Including:
 

More on language development

Terms you should know:

The preoperational stage and characteristics thereof

Information processing

    In the previous chapter, on infant language development, you learned about the stages of language development, theories about the genetic basis of  language, and the importance of the environment. (Click here if you would like to go back to those pages and review that information.) There are other common characteristics of children's language development, in addition to the stages. These include:
 

• Mastery of grammar - by age three, children have significant understanding of the rules of a language (whatever language they happen to speak). For example, you will hear a young child say - "I pet doggy"  not "Doggy me pet". They understand that the subject comes first, then the verb, the object. This is quite a complicated understanding, when you really think about it.

• Difficulty in understanding abstract language - young children children do not understand the meaning of such abstract terms as "justice" or "democracy" because it does not relate to their own experience. They also have trouble with metaphors. For example, if Heather's mom comments,

        "After all of those piano lessons and Matt still can't play. Well, I guess you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink."
     Heather is likely to reply:
        "Matt doesn't have a horse."
 
• Overregularization - young children tend to apply the rules of language too much and not make exceptions to the rules when appropriate. For example, a child might say,

    "The baby drinked her bottle."  or
    "I runned when I heared the noise."
The child is applying the rule "add -ed to make a past tense" to every situation, even when it is not appropriate.
 
• Failure to use the passive tense - this has to do with reversibility (or lack thereof) and overregularization. Young children do not understand sentences such as

    "He was bitten by the dog."
They do not understand that the action something was performed on does not always have to go last and that the actor (dog) does not always have to go first. Nor do they realize that you could change this statement around to say "The dog bit him."
In fact, if you made such a statement as ,
    "He was bitten by the dog."
a young child is likely to argue,
    "No! The dog bited him!" and if you are silly enough to argue that was what you said, the child will correct you and say,
    "No, you didn't, you said that the dog bited him!"
(Notice the clever way that I threw examples of overregularization in there, too!  (- :       )
 

What are operations? What is he talking about? Maybe Piaget is more easily comprehended in the original French. Unfortunately, I don't read French, do you? Fortunately, you have me, your humble instructor here at your service to (hopefully) make this somewhat clearer than mud.

An example might help...
 
 
 

AN EXAMPLE OF A CHILD AT THE PREOPERATIONAL STAGE,  I.E., ONE WHO DOES NOT  ENGAGE IN MENTAL OPERATIONS This is Maria at age five, a very bright little girl. I tried the pennies exercise with her (you know, the one in your textbook). Here is what happened. First, I took a row of ten pennies and evenly spaced them apart. O  O  O  O  O  O  O  O  O  O  ME: Now, Maria, look carefully at the row of pennies. There are ten pennies here, right? MARIA: I don't know, let me see. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten! Yes. ME: All right, very good counting. Now I am going to do something with them. I am going to spread them out. Then I am going to ask you a question. If you get the right answer, you can keep all ten pennies. (Notice my clever use of positive reinforcement, in keeping with what theorist - that's right, Skinner.) Now, I moved the pennies apart further so that they looked like this. O      O      O       O       O  O      O  O      O       O  ME: Now, Maria, are there more pennies than there were before, less, or just the same? MARIA: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten -- there are the same. There were ten before and there are still ten. Maria takes all the pennies.   Why is this preoperational? She got the right answer. Because Maria had to count the pennies to know that they were the same. She could not perform logical operations to come to the right answer.

 
 
 

AN EXAMPLE OF A CHILD WHO DOES  ENGAGE IN MENTAL OPERATIONS The next year, we did the exact same task and the conversation went like this.   Again, I took a row of ten pennies and evenly spaced them apart. O  O  O  O  O  O  O  O  O  O ME: Now, Maria, look carefully at the row of pennies. There are ten pennies here, right? MARIA: Okay. ME: Now I am going to do something with them. I am going to spread them out. Then I am going to ask you a question. If you get the right answer, you can keep all ten pennies. O      O      O       O       O  O      O  O      O       O ME: Now, Maria, are there more pennies than there were before, less, or just the same? MARIA: The same. ME: How do you know that? MARIA: Because you didn't take any away and you didn't add any, so there must be the same. Besides,all you did was spread them apart and you could just squish them back up together again. PAY ATTENTION TO THAT LAST STATEMENT. Although it may not sound so profound, it demonstrates an understanding of the concept of reversibility --- Unlike the year before, she did not need to count the pennies or do anything physical to know that there were the same number of pennies. While a preoperational child could get the correct answer by pushing the pennies back together, a child who has achieved the concrete operational stage can perform this IN HER MIND. That, is, she can know something - in this case, that you can push the pennies back together and have the same appearance as before-  without actually doing it.

Developmental psychologists are in almost universal agreement that Piaget underestimated the cognitive capabilities of young children. As has been pointed out in much of this chapter, children are better than Piaget had thought at understanding causality, other people's points of view and numbers. Your textbook author spends quite a bit of this chapter discussing Wellman's research on theory of the mind, and other studies which seem to document children's ability to understand the world. I am assuming that there is a point to this, rather than just trying to fill up space, and I think the point is that preschool children are quite aware of what is going on around them. SO ... we should:

• be careful of our behavior and languages (as they are likely to infer our beliefs, feelings and desires from it and use it to build their model of the world),
• take seriously their attempts to talk and interact with us, and make every effort to respond to them,
• talk to them about our reasoning and beliefs as we go through our daily routines. At the same time, I think it is important not to become frustrated if children don't understand our seem to pay attention, because children certainly develop at different rates, and they might not yet be at the age where our explanations make any sense to them - but, then again, they just might.

Click here to go on to the page on information processing (it is relatively short).