Cognitive prerequisites to language?

Abstract

Infants performed Piaget's stage 4 manual search task with an object hidden at successive locations (A and B) in the vertical plane. In the various studies, the initial location (A) either had an immediate background or the background was absent. The majority of infants in each experiment made persistent perseverative errors to the initial location (A) when the object was moved to a new location (B), if there had been no immediate background at A. When a background was available infants showed an equiprobable pattern of search to A and B. The results suggest that the typical stage 4 error, described by Piaget as characteristic of infants between eight and 11 months, may only occur when the baby is unable to monitor movements of the object with respect to a stable background as a visual frame of reference.The Piagetian hypothesis that there are cognitive prerequisites for language acquisition is examined. Two different formulations are distinguished: the hypothesis that the child interprets utterances in terms of what he knows about the world; and the hypothesis that the emergence of particular ideas leads the child to cast around for the linguistic means of expressing them. The second but not the first formulation implies that the sequence of cognitive development will influence the sequence and timetable of language acquisition. Evidence from three sources is reviewed and provides little support for this prediction. It is argued that the course of language acquisition is probably determined by three factors which are largely independent of level of cognitive development: (i) linguistic complexity, (ii) the likelihood that the non‐verbal context will offer an unambiguous gloss of an adult utterance and (iii) the asymmetry between comprehension and production.