Adquisition of Language - Jean Piaget

This language acquisition theory was created by Jean William Fritz Piaget, a very important Switzerland psychologist. His theory in the language is subordinated to the thoughts. The acquisition of language owes to biological and not cultural factors. The human being comes to the world with a biological inheritance, on which the intelligence depends.

According to this theory the acquisition of the language depends on the development of the intelligence, that is to say, it is necessary intelligence to be able to acquire a language. In this theory it is reflected since the cognitive knowledge develops in a person from his first years of life until it reaches his intellectual maturity.

Piaget holds that the thought and the language develop separately, since the intelligence starts developing from the birth, before the child speaks, for what the child is learning to speak according to his cognitive development there is reached the level necessary for it. For him, it is the thought the one that makes possible to acquire a language, which implies that when the human being is born it does not possess an innate language, but he is acquiring it little by little as part of the cognitive development. Once acquired this language in turn will help also to the cognitive development.

In the process of acquisition of the language Piaget it establishes:

 Egocentric Speech: a child who still has not learned a language cannot express his first intelligent thoughts, these only they exist as images or physical actions. The egocentric speech is the one that the child uses to be able to express his thoughts in this stage, more than to communicate to him social entity. This language is diminishing up to disappearing after them 7 años.

 Social Speech: it is the one that develops after the egocentric one.

For Piaget, the progressive construction of different schemes on the reality is a sign of that the intelligence of the child is developing The schemes they are a fundamental element in order that the human beings adapt to the environment and could survive, that is to say, that since the children are born, construct and accumulate schemes due to the active exploration that they carry out inside the environment in which they live, and where as they interact with him, they try to adapt the existing schemes to confront the new experiences.

Another Piaget's idea is that the learning begins with the first experiences sensory - motorboats formed with the cognitive development and the language, where the learning continues for the construction of mental structures, based on the integration of the cognitive own processes where the person constructs the knowledge by means of the constant interaction with the environment.

Therefore in order that the child reaches his maximum intellectual development it must cross from his birth different and progressive stages of the cognitive development. The child cannot skip any of these stages and it is not also possible to force him in order that them more rapid scope.

In turn these stages divide in stadiums of the cognitive development. These stadiums like the psychological structures develop from the innate reflections, are organized during the infancy in schemes of conduct, are internalized during the second year of life as models of thought, and develop during the infancy and the adolescence in complex intellectual structures that characterize the adult life.

These stages Piaget are named by:

Sensory - motive stage: it begins with the birth and concludes at the age of 2.

The conduct of the child is essentially a motorboat; there is no internal representation of the external events, or thinks by means of concepts.
 Stadium of the mechanisms congenital reflections. 0 - 1 month.
 Stadium of the circular primary reactions. 1-4 months.
 Stadiums of the circular reactions secundarias.4 - 8meses.
 Stadium of the coordination of the previous schemes of conduct. 8 - 12 months.
 Stadium of the new discoveries for experimentation. 12 - 18 months.
 Stadium of the new mental representations. 12 - 24meses.

Stage pre operational: of 2 years up to 6 years.

It is the stage of the thought and that of the language that classifies his aptitude to think symbolically, imitates objects of conduct, symbolic games, drawings, mental images and the development of the spoken language.

 Stadium pre conceptual. 2 - 4 years
 Intuitive Stadium. 4 - 7 years.

Stage of concrete operations: from 7 years to 11 years.

The processes of reasoning there become logical and can be applied to concrete or royal problems. In the social aspect, the child now turns into a really social being and in this stage the logical schemes appear of seriousness, mental classification of sets and classification of the concepts of chance, space, time and speed.

Stage of formal operations: 12 years in forward.

In this stage the teenager achieves the abstraction on concrete observed knowledge that allows him to use the logical inductive and deductive reasoning. It develops idealistic feelings and permanent training achieves of the personality, there is a major development of the moral concepts.