will also have different ways of thinking and understanding things
• Communication - passing information from one person (or animal) to another.
• Culture: a group of people who share similar customs, beliefs and behaviour
• Language - a system of communication used by a specific group of people
• Recall - to bring a memory back into one's mind (similar to "retrieval")
• Thought - the mental activity of thinking, which involves reasoning and considering, and that produces ideas and opinions
• Language may therefore:

  • lead us to focus on certain ways of seeing and understanding things
  • make some ways of thinking easier and more likely than others
  • lead to memory bias, where the ability to recall or retrieve certain information is increased or decreased
• Sapir and Whorf provided evidence for their ideas by studying indigenous (native) languages.