Chapter 9 Cognitive and Language Development in Early Childhood CHD2220 Preoperational Development o Preoperational development is the period Piaget refers to from the ages of 3 6 years of age The term operational is refers to the logical systems of thought which emerge in middle childhood Preoperational means that the preschoolers are incapable of these advanced forms of reasoning The Symbolic Function o Piaget identified the end of the second year of life as a major turning point in cognitive development marked by the advent of the symbolic function the ability to use symbols to represent or stand for perceived objects and events o Deferred imitation children observe the behavior of a model and imitate that behavior when the model is no longer present o Symbolic or pretend play children pretend that an object is something other than what it really is Ex transforming a doll into a real person Pretend play follows a unique set of skills Shifting context performing routine behaviors outside of their typical setting For example eating pretend food in the backyard instead of in the kitchen Substituting Objects during the third year children become increasingly able to transform virtually any object into the props needed for their pretend play episodes and they become progressively less dependent on realistic props during the preschool years Substituting other agents for oneself For example a child may pretend to feed herself by bringing an empty spoon to her mouth or pretend to go to sleep by putting her head down on a table Sequencing and socialization of pretend episodes although pretense begins with single acts children coordinate such acts into sequences of increasing length and complexity through the preschool years o Mental images internal representations of external objects or events This is also a form of symbolic function The Advent of Preconcepts o Piaget believed that preschool children tend to focus their attention on minute and often inconsequential aspects of their experience a process he referred to as centration Ex a 3 year old may remember nothing else about her babysitter other than her big bright earrings o Piaget suggested that such collections of images derived from centrated perception merge into preconcepts disorganized illogical representations of the child s experiences Ex Sam s preconcept of a zoo is composed of a lion s head popcorn cages ice cream throwing peanuts raw meats his father taking pictures and his mother tearing her dress Transductive Reasoning Thinking with Preconcepts o The disordered and organized nature of preconcepts severely limits the quality of preschool age children s reasoning and problem solving We can understand the difficulty by comparing preoperational thought to the primary forms of logical thought in older children and adults induction and deduction Induction we derive general principles from particular examples Ex an 8 year old boy who observes that teachers have favored girls in each of his classes might induce the general principle that girls are teachers pets Egocentrism Deduction we use general principles to predict particular outcomes Ex the same child could use this general principle to deduce that when he enters his next grade his new teacher will be likely to favor girls o Preschool children cannot think inductively or deductively they think by transduction reasoning within the unsymmetrical collections of images which constitute their preconcepts o Egocentrism a major limitation of preoperational thought where the child is unable to conceptualize the perspective of other individuals In other words they have difficulty seeing the world as others see it o The effects of egocentrism on perception and cognition are illustrated in Piaget s experiments with the three mountain problem Piaget asked each child between 4 and 12 years to examine a doll on a mountain at different visual perspectives Children under 8 identified their own views as that of the doll a clear demonstration of egocentrism Irreversibility o A second limitation of preoperational thought is irreversibility the notion that preschoolers cannot mentally reserve their transductive sequences of thought Ex this is why preschoolers can normally take something apart but cannot put it back together Reasoning in Content Domains Classification characteristics o Classification refers to the tendency to group objects on the basis of particular sets of o Piaget found a three stage developmental progression of classification in children children 5 and younger have no overall plan for sorting but produce Stage 1 graphic collections or pictures made with objects Stage 2 children 6 8 years sorted in a more organized way producing a series of collections of objects each based on a different dimension of similarity Piaget called these non graphic collections Ex placing all circles and squares together then switching dimensions placing large forms together and small forms together Stage 3 and rules of class inclusion Ex children responded correctly when asked if there are more cows or animals in the world children late childhood to early adolescence understood the relationship o There is new evidence suggesting that children begin to spontaneously sort objects into different categories by the end of the second year o Quantitative reasoning refers to the ability to estimate the amount of things and changes in the amounts of things in terms of number size weight volume speed time and distance Are these concepts beyond the capacity of preschool children o Concepts of Quantity A critical point in development of quantitative reasoning is reached when children become aware that things in nature exist in specific amounts and that those amounts change when certain actions are carried out Conservation the notion that certain attributes of objects and events may remain unchanged despite transformations or changes in other attributes Ex moving the same amount of liquid from a short and wide glass to a tall and thin glass Children do not understand that there is the same amount of liquid although the container is changed o Concepts of Number Quantitative Reasoning o Concepts of Counting Piaget found that young preoperational children show no understanding of 1 1 correspondence responding only to the physical appearance of the rows if one is spread out it is judged to have more beans if compressed it has fewer beans It has been found that preschool children can conserve number if the task
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