Cognitive Theory/ Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
The cognitive perspective is derived from the multidisciplinary field of modern psycholinguistics. Its basic concern is constructivism3 (Constructivism: is basically a theory -- based on observation and scientific study -- about how people learn. It says that people construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those experiences.) and the treatment of information where the child uses his cognitive abilities for the sake of understanding the matters that surround him. The constructive view is proposed and developed by Piaget (1966) who according to Kearns (ibid:152)
He theorized that cognitive development proceeds as a result of child’s interaction with the environment and that depends on cognition…Piaget believed children passed through predictable, sequential stages of cognitive development. In the first, the sensorimotor stage, the baby learns about their environment by exploring through their senses. Towards the end of the sensorimotor stage, the child begins to understand the existence of symbols for real object e.g. mumy, daddy, ball…”
-To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes resulting from biological maturation and environmental experience.
- He believed that children construct an understanding of the world around them, experience discrepancies between what they already know and what they discover in their environment, then adjust their ideas accordingly. Correspondingly, the child should possess certain psychological readiness, or cognitive ability before he/ she can learn new and peculiar features about the use of language. One example of this suggested by Graham Williamson (2014) is that a child must have the mental ability to appreciate (to understand or realize) that people or things, still exist even when they are out of sight. If they cannot appreciate this, then it would be difficult, for example, for the child to understand and respond appropriately to questions such as “where is dad? or mom?” when the child is at nursery school and the father or mother is at work. In this case, the child must have the mental ability to understand that dad still exists and that he exists in some place away from the nursery. This cognitive ability is known as object permanence.
“Data Crunching” can also be considered as a key concept in the cognitive processing theory. (Hoff & Naigles, 2002: 422) claimed that“learning language is a process of “data crunching,” in which children take in and process the language they hear”. Levin and Munsch (ibid) also comment that “their understanding of language is learned and is not innate as Chomsky’s theory asserts. These theorists would say that although the learning may be motivated by social interaction, the actual process of learning words and their meanings may rely more on the computational ability of the human brain”.
Main Criticism
Piaget‟s theory was criticized to be conducted in a wrong way and limited in terms of the size of participants. Piaget relied only on observing his own three children to clear cut his assumptions. In this case, it may be deduced that Piaget had prepared his children to answer in a way that serves his theory. Moreover, one can consider the genetic heritage among his three children and this fact leads to the homogeneity of the sample which is supposed to heterogeneous.