The Language and Thought of the Child

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Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959 - Child development - 288 pages
2012 Reprint of 1926 American Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Jean Piaget was one of the most salient and inspirational figures in psychological and educational research this century. He was prolific, authoring or editing over eighty books and numerous journal papers which have spawned a huge and fertile continuation of his research over the decades. A major component of any course on children's psychological development and a research tradition that is expanding, scholars need access to the original texts rather than relying on secondhand accounts. Piaget wanted to revolutionize the way research methods were conducted. Although he started researching with his colleagues using a traditional method of data collection, he was not fully satisfied with the results and wanted to keep trying to find new ways of researching using a combination of data, which included: naturalistic observation, psychometrics, and the psychiatric clinical examination, in order to have a less guided form of research that would produce more genuine results. As Piaget developed new research methods, he wrote The Language and Thought of the Child, which aimed to synthesize the methods he was using in order to study the conclusion children drew from situations and how they arrived to such conclusion. The main idea was to observe how children responded and articulated certain situations with their own reasoning, in order to examine their thought processes.

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Contents

CHAPTER I
1
Conclusions
34
TYPES AND STAGES IN THE CONVERSATION
48
Copyright

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About the author (1959)

Jean Piaget, 1896-1980 Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, whose original training was in the natural sciences, spent much of his career studying the psychological development of children, largely at the Institut J.J. Rousseau at the University of Geneva, but also at home, with his own children as subjects. The impact of this research on child psychology has been enormous, and Piaget is the starting point for those seeking to learn how children view numbers, how they think of cause-and-effect relationships, or how they make moral judgments. Piaget found that cognitive development from infancy to adolescence invariably proceeds in four major stages from infancy to adolescence: sensory-motor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Each of these stages is marked by the development of cognitive structures, making possible the solution of problems that were impossible earlier and laying the foundation for the cognitive advances of the next stage. He showed that rational adult thinking is the culmination of an extensive process that begins with elementary sensory experiences and unfolds gradually until the individual is capable of dealing with imagined concepts, that is, abstract thought. By learning how children comprehend the world and how their intellectual processes mature, Piaget contributed much to the theory of knowledge as an active process in which the mind transforms reality. Put simply, Piaget described children from a perspective that no one had seen before.

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