Major Language Theories

Study of Chomsky, Piaget and Vygotsky’s Language Theories

Professor Dr. Amin Zadeh
Somayeh Mohammadi Chahaki

Introduction
Language is the means to transfer the intended message to the receiver.
Everyone as human being uses it. Language is regarded an exclusively human
method of communicating ideas, emotions by means of system of symbols.
Language plays a significant role in unifying a vast and complex notion and in
providing individuals with outlets for developing various skills and abilities. In fact
language is one attribute that sets humans apart from all other creatures and binds
humans together across all geographic barriers. Language can be the tool for great
achievement in any discipline. Good understanding of what individuals need and are
able to do and also a sound knowledge and belief in the goals of language act
program are essential factor in successful individualization of instruction. Language
is a means through which thought is organized, refined, and expressed. In short,
language helps in the formation of concepts, analysis of complex ideas, and to focus
attention on ideas which would otherwise be difficult to comprehend.

Here, the theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Chomsky are considered.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn
any human language. He claims that certain linguistic structures which children use
so accurately must be already imprinted on the child's mind. Chomsky believes that
every child has a 'language acquisition device' or LAD which encodes the major
principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child's brain.
Children have then only to learn new vocabulary and apply the syntactic structures

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from the LAD to form sentences. Chomsky points out that a child could not possibly
learn a language through imitation alone because the language spoken around them
is highly irregular-adult's speech is often broken up and often sometimes
ungrammatical. Chomsky's theory applied to all languages as they all contain nouns,
verbs, consonants and vowels and children appear to be 'hard-wired' to acquire the
grammar. Every language is extremely complex, often with subtle distinctions which
even native speakers are unaware of. However, all children, regardless of their
intellectual ability, become fluent in their native language within five or six years.

Chomsky's view of competence, deals primarily with abstract grammatical

knowledge. He believes that linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal
speaker and listener in completely homogeneous speech community, which knows
its language perfectly, and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions
as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest and errors in
applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance (Chomsky. 1965).

According to Chomsky, basic form of language is stored in human brain.

Language is a competency that is unique for human. For Chomsky, the focus of
linguistic theory was to characterize the abstract abilities speaker possess that enable
them to produce grammatically correct sentences in a language. Chomsky
considered language as a highly abstract generative phenomenon. He arrested that
human beings are born biologically equipped to learn a language and proposed his
theory of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) - an inborn mechanism or process
that facilitates the learning of a language.

According to Chomsky, there are infinite numbers of sentences in any

language; all possible sentences would be impossible to learn through imitation and
reinforcement. In his view, to study language is to study a part of human nature
manifested in the human mind. One of the fundamental aspects of human language
according to Chomsky is its creative nature. He argues that something specifically
about human language must be innate, that is available to us by virtue of being
human, specified somehow in our genetic makeup. The most commonly accepted
viewpoint on language acquisition suggests human learn language by observing and

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memorizing grammatical cues. This theory posits that our understanding of language
is built solely on experience, not an internal language processing feature.

As Chomsky puts it, "Evidently, development of language in the individual

must involve three factors: (1) genetic endowment, which sets limits on the
attainable languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; (2) external
data, converted to the experience that selects on or another language within a narrow
range; (3) principles not specific to the faculty of language.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

Jean Piaget, emphasized the significance of social interaction to intellectual

development. Piaget saw interaction as the key to how overcome the instability of
the symbols as individually construct. Piaget tied the role of language an integral
part of his ideas on intellectual development. Piaget linked the role of social
interaction in intellectual development to the role of language.

According to Piaget, language is inherently a social factor partly because of

the conventional nature of words and this conventional nature of words is crucial for
conceptual development. Piaget argued that formation of mental structures
underlying feelings of logical necessity requires social interaction using a
conventional sign system. Piaget theorized that language was simply one of
children's ways of representing their familiar worlds, a reflection of thought, and that
language did not contribute to the development of thinking. In fact he argued that
cognitive development proceeded language.

Piaget's theory states that children's cognitive development goes through

four stages of cognition as they actively synthesize new information with current
knowledge. Reaching equilibrium between new and current knowledge is key,
requiring the child to actively assimilate or accommodate all that is learned. He
became intrigued with the reasons children gave for their wrong answers to the

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questions that required logical thinking. He believed that these incorrect answers
revealed important differences between the thinking of adults and children.

Piaget (1936) described his work as genetic epistemology (i.e. Origins of

thinking). Genetics is the scientific study of where things come from (their origins).
Epistemology is concerned with the basic categories of thinking, that is to say, the
framework or structural properties of intelligence. Piaget (1936) was the first
psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development. His contributions
include a theory of child cognitive development, detailed observational studies of
cognition in children, and a series of simple but ingenious tests to reveal different
cognitive abilities. According to Piaget, children are born with a very basic mental
structure (genetically inherited and evolved) on which all subsequent learning and
knowledge is based.

To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of

mental processes as a result of biological maturation and experience. Children
construct an understanding of the world around them, then experience discrepancies
between what they already know and what they discover in their environment.
Through his study of the field of education, Piaget focused on two processes, which
he named assimilation and accommodation. To Piaget, assimilation meant
integrating external elements into structures of lives or environments, or those we
could have through experience.
Assimilation is how humans perceive and adapt to new information. It is
the process of fitting new information into preexisting cognitive schemas. In
contrast, accommodation is the process of taking new information in one's
environment and altering pre-existing schemas in order to fit in the new information.
This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be
changed to deal with a new object or situation. Piaget's understanding was that
assimilation and accommodation cannot exist without the other. When they are in
balance with each other, assimilation and accommodation generate mental schemas
of the operative intelligence. Cognitive development is Piaget's theory. Through a
series of stages, Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development: the
sensorimotor, pre operational, concrete operational and formal operational period.

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 Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934)

Lev Vygotsky is regarded as the founder of socio-cultural theory or the

socio historical approach in psychology. Unlike Chomsky and Piaget, Vygotsky's
central concern was the relationship between the development of thought and that of
language. He was interested in the ways in which different languages might impact
on how a person thinks. Vygotsky's theory views language first as social
communication, gradually promoting both language itself and cognition.
According to Vygotsky, a word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a
thought unembodied in words remains a shadow. The speech structures mastered by
the child become the basic structure of his thinking. The structure of the language
one habitually uses influences the way he perceives his environment. A child first
seems to use language for superficial social interaction, but at some point, this
language goes underground to become the structure of the child's thinking.

In Vygotsky's view point, language is critical for cognitive development.

He argues that language in the form of private speech guides cognitive development.
The corner stone of Vygotsky's theory are the social significance of education and
its relation to societal involvement. According to him, language and culture play
essential roles both in human intellectual development and in how humans perceive
the world.

The main difference between the ideas of Vygotsky and his contemporaries
was regarding emphasis on an individual's interaction with his social environment.
For Vygotsky, thinking and language are key as the child develops through social
interactions such as conversing and playing.

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 An expert teacher is central to Vygotsky theory. The teacher's role is to
identify the student's current mode of representation and then through the use of
good discourse, questioning or learning situations, provoke the student to move
forward in thinking. The recognition of a student's representation or thinking was
seen as his zone of proximal development and the teacher's actions for supporting
learning was described as scaffolding. When working in the zone of proximal
development particular attention is paid to the language being used since the
language of the student influences how he will interpret and build understandings.

According to Vygotsky, cognitive skills and patterns of thinking are the

products of the activities practiced in the social institutions of culture in which the
individual grows up. A clear understanding of the interaction between thought and
language is necessary for the understanding of intellectual development. Language
is essential in forming thought and determining personality features.

One important tenet in Vygotsky's theory is the notion of the existence of

what he called the Zone of proximal development, zone of proximal development is
the difference between the child's capacity to solve problems of his own, and his
capacity to solve them in assistance. Zone of proximal development includes all the
functions and activities that a child or a learner can perform only with the assistance
of someone else. An essential feature of learning is that, it awakens a variety of
internal developmental processes which are able to operate only when child is in the
action of interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with peers.

By explaining human language development and cognitive development,

Vygotsky's social interactionist theory serves as a strong foundation of the modern
trends in applied linguistics. It lends support to less structured and more natural
communicative and experiential approaches and points to the importance of early
world human interaction in foreign language learning.

Unlike Piaget's notion that children's development must necessarily precede

their learning. Vygotsky argued "learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the
process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological

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function" (1978, p. 90). As a matter of fact, the major theme of Vygotsky's
theoretical framework is that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the
development of cognition. Vygotsky (1978) states: “Every function in the child's
cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the
individual level: first, between people (inter psychological) and then inside the child
(Intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory,
and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual
relationship s between individuals. Vygotsky's theory was an attempt to explain
consciousness as the end product of socialization. For example, in the learning of
language, our first utterances s with peers or adults are for the purpose of
communication but once mastered they become internalized and allow "inner
speech".

Comparing and contrasting Piaget's and Vygotsky's theory of cognitive

development

Piaget and Vygotsky were contemporaries, both studying child

psychological developmental during the early 20th century. Although both men
studies the same subject, their theories contained more differences than similarities.
Piaget's research emphasized "nature," or innate capabilities, while Vygotsky's
theories revolved around "nature," or the connection between environment and
development.

Piaget believed there were four stages that every child goes through
before they are able to fully receive, process, and return information. They are the
sensorimotor stage, pre operational stage, concrete operations, and lastly formal
operations. He believed that each stage had its limits and that until a child reached
the next stage trying to explain something beyond their grasp was futile.

Jean Piaget shaped a new way of thinking and looking at the stages of
development. Piaget's research proved that the way children think is qualitatively
different from the thinking patterns of adults. According to Piaget's theory, even
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young children attempt to make sense of their world by constructing reality, rather
than simply acquiring knowledge. Social interaction is a factor in Piaget's theory of
cognitive development. Piaget defines social interaction as the interchange of ideas
to the construction of knowledge, which is incorporated into the individual’s
schemata. Schemata evolve over time as new ideas are constantly being integrated
and schemata change or adapt to fit new ideas. Piaget's theory outlines a continuum
of development where new schemata do not replace old schemata or add to them.

Through this process social knowledge is formed. Piaget argues that social
knowledge, such as the concept of honesty, such as the concept of a tree. For
example, a child develops the socially acceptable concept of tree through physical
knowledge, which is relatively independent of others. In contrast, the child cannot
develop a socially acceptable independent construct of the concept of honesty. The
child depends on social interaction for the construction and validation of social
knowledge.

Piaget states that social interaction exists on multiple levels; it can take
place in the classroom or at home. Social interaction occurs between students,
teachers, parents, and others within the environment. Piaget's theory supports the
claim that all forms of social interaction and experience are equally important in the
child's intellectual development. Like Piaget, Vygotsky is particularly interested in
the intersection between individual development and social relations. One of the
most important points Vygotsky addresses is that of scaffolding, which views
children as actively constructing themselves and their environment. The social
environment acts as the framing that permits a child to move forward and continue
growth.

Vygotsky argues that one of the most important components of scaffolding

is the engagement of children in interesting and culturally meaningful problem
solving activities. This leads into what Vygotsky terms the Zone of Proximal
Development. Vygotsky took a much more hands on approach to child
development. He believed that children grew through sociocultural development,
meaning it was their culture and social encounters that taught them to behave and
what was acceptable. The biggest difference between them is their approach to

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discovery learning. Piaget believed children should be left alone to discover the
world and interpret it themselves while Vygotsky believed that a child would be
guided in their discovery.

Similarities between Vygotsky and Piaget

Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky were both developmental psychologists who
studied how language develops in children. Piaget and Vygotsky both believed that
children's inquisitive natures give them the ability to develop language skills from
an early age.

Evidence to support Chomsky's theory

 Children learning to speak never make grammatical errors such as getting
their subjects, verbs, and objects in the wrong order.

 If an adult deliberately said a grammatically incorrect sentence, the child

would notice.

 Children often say things that are ungrammatical such as 'mama ball’, which
they cannot have learnt passively.

 Mistakes such as 'I drawed' instead of ' I drew' show they are not learning
through imitation alone.

 Chomsky used the sentence 'colorless green ideas sleep furiously', which is
grammatical although it does not make sense, to prove his grammatical
without having any meaning, that we can tell the difference between a
grammatical and an ungrammatical sentence without ever having heard the
sentence before, and that we can produce and understand brand new sentences
that no one ever said before.

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 Evidence against Chomsky's theory

Critics of Chomsky's theory say that although it is clear that children don't
learn language through imitation alone, this does not prove that they must have an
LAD -language learning could merely be through general learning and
understanding abilities and interactions with other people.

Egocentric speech

According to the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, children between

the ages of three to five go through a stage called egocentrism. The term egocentric
to a child's inability to understand another person's point of view; in other words, he
or she believes that other children feel, think, and experience life as they do. In many
cases, children also take part in egocentric speech. Egocentric speech involves a
child talking to him or herself for self-guidance, usually through an activity.

For example, a four-year-old girl may say things aloud when playing on her
own or explain what she is doing, as if she was talking to someone. If playing with
a doll, she might say something like: 'Now I am going to take you to the table.' If
stacking blocks, the four-year-old may say: 'see, I'm putting one block on this one.
Both Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist and the father of
cultural-historical psychology, had similar ideas about the cognitive and social
development of children. However, when it came to egocentric speech in children,
they had very different views.

Piaget's view
Piaget was the first in his field to coin the term 'egocentric speech' in relation
to the egocentric stage of child development, which he shared in his 1923 book, The
Language and Thought of the Child. In Piaget's opinion, children weren't born with
the ability to relate to others, but instead focused solely on themselves.

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 Piaget believed that when children talked to themselves, they did it for self-
centered purposes and without taking others and their thoughts into consideration.
According to Piaget, because children don't really communicate with peers, they
resort to talking to themselves. As described by Piaget, egocentric speech is
associated with immaturity, a sign that a child is at the point in his or her
development where he or she has not yet learned how to interact with others.
Therefore, the tendency towards egocentric speech would fade away as the child
increased in maturity.

Vygotsky's View
While Piaget viewed egocentric speech as an unimportant act used for self-
centered purposes, Vygotsky viewed it as a key part of the social learning process.
In his 1934 book, Thought and Language, Vygotsky discussed egocentric speech not
as a shortcoming, but as a healthy part of development. In contrast to Piaget, he
believed that children were born social creatures that are continuously learning how
to relate to others.

Language Acquisition

Anybody who has had or known a child knows that children take to learning
language at a remarkable rate. In fact, it seemed a little too remarkable for one
linguistics researcher. Noam Chomsky, a pioneering linguist and a professor at MIT,
put forth an idea called the language acquisition device or LAD, for short. The LAD
is a hypothetical tool hardwired into the brain that helps children rapidly learn and
understand language. Chomsky used it to explain just how amazingly children are
able to acquire language abilities as well as accounting for the innate understanding
of grammar and syntax all children possess.

Keep in mind that the LAD is a theoretical concept. There isn't a section of the
brain with 'language acquisition device' printed on it and a big switch to turn on and
learn a new language. Rather, the LAD is used to explain what are most likely
hundreds or thousands of underlying processes that humans have in their brains that
have evolved to make us particularly exceptional at learning and understanding
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language. Chomsky developed the LAD in the 1950s and since then, has moved on
to a greater theory called universal grammar (or UG) to account for the rapid
language development in humans. While universal grammar is a bit beyond the
scope of this article, just remember for now that LAD later evolved into this theory.

How it Works
Let's go into a little more detail on the LAD. Chomsky proposed that every
child was born with a LAD that holds the fundamental rules for language. In other
words, children are born with an understanding of the rules of language; they simply
need to acquire the vocabulary.

Chomsky offered a number of pieces of evidence to support his theory. He

posed that language is fundamentally similar across all of humanity. For instance,
every language has something that is like a noun and a verb, and every language has
the ability to make things positive or negative. Chomsky also discovered that when
children are learning to speak, they don't make the errors you would expect. For
instance, children seem to understand that all sentences should have the structure
'subject-verb-object', even before they are able to speak in full sentences. Weird,
huh?

From his experiments, Dr. Chomsky also noted that young children, well
before reaching language fluency, would notice if adults around them spoke in a
grammatically incorrect manner. He also found that children attempt to apply
grammatical rules to words for which their language makes an exception. For
example, in following the English rules of grammar, a child might pluralize the word
'fish' as 'fishes' and 'deer' as 'deers', even though our language makes exceptions for
those words.

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who studied the development of

cognitive processes from infancy through adulthood. Piaget often spoke about the
relationship between cognitive development and language skills, but he was never

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exclusively focused on childhood language development. Piaget's theories have been
extremely influential on psychologists studying early childhood.

The Sensorimotor Stage

According to Piaget's theory, all children develop cognitive abilities such as
language in four stages. In the sensorimotor stage, which lasts until the child is
around 2 years old, the emphasis is on movement and physical reactions. Small
babies don't realize they can control their own bodies, so much of their play is
initially based on figuring out how to perform basic motor activities like opening the
fingers or waving the legs followed by more complex tasks like crawling and finally
walking. At this early stage in cognitive development, Piaget saw language skills as
basically physical. The baby experiments with what her mouth can do just as she
experiments with what her hands can do. In the process she learns how to imitate
some of the sounds she hears her parents making and in what context those sounds
should be made.

The Preoperational Stage

The preoperational stage begins at around 2 years and lasts until the child is 6
or 7. The defining feature of this stage, in Piaget's view, is egocentricity. The child
seems to talk constantly, but much of what he says does not need to be said out loud.
For instance, the child might describe what he is doing even though others can easily
see what he is doing. He shows no awareness of the possibility that others have a
viewpoint of their own. Piaget sees little distinction at this stage of development
between talking with others and thinking aloud.

The Concrete Operational Stage

The concrete operational stage begins around age 7 and lasts until at least age
11 or 12. At this stage, the child is capable of using logic and of solving problems in
the form of stories as long as the story deals only with facts rather than abstract ideas.
Language at this stage is used to refer to specific and concrete facts, not mental
concepts. Piaget believed that some people remain in this stage for the remainder of
their lives, even though a child in this stage has not yet reached full cognitive
maturity.
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 The Formal Operational Stage
The formal operational stage begins at age 11 or 12 at the earliest. At this stage,
the child can start to use abstract reason and to make a mental distinction between
herself and an idea she is considering. Children who have reached this stage can use
language to express and debate abstract theoretical concepts such as those found in
mathematics, philosophy or logic. Piaget believed that these four stages of cognitive
and linguistic development were universal and that no children ever skipped over
one of the four steps.

The work of Lev Vygotsky (1934) has become the foundation of much research
and theory in cognitive development over the past several decades, particularly of
what has become known as Social Development Theory. Vygotsky's theories stress
the fundamental role of social interaction in the development of cognition
(Vygotsky, 1978), as he believed strongly that community plays a central role in the
process of "making meaning." Unlike Piaget's notion that children’s' development
must necessarily precede their learning, Vygotsky argued, "learning is a necessary
and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically
human psychological function" (1978, p. 90). In other words, social learning tends
to precede (i.e. come before) development.

Vygotsky has developed a sociocultural approach to cognitive development.

He developed his theories at around the same time as Jean Piaget was starting to
develop his ideas (1920's and 30's), but he died at the age of 38 and so his theories
are incomplete - although some of his writings are still being translated from
Russian.

No single principle (such as Piaget's equilibration) can account for

development. Individual development cannot be understood without reference to the
social and cultural context within which it is embedded. Higher mental processes in
the individual have their origin in social processes.

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 Though Piaget's basic ideas and observations have stood up very well despite
years of research scrutiny, the specifics of his work as originally communicated are
now considered out of date. Piaget had proposed that children learn how to perform
various concrete operations more or less under their own steam; based upon their
own mental observations and private experiments. Newer research suggests this is
an incomplete way of thinking about how these complex abilities form. While
children's personal observations and private experiments are unquestionably
important, more recent research suggests that children's schooling, culture and other
interpersonal experiences also affect their cognitive development in important and
vital ways. Specifically, Vygotsky's developmental theory has highlighted the
important contribution of social, interpersonal and linguistic factors in facilitating
children's mental development.

Social Development
Vygotsky observed that very young children tend to talk out loud as they
problem-solve and try to learn a new mental task. This external dialogue helps
children guide themselves through tasks. By middle childhood, as children become
more efficient and skilled at various mental operations, these out-loud comments
transform to become the internalized thoughts familiar to adults. For example, a
three-year-old girl may say out loud,

"I want to wear my princess crown. What did I do with my princess crown?
Oh, I put it on the couch,"

As she thinks through this situation. In contrast, an older, 8-year-old girl (in
the middle childhood stage) may think to herself,

"What did I do with my math book? Oh yeah, I put it on the kitchen table"

Rather than voicing these thoughts out loud.

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 Vygotsky also observed that children learn cognitive tasks through their
interactions with older peers and adults. Not only do younger children watch and
imitate older people/peers as they complete tasks, but these older guides also help
younger children accomplish tasks they couldn't accomplish on their own. Vygotsky
coined the term "zone of proximal development" to describe the difference between
what children can do alone (i.e., without help) and what they can do with assistance.

According to Vygotsky, in an ideal environment most likely to foster healthy

cognitive development children's caregivers, teachers and more mature peers will
provide them with a range of experiences and tasks that fall within their zone of
proximal development. Exposure to such experiences, accompanied by appropriate
prompting, questioning, and adjustments (so as to match demands to children's skill
level) will create the best possible environmental conditions necessary to facilitate
children's growth. For example, Mom may use the following prompts with Sally as
she struggles to read a new word:

"Try looking at that word again. What sound does the 'A' make? What sound
does the 'D' make?"

In this situation, Mom helps Sally through a task that is just beyond her current
abilities (reading a new and difficult word out loud) by breaking it down into its
component parts and encouraging Sally to sound out individual letters. Mom's
deconstruction of speaking a word out loud into a series of letter sounds makes the
overall task much easier for Sally to accomplish.

Vygotsky also observed that adults and older peers' instructions to children
become less directive across time; a process he called "scaffolding." When working
with very young children, adults and older peers are naturally prone to provide a lot
of structure and direction, telling children exactly what to do and how to do it. As
time goes by, however, and children gain experience with problem solving on their
own, adults/peers will naturally decrease the amount of prompting and direction they
provide to children. Based on this observation, Vygotsky became a great proponent
of reciprocal teaching and cooperative learning. He urged schools to set up learning

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environments in which older or more accomplished peers were assigned to help
younger or struggling peers grasp a subject or learn a new skill, based on the idea
that this arrangement would produce the most effective learning.

Information Processing Theory is another theory that has been used to explain
children's cognitive development during middle childhood. Basically, this theory
describes how children retain, organize, and use information while learning and how
these abilities change over the course of children's cognitive development. This is a
single minded theory that views children squarely in terms of their ability to
consume, digest and regurgitate information. Accordingly, children take "inputs"
from their experiences, process them internally, and create behavioral "outputs."
There are no specific developmental stages associated with this theory. Instead,
children's attention and memory abilities are thought to undergo more or less
continuous improvement. The major utility of information processing theory with
regard to the middle childhood time period is that it provides concepts and language
useful for understanding children's mental abilities in the context of school
environments and tasks.

Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory, Erickson’s psychosocial theory, and

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory have significant contributions for understanding the
relationship between play and social development. In addition, Sutton-Smith has
advocated that play can also be viewed from an evolutionary perspective.

Although Piaget (1962) felt that play has a primary role in the child’s
development, he placed little emphasis on play as a factor in the child’s responses to
the social environment. Nevertheless, he saw a role for peer interactions within play
for social-cognitive development. More specifically, play interactions helped
children understand that other players have perspectives different than their own.
Play, for Piaget, provides children with opportunities to develop social competence
through ongoing interactions.

Erikson (1963) maintained there is a relationship between make-believe play

and wider society. Make-believe permits children to learn about their social world

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and to try out new social skills. Moreover, play facilitates the understanding of
cultural roles and to integrate accepted social norms into their own personalities. For
Erikson, like Piaget, play promotes a child who is socially competent (Creasey et al.,
1998).

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory has a significant role for play in that he

proposed that make-believe play in the preschool years is vital for the acquisition of
social and cognitive competence. Vygotsky suggested that make-believe play
required children to initiate an imaginary situation and follow a set of rules to play
out the situation; the child is able to act separately from reality. This type of play
helps children choose between courses of action (Creasey et al., 1998). Make-believe
play also forces young children to control their impulses and subject themselves to
the rules of play; moreover, Vygotsky believed that all imaginary situations devised
by young children follow social rules. Through make-believe play, children develop
an understanding of social norms and try to uphold those social expectations (Berk,
1994b).

Sutton-Smith (1976) and others maintain that there is a relationship between

play and evolution. Much of children’s social play resembles that of primates and is
necessary for survival. For example, rough-and-tumble play, in which both children
and primates engage, offers a survival benefit in that it provides experiences in being
dominant that later promote self-confidence in social interactions. It must be noted
that more recently Sutton-Smith (1997) has embraced a wider understanding of play.
He suggests that the usual psychological theories of play present a sanitized, middle-
class perspective of play (Vandenberg, 1985). The negative social attributes of play,
such as violence and aggression, are given less importance. In addition, he believes
that too much stress has been placed on the function of play to promote development
and progress and to describe what is done by immature organisms (Sutton-Smith,
1997).

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 Are children born with a universal language syntax encoded, as it were, in their
DNA — so that learning to speak and write is just a matter of fitting the particulars
of their language into this template? Or, is language acquisition a more complex and
subtle process of learning and thinking? These have been the polarities of a fierce
linguistic controversy set off a half century ago by the publication of Noam
Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures." That debate still rages.

Linguist Noam Chomsky challenged old ideas about language acquisition in

his first book, "Syntactic Structures," published in 1957. He rejects the notion that
all language must be learned afresh by each child. Instead, Chomsky says, normal
children everywhere are born with a kind of hard-wired syntax that enables them to
grasp the basic workings of language. The child then chooses the particular grammar
and language of the environment from the available options in the brain.

Thus, the capacity for language is a biological inheritance and specific

languages are then activated largely through the child's interaction with the native
environment. It's as if the child's brain is a CD player already set to "play" language;
when the CD for a certain language is inserted, that is the language the child learns.

Chomsky advanced his "government-binding" theory in a 1981 book, in which

he says a child's native knowledge of syntax consists of a group of linguistic
principles that define the form of any language. These principles are connected with
parameters, or "switches," triggered by the child's language environment. Chomsky
emphasizes the importance of the child's genetic inheritance of the syntax imprint.
For Chomsky, the "growth" of language is analogous to the growth of internal organs
and arms and legs -- determined by internal mechanisms, but nourished by the
environment -- whether verbal or nutrition. Chomsky sees language development in
the child as a separate aspect of knowledge, apart from the rest of cognition, or
mental functioning.

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 Development of Language

The development of language is considered to be a major principle of

Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. The language of certain group of people indicates
their cultural beliefs and value system. The children learn language much the same
way that children learn cognitive skills. Vygotsky states that human may have "built
in biases, rules, and constraints about language that restricts the number of
possibilities considered"(Woolflok, A., 2004). A child's thinking regarding these
language constraints is very important in language development (Woolflok, A.,
2004). Another aspect of language development involves private speech. Private
speech is self- talk children (and adults) may use to guide actions and aid in thinking.
While Piaget may view private speech as egocentric or immature, Vygotsky
understood the importance of self-directed speech. Private speech is considered to
be self-directed regulation and communication with the self, and becomes
internalized after about nine years (Woolflok, A., 2004).

Vygotsky also emphasized the importance of cultural tools in cognition.

Cultural tools can be any technological tool or any symbolic tool which aids in
communication. Language, the media, television, computers, and books are only a
handful of all the cultural tools available for problem solving or learning. Higher-
level processing is mediated by psychological tools, such as language, signs, and
symbols. After receiving constructed help, children internalize the use of the cultural
tools, and are better able to utilize the tools in the future on their own. Piaget and
Vygotsky also differ in how they approach discovery learning. Piaget advocated for
discovery in the classroom. Guided discovery involves the teacher offering
intriguing questions to students and having them discover the answers through
testing hypotheses. The students are engaged in the discovery process, they are still
receiving assistance from a more knowledgeable source.

I believe that both Piaget and Vygotsky provided educators with important
views on cognitive development in the child. Piaget proposed that children progress
through the stages of cognitive development through maturation, discovery methods,
and some social transmissions through assimilation and accommodation. Vygotsky's

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theory stressed the importance of culture and language on one's cognitive
development.
On the other hand, Chomsky, for his part does not see our linguistic faculties
as having originated from any particular selective pressure, but rather as a sort of
fortuitous accident. He bases this view, among other things, on studies which found
that recursivity - the ability to embed one clause inside another, as in "the person
who was singing yesterday had a lovely voice" - might be the only specifically
human component of language. To his belief, from birth, children would appear to
have certain linguistic abilities that predisposes them not only to acquire a complex
language, but even to create one from whole cloth if the situation requires. In
addition, the reason that children so easily master the complex operations of
language is that they have innate knowledge of certain principles that guide them in
developing the grammar of their language. In other words, Chomsky's theory is that
language learning is facilitated by a predisposition that our brains have for certain
structures of language.

Regarding the two cognitive theories, I would be more apt to apply Vygotskian
principles to my classroom. I believe that principles such as scaffolding, co-
constructed knowledge, dialogue, and cultural tools are all important components of
a student's knowledge acquisition. By helping students within their zone of proximal
development, we offer them useful learning strategies which they internalize and
utilize later. Piaget proposed many applicable educational strategies, such as
discovery learning with an emphasis on activity and play. However, Vygotsky
incorporated the importance of social interactions and a co-constructed knowledge
base to the theory of cognitive development.

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 References

Berk,L, & Winsler, A. (1995). Scaffolding children's learning: Vygotsky and

early childhood education. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education
of young children.
Chomsky, Noam (1995). The minimalist Program. MIT press.
Damon, W. (1981). The social world of the child. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Fillmore, C.J. (1963) 'The Position of Embedding Transformations in a
Grammar', Word 19:208-31.
Goodman, Y., & Goodman, K. (1990). Vygotsky in a whole language
perspective. In L.
Harris, Margaret (1992). Language Experience and Early Language
Development: From input to intake.
Hantano, G. (1993). Commentary: Time to emerge Vygotskian and
constructivist conceptions of knowledge acquisition. In E. Forman, N. Minick, & C.
Stone (eds), contexts for learning (pp. 153-166), New York: Oxford University
Press.
Webelhuth, G. (ed) (1995) Government and Binding Theory and the
Minimalist Program, Oxford: Blackwell.
Woolfolk, Anita. (2004). Educational Psychology. (9th ed). Boston: Allayn
and Bacon.
Yasnitsky, A. & Van der Veer, R. (Eds.) (2016). Revisionist Revolution in
Vygotsky studies. London and New York: Routledge.

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