Jean Piaget And His Researches Of The Language And Thought Of The Child

Jean Piaget was Born in 1896 in Neuchatel, western Switzerland, and Piaget was the son of a professor of medieval literature at the local university. After gaining his Doctor’s degree, Piaget began studying child linguistic development, and in 1921 he became director of the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva. From 1925-29 he was professor of psychology, sociology and the philosophy of science at the University of Neuchatel, Piaget conducted his research at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, opened in 1912 for the study of the child and teacher training. There he observed children of four and six, taking down everything they said while they worked and played, and the book includes transcripts of their 'conversations'.

Basically, Piaget discovered and what every parent could confirm is that, when children speak a lot of the time; they are not talking to anyone in particular. They are thinking aloud. He identified two types of speech, egocentric and socialized. Within the egocentric type were three patterns

Repetition speech not directed to people, the saying of words for the simple pleasure of it such as boom boom boom,,yaya yaya yaya, or any new sentence what they enjoy to repeat again and again

Monologue whole commentaries which follow the child's actions or play suppose they have something in their mind or they learned something from somewhere and they already have their own concept of plotting,planning and performing or coping the same pattern from any TV show or from any other place.

Collective monologue when children are talking to each other, yet are not really taking account of what the others are saying. (A room of ten children seated at different tables may be noisy with talk, but in fact are all really talking to themselves. ) So basically Piaget believed that Part of the reason for the egocentricity of the child is that a significant part of their language involves gesture, movements and sounds. As these are not words, they cannot express everything, so the child must remain partly a prisoner of their own minds. Piaget also noticed that children think in terms of 'schemas', which allow them to focus on the whole of a message without having to make sense of every detail and I am very much agreed with his research because I also noticed that When children hear something they do not understand, they do not try to analyze the sentence structure or words, but try to grasp or create an overall meaning. However his initial experiments observing the language and thought of the child, therefore, led to great insights into how as adults we process knowledge and create new understanding.