Language and Thought of the Child

Selected Works vol 5

Jean Piaget

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134740499
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Jean Piaget was one of the most salient and inspirational figures in psychological and educational research of the 20th century. He was also prolific, authoring or editing over 80 books and numerous journals and papers which spawned a continuation of his work over the following decades. His work now compromises a major component of many courses on children's psychological development and in a research tradition which is expanding, scholars may need access to the original texts rather than secondhand accounts. This volume is the sixth of nine reproducing Piaget's original works - they are also available as a boxed set.

CHAPTER I

THE FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE IN TWO CHILDREN OF SIX¹

THE question which we shall attempt to answer in this book may be stated as follows: What are the needs which a child tends to satisfy when he talks? This problem is, strictly speaking, neither linguistic nor logical; it belongs to functional psychology, but it should serve nevertheless as a fitting prelude to any study of child logic.

At first sight the question may strike one as curious, for with the child, as with us, language would seem to enable the individual to communicate his thoughts to others. But the matter is not so simple. In the first place, the adult conveys different modes of thought by means of speech. At times, his language serves only to assert, words state objective facts, they convey information, and are closely bound up with cognition. “The weather is changing for the worse,” “Bodies fall to the ground.” At times, on the other hand, language expresses commands or desires, and serves to criticize or to threaten, in a word to arouse feelings and provoke action—“Let’s go,” “How horrible!” etc. If we knew approximately in the case of each individual the proportion of one type of speech to another, we should be in possession of psychological data of great interest. But another point arises. Is it certain that even adults always use language to communicate thoughts? To say nothing of internal speech, a large number of people, whether from the working classes or the more absent-minded of the intelligentsia, are in the habit of talking to themselves, of keeping up an audible soliloquy. This phenomenon points perhaps to a preparation for social language. The solitary talker invokes imaginary listeners, just as the child invokes imaginary playfellows. This is perhaps an example of that return shock of social habits which has been described by Baldwin; the individual repeats in relation to himself a form of behaviour which he originally adopted only in relation to others. In this case he would talk to himself in order to make himself work, simply because he has formed the habit of talking to others in order to work on them. Whichever explanation is adopted, it would seem that language has been side-tracked from its supposed function, for in talking to himself, the individual experiences sufficient pleasure and excitement to divert him from the desire to communicate his thoughts to other people. Finally, if the function of language were merely to ‘communicate,’ the phenomenon of verbalism would hardly admit of explanation. How could words, confined as they are by usage to certain precise meanings (precise, because their object is to be understood), eventually come to veil the confusion of thought, even to create obscurity by the multiplication of verbal entities, and actually to prevent thought from being communicable? This is not the place to raise the vexed question of the relation between thought and language, but we may note in passing that the very existence of such questions shows how complex are the functions of language, and how futile the attempt to reduce them all to one—that of communicating thought.

The functional problem therefore exists for the adult. How much more urgently will it present itself in the case of defective persons, primitive races and young children. Janet, Freud, Ferenczi, Jones, Spielrein, etc., have brought forward various theories on the language of savages, imbeciles, and young children, all of which are of the utmost significance for an investigation such as we propose to make of the child mind from the age of six.

M.Janet, for example, considers that the earliest words are derived from cries with which animals and even savages accompany their action—threats, cries of anger in the fight, etc. In the earliest forms of social activity, for instance, the cry uttered by the chief as he enters into battle becomes the signal to attack. Hence the earliest words of all, which are words of command. Thus the word, originally bound up with the act of which it is an element, at a later stage suffices alone to release the act.¹ The psycho-analysts have given an analogous explanation of word magic. The word, they say, having originally formed part of the act, is able to evoke all the concrete emotional contents of the act. Love cries, for instance, which lead up to the sexual act are obviously among the most primitive words; henceforward these and all other words alluding to the act retain a definite emotional charge. Such facts as these explain the very wide-spread tendency of primitive thought to look upon the names of persons and objects, and upon the designation of events as pregnant with the qualities of these objects and events. Hence the belief that it is possible to work upon them by the mere evocation of words, the word being no longer a mere label, but a formidable reality partaking of the nature of the named object.² Mme Spielrein³ has endeavoured to find the same phenomena in an analysis of the very earliest stages of child language. She has tried to prove that the baby syllables, mama, uttered in so many tongues to call the mother, are formed by labial sounds which indicate nothing more than a prolongation of the act of sucking. ‘Mama’ would therefore be a cry of desire, and then a command given to the only being capable of satisfying this desire. But on the other hand, the mere cry of ‘mama’ has in it a soothing element; in so far as it is the continuation of the act of sucking, it produces a kind of hallucinatory satisfaction. Command and immediate satisfaction are in this case therefore almost indistinguishable, and so intermingled are these two factors that one cannot tell when the word is being used as a real command and when it is playing its almost magical role.

Meumann and Stern have shown that the earliest substantives of child language are very far from denoting concepts, but rather express commands or desires; and there are strong reasons for presuming that primitive child language fulfils far more complicated functions than would at first appear to be the case. Even when due allowance is made for these theories in all their details, the fact remains that many expressions which for us have a purely conceptual meaning, retain for many years in the child mind a significance that is not only affective but also well-nigh magical, or at least connected with peculiar modes of behaviour which should be studied for themselves and quite apart from adult mentality.

It may therefore be of interest to state the functional problem in connexion with older children, and this is what we intend to do as an introduction to the study of child logic, since logic and language are obviously interdependent. We may not find any traces of ‘primitive’ phenomena. At any rate, we shall be very far removed from the common-sense view that the child makes use of language to communicate his thoughts.

We need not apologize for the introductory character of the questions dealt with in this work. We have simply thrown out certain feelers. We have aimed first and foremost at creating a method which could be applied to fresh observations and lead to a comparison of results. This method, which it was our only object to obtain, has already enabled us to establish certain facts. But as we have only worked on two children of six years old, and as we have taken down their talk—in its entirety, it is true—only for a month and during certain hours of the day, we advance our conclusions provisionally, pending their confirmation in the later chapters of the book.

I. THE MATERIAL

The method we have adopted is as follows. Two of us followed each a child (a boy) for about a month at the morning class at the Maison des Petits de l’Institut Rousseau, taking down in minute detail and in its context everything that was said by the child. In the class where our two subjects were observed the scholars draw or make whatever they like; they model and play at games of arithmetic and reading, etc. These activities take place in complete freedom; no check is put upon any desire that may manifest itself to talk or play together; no intervention takes place unless it is asked for. The children work individually or in groups, as they choose; the groups are formed and then break up again without any interference on the part of the adult; the children go from one room to another (modelling room, drawing room, etc.) just as they please without being asked to do any continuous work so long as they do not themselves feel any desire for it. In short, these school-rooms supply a first-class field of observation for everything connected with the study of the social life and of the language of childhood.¹

We must anticipate at once any objection that may be advanced on the plea that since these children were used as subjects they were not observed in natural conditions. In the first place, the children, when they are in the play-room with their friends, talk just as much as they would at home, since they are allowed to talk all day long at school, and do not feel censured or constrained in any way whatsoever. In the second place, they do not talk any more at school than they would at home, since observation shows that up to a certain age, varying between 5 and

, children generally prefer to work individually rather than in groups even of two. Moreover, as we have taken down in its entirety the context of our two subjects’ conversations, especially when it was addressed to an adult, it will be quite easy to eliminate from our statistics all that is not spontaneous talk on the part of the children, i.e., all that may have been said in answer to questions that were put to them.

Once the material was collected, we utilized it as follows. We began by numbering all the subjects’ sentences. As a rule the child speaks in short sentences interspersed with long silences or with the talk of other children. Each sentence is numbered separately. Where the talk is a little prolonged, the reader must not be afraid of reckoning several consecutive sentences to one number, so long as to each sentence containing a definite idea only one number is affixed. In such cases, which are rare enough, the division is necessarily arbitrary, but this is of no importance for statistics dealing with hundreds of sentences.

Once the talk has been portioned out into numbered sentences, we endeavour to classify these into elementary functional categories. It is this method of classification which we are now about to study.

§ 1. AN EXAMPLE OF THE TALK TAKEN DOWN.

—Let us first of all give one complete example of the documents collected in this way, and let us examine it in all its complexity:

23. Pie (to Ez who is drawing a tram-car with carriages in tow): But the trams that are hooked on behind don’t have any flags. (No answer.)

24. (Talking about his tram). They don’t have any carriages hooked on… (He was addressing no one in particular. No one answers him.)

25. (To Béa), ’T’sa tram that hasn’t got no carriages. (No answer.)

26. (To Hei), This tram hasn’t got no carriages, Hei, look, it isn’t red, d’you set… (No answer.)

27. (Lev says out loud, ‘A funny gentleman’ from a certain distance, and without addressing himself to Pie or to anyone else). Pie: A funny gentleman! (Goes on drawing his tram.)

28. I’m leaving the tram white.

29. (Ez who is drawing next to him says, ‘I’m doing it yellow’), No, you mustn’t do it all yellow.

30. I’m doing the stair-case, look. (Béa answers, ‘I can’t come this afternoon, I’ve got a Eurhythmic class.’)

31. What did you say? (Béa repeats the same sentence.)

32. What did you say? (Béa does not answer. She has forgotten what she said, and gives Ro a push.)

33. (To Béa), Leave him alone.

34. (Mlle B. asks Ez if he would like to come with her), Come here Ez, it isn’t finished. 34 bis. Please teacher, Ez hasn’t finished.

35. (Without addressing himself to anyone,) I’m doing some black stones….

36. (Id), Pretty…these stones.

37. (To Ez), Better than you, eh? (No answer. Ez had not heard the previous remark.)

We have chosen this example from Pie (

years) because it is taken during the most sociable activity of which this child is capable: he is drawing at the same table as his bosom friend, Ez, and is talking to him the whole time. It would therefore be natural in a case of this kind if the sole function of speech were to communicate thought. But let us examine the matter a little more closely. It will be seen that from the social point of view the significance of these sentences or fragments of sentences is extremely varied. When Pie says: “They don’t have…etc.” (24), or “I’m doing…etc.” (35) he is not speaking to anyone. He is thinking aloud over his own drawing, just as people of the working classes mutter to themselves over their work. Here, then, is a first category which should be singled out, and which in future we shall designate as monologue. When Pie says to Hei or to Béa: “’T’sa tram…etc.” (25) or “This tram…etc.” (26) he seems on this occasion to want to make himself understood; but on closer examination it will be seen that he cares very little who is listening to him (he turns from Béa to Hei to say exactly the same thing) and, furthermore, that he does not care whether the person he addresses has really heard him or not. He believes that someone is listening to him; that is all he wants...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION
• FOREWORD TO THE THIRD EDITION
• CHAPTER I THE FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE IN TWO CHILDREN OF SIX
• CHAPTER II TYPES AND STAGES IN THE CONVERSATION OF CHILDREN BETWEEN THE AGES OF FOUR AND SEVEN
• CHAPTER III UNDERSTANDING AND VERBAL EXPLANATION BEWEEN CHILDREN OF THE SAME AGE BETWEEN THE YEARS OF SIX AND EIGHT.
• CHAPTER IV SOME PECULIARITIES OF VERBAL UNDERSTANDING IN THE CHILD BETWEEN THE AGES OF NINE AND ELEVEN
• CHAPTER V THE QUESTIONS OF A CHILD OF SIX
• CHAPTER VI THE MEASURE OF EGO-CENTRIC LANGUAGE IN VERBAL COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE ADULT AND THE CHILD AND IN VERBAL EXCHANGES BETWEEN CHILDREN
• APPENDIX
• INDEX