“Vygotsky was aware of Piaget’s work but unlike Piaget, he believed that the social environment was just as important in the child’s cognitive as biological maturation. Modern research shows that Piaget seems to have seriously underestimated social influences in this area”. (N.Hayes and S.Orrell , 1998)
J.B.Watson (1913) believed that “thought is language” whereas Piaget was saying the opposite to this, he believed “language is thought”.
For Piaget it is thinking which is the most important and the child only develops language because it is a useful tool of thought. Vygotsky however disagrees with this and he saw the child’s “acquisition of language as having many social origins, arising from the need to communicate with other people”. (N.Hayes and S.Orrell 1998)
When a child starts to talk, Piaget says, its speech is mainly “egocentric- not being used for any social purposes”. The child is simply saying its thoughts out loud.
Vygotsky thought the behaviour that Piaget had labelled as “egocentric speech” as being an example of what he called “expressive function of language”.
Both Piaget and Vygotsky saw this kind of language as being used to monitor and direct the child’s internal thought patterns.
Piaget and Vygotsky agree that that the above form of language helps a child to “restructure” situations on a cognitive level.
Vygotsky considered the “communicative social function” as the most important form of the way a child uses language.
Vygotsky proposed that each child has a wide area of cognitive potential. This is the potential knowledge and expertise that the child could reach if it experienced the right kind of teaching and guidance from other people. He called this the “zone of proximal development” (ZPD for short). The ZPD is the cognitive development which the child wouldn’t manage on its own but will manage with help from other people.
Children will not achieve a lot in the way of psychological development without contact with others.
Piaget believed that all children pass through a series of stages in their cognitive development, these are:
- 0-2 yrs of age (approx) The sensori-motor stage. This is the very first period of cognitive development. Child’s main task is to organise and to interpret the information it is receiving through its sensory organs and to learn to co-ordinate its muscles.
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2-7 yrs of age. The pre-operational stage. This is the 2nd stage, the pre-operational stage, that the difference between children’s and adult’s thinking can be seen most clearly. At this stage Piaget thought the child’s use of language showed a gradual reduction of egocentricity.
- 7-11 yrs of age. The concrete operational stage. This was Piaget’s third stage, at this time a child’s thinking was very like that of an adult, but it would have difficulty in dealing with purely abstract concepts.
- 11 yrs – adulthood. The formal operational stage. By this stage the child’s thinking is like that of an adult, it can now handle abstract logic, develop theories about the world, test them out and use abstract concepts in thinking.
Although Piaget considered cognitive development happened through interaction with the environment he nonetheless though that it was an inherited process as a certain form of thinking could not develop until a child was ready for it.
The work of Piaget and Vygotsky is similar, they share some of the same views, although Vygotsky believed that the social environment was an important factor in the child’s cognitive development, whereas Piaget believed thinking is the most important factor in a child’s cognitive development.
Michelle Jones. Gcse psychology, 2002.
