Guiann Maris M.

Lumanas MAED-LT
EFD 504 | Advanced Educational Psychology
November 14, 2021

COGNITIVE AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

It is said that language and cognition are partners in child development.

Cognition as defined by Jean Piaget, a French psychologist, unfolds in a
sequence of stages. And these stages are age-related and distinctive. A child’s
development goes through these four stages: sensorimotor stage, pre-
operational stage, concrete operational stage, and formal operational stage. He
emphasized in his study that a child’s knowledge is composed of schemas,
basic unit of knowledge used to organize past experiences and serve as a basis
for understanding new ones. Meaning to say that the child’s ability to
understand and conceptualize is an active and constructive process. When a
child goes through a particular stage, he/she already has pre-distinct
development and that goes on as he/she moves up to a higher stage.
As a realization, I have come to think that our children in school or even at
home are so much capable of acquiring knowledge and learning skills. They
are the by-product of the stages that they have gone through, or as I may say,
we are the product of the past experiences and developments that we have
gone through as we age and go through life.
Partnering cognitive development, language development refers to the
process by which children come to understand and communicate language
during early childhood. Humans have the ability to understand and learn
language. As a matter of fact, only us has the ability to learn and communicate
using different languages. B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky are two
personalities who have made great influence in language development.
Skinner believed that children learn language through operant conditioning: in
other words, children receive “rewards” for using language in a functional

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manner. On the other hand, Chomsky proposed that children have innate
abilities to learn language.
Learning a language is like learning any new skill. Hence, it supports
cognitive development. It starts from early childhood, allowing children to
grasp spoken word and communicate. See, how wonderful it is that as humans,
we are able to communicate what’s in our minds, and most especially our
feelings through language. And I believe that we are given this ability in order
for us teach our children the right knowledge in communication and the right
way on how to communicate. Being in the field of teaching is a great
advantage to do so. So let us not take for granted this opportunity, and make
the most out of it for the goodness of the younger generation.

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References:

Guedim, Zayan (2020). 5 Theories of Language Development: How Language

Came to Be. Retrieved November 14, 2021, from https://edgy.app/
theories-of-language-development

Cognitive and Language Development. Retrieved November 14, 2021, from

http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/hwaters-/psy327/slide%20sets/
327set2a_cogdev.pdf

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