Cognitive theory suggests that language development and general cognitive growth proceed in parallel in normal children. In the early 1970°s, partly as a reaction against the dominant
innatist theories of the 1960’s, a group of psychologists claimed that cognitive growth was the major guiding force behind language acquisition. The research had several strands, though the overall aim was to link linguistic stages to prior states of cognitive development. The overall notion came to be known as the ‘cognitive hypothesis’.
 |
| Cognitive theory |
Piaget in his books published in the 1920s and later on discusses various aspects of this theory. He argues that the developmental stages of cognitive growth are related to language development. As a child grows, his intelligence and cognitive ability develop. The child constructs an understanding of why the world works. His intelligence is the product of his environment and his mental structure. Piaget rejects the behaviourists’ view that a newborn child is totally moulded by his environment. He also rejects the mentalists’ notion that a child carries a complex device within himself which is like a blueprint.
Language is dependent on cognition but the reverse is not true. Furth (1966 cited in Crittenden, 1979) found that deaf children develop cognitively as hearing children do. So language does not seem absolutely essential for cognitive growth. On the other hand, Mongoloid children whose mental ability is low rarely acquire a full use of language. Thus a minimum level of intelligence seems necessary for language to develop.
Piaget believes that as a child grows up he passes through a number of stages. Each of these stages is characterized by certain properties of the child’s thought. Each child has to pass through the stages in a fixed order but the rate at which he does so may vary from one child to another. Through these stages the child develops his cognitive ability which plays an important role in language acquisition.
The stages are:
The sensorimotor stage (from birth to 18 months)
The preoperational stage (18 months to 7 years)
The stage of concrete operation (7 — 11 years)
The stage of formal operation (11 years to over)
A child in the first eighteen months takes the first steps in the construction of a model of reality and his own interaction with it. Towards the end of this period he begins to be able to represent his actions to himself before they occur. This is recognized by the appearance of the ‘semiotic function’. The ‘semiotic function’ occurs in several forms:
Behavioural imitation, e.g. a child imitates someone stamping her foot in rage.
Symbolic play, e.g. a child, seeing a pillow on the floor, pretends to lie down and sleep.
Drawing.
Language, which is thus seen as just one means by which a child begins to represent reality to himself.
Language, then, according to Piaget, is part of the means whereby the child is able to think about reality. Many notions which seem important in early linguistic development are dependent on cognitive developments in the sensori-motor period, in particular those of agent, action, affected, location, which are obviously related to the perception of space and causality. Children’s first words appear towards the end of the first year, and their one-word utterances show awareness of concepts like agent and location early in the second year.
Bruner (1975 cited in Crittenden, 1979) has also formulated a theory concerning the emergence of language at this early period. Bruner’s position is that grammar is acquired because of the isomorphism between syntactic categories and psychological events and processes.
In the preoperational period the child’s construction of reality and his construction of language to represent that reality continue to develop. The order of spatial notions in children parallels the order of understanding the spatial terms. First to occur are simple factors like ‘in’ and ‘on’, followed by relational terms like ‘in front of?' and ‘below’ and lastly complex rational movement terms like ‘along’ and ‘through’.
At the third stage children begin to develop ‘operational thought’ i.e., begin to develop a certain capacity for logical thought. They can now see that if ball ‘A’ is bigger than ball ‘B’ and ball ‘B’ is bigger than ball ‘C’, then ‘A’ must be bigger than ‘C’. They begin to develop the ability to use necessary terminology to handle concepts like volume, number, weight and quantity independently from other concepts. At the last stage he makes further improvements.
According to Piaget, the child is born with a very limited set of behaviour patterns or schemata, which he seeks to assert on any object he encounters. For instance, he will try to suck blankets and fingers as well as the nipples of his mother. This process whereby the child seeks to encompass an available object into a schema, is called “assimilation”. While trying to assimilate these objects to his schema, the infant discovers that he has to open his mouth in a different way to suck different objects, so his schema becomes differentiated as a result of interaction with his environment. This process is called “accommodation”. According to Piaget, whatever we learn we have to assimilate and accommodate.
This theory can be said to be a balanced one. It takes from the mentalist and the behaviourist theories. Piaget’s idea of ‘schemata’ is similar to Chomsky’s idea of LAD. Piaget adds the behaviourists’ idea of the influence of the environment to Chomsky’s idea of LAD and then makes it more acceptable and logical. For Piaget, as the child grows up his intelligence develops and he learns from his environment. And assimilation and accommodation help the child for phonological, syntactic and semantic development.
Cognitive theory rejects the view that language is an autonomous system whose acquisition depends on innate linguistic endowments. Although this theory cannot be supported in its extreme form, most researchers have come to realize that linguistic development cannot be studied detached from cognition since they are likely to influence one another in normal children. In fact, the interaction of cognitive and linguistic development remains to be studied in any detail.
Criticism of Cognitive Theory
There are number of limitations or weakness of the famous Cognitive Theory of First Language Acquisition. All these criticisms or limitations are also known as weakness. They are taken from the writings of famous critics.
Relation Between Language and Cognitive Development
If a correlation between the stages of language development and the stages of cognitive development is established it does not entail a causal connexion. As Curtiss (1981, cited in Cruttenden, 1979) noted,
“hair growth might be positively correlated with language development, but this is not an interesting link between the two.”
Ness Proved
It has been observed that a number of children have been able to speak firmly but their general intelligence is so low that they perform at below the two-year-old level on a number of tasks. This evidence challenges the Cognitive hypothesis.
0 Comments