by Morton Hunt
Language and thought: Piaget believed that language plays only a limited role in the development of thought and that logical thinking is primarily nonlinguistic and derives from actions—first, doing things to the world around one, and later, doing things to one’s mental images of those things.27 Developmentalists in the Soviet Union and America found evidence to the contrary. Although it is true that some thinking is nonlinguistic, language is a set of symbols that give the child extraordinary freedom to manipulate the world mentally and to behave appropriately toward new stimuli without needing to experience them directly (“It’s hot—don’t touch”). Jerome Bruner, an eminent developmentalist, has long maintained that language is a crucial part of the child’s symbol system and “a means, not only for representing experience, but also for transforming it.”28
A bit of research evidence about the role of language in thought: Prekindergarten children were shown three black squares and told to choose one; if they chose the largest, they were rewarded. Once they had learned to choose the largest, they were shown three new squares, the smallest of which was the same size as the former largest one; again it was the largest that was rewarded. But the children had no mental symbols with which to tell themselves to “always choose the largest” and kept picking the size that had previously been rewarded, even though it now brought no reward. Kindergarten and older children, however, were quickly able to tell themselves to choose “the largest one,” regardless of the actual size of the square.29
More complex and advanced problems are also easier to solve if words are used to guide thought. A group of nine- and ten-year-olds was instructed to think out loud while trying to solve difficult problems involving moving disks from one circle to another in the fewest moves; another group did not receive these instructions. The group that thought out loud solved the problems faster and more efficiently than the silent group; the deliberate use of words caused them to think of new reasons for trying one method or another and thus helped them find correct solutions.30
Language acquisition: Developmentalists and psycholinguists (psychologists interested in language acquisition and use) have spent a great deal of time in recent decades listening to children speak, calculating how rapidly they learn new words, tracking the kinds of mistakes and corrections they make, and so on. Among the findings is that children develop or acquire new forms (word endings, forms of verbs, prepositions) in a relatively uniform sequence. Between two and four their vocabularies increase from a few hundred words to an average of twenty-six hundred. (They acquire fifty or more per month.) They first imitate verb forms they hear, then generalize on verb endings, reasonably (but wrongly) assuming that language has regularities throughout (“I taked a cookie,” “I seed the birdie”), and only slowly learn to use irregular verb forms. They stubbornly cling to their grammatical errors, as in this bit of dialogue reported by one psycholinguist:
CHILD: Nobody don’t like me.
MOTHER: No, say, “Nobody likes me.”
CHILD: Nobody don’t like me. (eight repetitions of this interchange)
MOTHER: No, now listen carefully; say, “Nobody likes me.”
CHILD: Oh! Nobody don’t likes me.31
They correct their errors by themselves when they are good and ready. Apparently they acquire many elements of grammar that they do not use until, at some moment, they mentally compare what they are saying to some stored knowledge and see the discrepancy.
JAMIE (nearly seven): I figured something you might like out.
MOTHER: What did you say?
JAMIE: I figured out something you might like.32
The most significant advance in the study of language acquisition concerns the means by which children understand syntax—the arrangement of words in a sentence that denotes their relationship to one another and thus the meaning of the sentence. In 1957 B. F. Skinner published a book called Verbal Behavior, in which he explained the child’s acquisition of language entirely in terms of operant conditioning:when the child uses a word or sentence correctly, the parents or others approve, and that reward conditions the child to use it correctly the next time.
But in the same year Noam Chomsky, a brilliant young psycholinguist, presented a radically different analysis in his Syntactic Structures. He asserted that “there must be fundamental processes at work quite independently of ‘feedback’ from the environment”; the brain must have inborn capacities to make sense of language. As evidence, he pointed out that children produce innumerable sentences they have never heard, which makes imitation through conditioning seem a quite inadequate explanation of sentence formation. Furthermore, children’s efforts to make sentences are often ungrammatical but never grossly in violation of syntax. (They never produce backward sentences.) Most important, children understand what is meant even when the form of a sentence is ambiguous; they must have a built-in ability to perceive the “deep structure” of the sentence, whatever its “surface structure.” An example Chomsky gave:
John is easy to please.
John is eager to please.
The sentences have the same surface structure, but if you try to paraphrase them in the same fashion, only one makes sense:
It is easy to please John.
It is eager to please John.
No child makes such an error; every child comprehends the deep structure. “John” in the first sentence is the deep object of “please,” so the paraphrase works; “John” in the second sentence is the deep subject of “please,” so that any paraphrase has to take the form “John is eager to please (someone).” An understanding of deep structure is not learned from surface structure or from rules of thumb; the ability to perceive it is innate. (Neither Chomsky nor any other psycholinguist, however, says that language itself is innate, but only that the child has an innate predisposition to recognize and interpret the deeper structure of sentences.)
In recent studies of creoles—languages that have evolved from the mixing of existing languages—the linguist Derek Bickerton has found that creoles formed in different parts of the world are more similar to each other in grammatical structure than to long-lived languages. He also has claimed that pidgin—an informal first-generation creole that lacks consistent grammatical rules—tends to become more developed and grammatical when spoken by the children whose parents speak it. Both bodies of evidence, according to Bickerton, are evidence of the brain’s built-in sense of grammar.33
Intellectual development: Often ploddingly but sometimes inventively, researchers have devised experimental techniques better than Piaget’s and, as noted, produced a substantial number of modifications and a few outright rejections of parts of his work. Some examples:
—Heart rhythms of babies as young as four months increase when an object disappears and also when it reappears, indicating surprise. This suggests that, contrary to Piaget’s doctrine, babies expect objects to continue to exist.34 (But it is still true that they seem to forget about an object as soon as it has disappeared.)
—Piaget tested children for “conservation of number” (the ability to recognize that, say, six closely grouped objects are as many as six spaced ones), and concluded that they did not attain it until the stage of concrete operations, at about seven. But later researchers used different experimental methods, such as Rochel Gelman’s “magic” procedure, in which one of a small set of toy mice on a plate is surreptitiously removed or an extra one added while the plate is covered. Children of five or even less recognize that there are fewer or more, and say that one has been taken away or added.35
—Researchers studying children’s ability to take another person’s view have used more naturalistic methods than Piaget’s mountain experiment. Instead of asking questions about what things look like from a different perspective, they let the children talk to different people about the workings of a toy. Surprisingly, even a four-year-old will use short and simple sentences when talking to a two-year-old but longer and more complex ones when talking to an adult. Indeed, the latest w
ork on “theory of mind”—the child’s recognition that other people have their own reasons for what they do, based on their own perspective and experience—shows that children become aware of this quite early in life: They begin to read others’ intentions in their first year of life and are good at doing so by the end of the second year. Preschoolers, it is now clear, are far less egocentric and far more capable of taking another person’s perspective than Piaget thought. The evidence is derived not only from observations of children’s behavior but from physiological evidence: according to a study published in 2006, fMRI brain scans (to be discussed in Chapter 16) indicate that it is when the right and left temporo-parietal junction and the posterior cingulate areas of the brain develop early in life that children become capable of reasoning about other people’s thoughts and beliefs.36
—Piaget said that children acquire the concept of causality gradually over a period of years. Later researchers say that he came to this conclusion because he asked children to explain what causes wind and rain, how machines work, and other processes beyond their ken. If, instead, one tests them on things they are familiar with, the results are different. In one such experiment, children saw a ball roll down an incline in a box and disappear, at which point a jack-in-the-box popped up. Then the box, which was actually made in two parts, was pulled apart, and the ball, seen rolling down into one part, obviously could not reach the other part—out of which, nonetheless, the puppet popped up. When it did, children of four and five laughed, giggled, wriggled, and said things like “It’s a trick, right?,” clearly indicating that they sensed that it should not have happened.37
—On the basis of many experiments, a number of psychologists maintain that human intellectual growth is not accomplished in the clear-cut stages depicted by Piaget; there is much more overlapping or gradual change than his model depicts. There is also some evidence that at times children perform—or can be trained to perform—certain mental tasks of an advanced stage before completely mastering the stage they are in; the sequence of steps of mental development is not invariant. Moreover, children can sometimes be trained to think beyond their present stage.
—When psychologists began using Piaget’s tasks to study cognitive development in children in other cultures, they often failed to find evidence of the stage of formal operations. In his later years, Piaget himself began to think that what he had characterized as formal relations relied more on the type of science education children received than on a predetermined psychological growth process.38
This was a foretaste of cultural psychology, one of the two new psychological specialties mentioned earlier that have recently modified and enriched developmental theory far more than all the above-mentioned (and many other) Piagetian-type studies.
Cultural psychology: This minor specialty (also known as cross-cultural psychology) has been bringing a broader and deeper perspective to development theory. We all know, of course, that people in other cultures behave and evidently think and feel anywhere from a bit differently to vastly differently from ourselves (“honor killing” by family members of women in Pakistan who have had an illicit sexual relationship is a “vastly different” example, as is, on a more amiable note, the “wife-lending” of the Inuit of Alaska and the Tupi-Kawahib of central Brazil). But although we are all aware of cultural differences, the great majority of psychological research studies have been conducted with American undergraduates in psychology courses, surely not a representative sample of humanity; generalizations drawn from such studies may be valid for that kind of sample but not necessarily for other people in other countries.39
Relatively few psychologists are devoting themselves to this new discipline, but it has made a number of significant contributions to the field of developmental psychology, these being notable examples:
—Children’s cognition has been shown to develop in whatever way enables them to perform functions valued in their society; the tasks Piaget had his children perform were those he found appropriate and valuable, but, as one researcher has pointed out, if those same children had been evaluated with respect to their grasp of the cognitive complexities of weaving, they would likely have seemed retarded compared to Mayan children in Guatemala.40
—Many Americans never think seriously about their dreams unless they are in therapy or are students of psychology. But in many non-Western cultures, dream interpretation is an important part of cultural life. The male Archur Indians of Ecuador, for instance, sit together every morning and share their dreams from the night before; this ritual is “vital to the life of the Archur,” writes a researcher. “It is their belief that each individual dreams not for themselves but for the community as a whole.”41
The following are a few of the many other subjects on which cultural psychology is influencing the study of human development:42
—Do different languages cause people to think differently? Apparently not, but the issue is still undecided.
—Does culture influence the creation of one’s sense of self? Apparently yes: The evidence indicates that in an individualistic culture such as our own, the growing and maturing individual develops an independent sense of self—one guided by one’s own thoughts, feelings, and actions. In contrast the collectivist cultures in which three quarters of the world’s population live, rate the rights and responsibilities of the group higher than those of the individual and tend to generate a collectivist sense of self—one guided by the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others.
—Do genes or culture account for the fact that only 4.1 percent of Chinese children and 10.3 percent of Japanese children score as low in mathematics as the average American child? When researchers asked Asian and U.S. students, teachers, and parents which is more important, “studying hard” or “innate intelligence,” Asians stressed hard work, Americans innate ability. Clearly, cultural belief is the key.
—Even within our own county, the culture of people living at an economic hardship level is distinctly different from that of “normal” life. A combination of physical hardship and cultural influences has been shown to result in poorer working memory and lessened cognitive control in adolescents.43
In an overview in the APS Observer, Alana Conner Snibbe sums up: “Cultural psychologists’ efforts have yielded a bevy of intriguing, often controversial cultural differences in psychological processes, including reasoning styles, motivation, perceptions of time, space, and color, relational styles, and emotional experience, regulation, and expression.”44
Evolutionary psychology: This relatively new field is, according to one of its leading enthusiasts, David M. Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, nothing less than “a revolutionary new science, a true synthesis of modern principles of psychology and evolutionary biology.”45 It came on the scene in the late 1980s, although it had been suggested earlier by William James and other functionalists. But while its early proponents thought natural selection had built specific behaviors into our brains, the new evolutionary psychologists believe that natural selection built into us general cognitive strategies which are expressed in various behaviors suitable to our circumstances.
An example of such an inborn strategy is the use of deception to achieve one’s goals. A number of theorists, among them Buss and Steven Pinker, argue that we lie because those of our ancestors who could do so had an advantage over their nonlying contemporaries and hence were more likely to live and to produce surviving children—who, inheriting the ability, again outproduced nonliars, until eventually the ability to lie became common to our species. But note: Lying is not a specific inherited behavior; it is a cognitive strategy that can take the form of many different behaviors, including lying, all of them deceitful but varying according to the norms of one’s culture and the particular situation.46
“Wait a moment!” you may be thinking. “The proof of evolution is the record shown by fossils—but what evidence can there be of how the mind worked in prehistoric times? Or that it was evolution that selected cognitive
abilities such as the ability to deceive?”
One proof, say the evolutionary psychologists, is cultural universality: If people in all sorts of different and far-removed cultures exhibit certain similar tendencies or behaviors, this is unlikely to be due to cultural transmission, and it is likely that evolution is responsible. Among such cultural universals are not only lying but telling stories, gossiping, using proper names, expressing emotions with the same facial expressions, dancing, giving gifts, making medicines, and so on and on.47
A very different source of evidence consists of the actual testing of hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory. Here’s an example. First, start with a well-supported observation: Men give higher priority to physical appearance than do women in the selection of a mate. Next, generate an evolutionary hypothesis to account for this: Women’s physical appearance was a clue to ancestral man as to fertility. Finally, test the hypothesis: Show male volunteers a variety of pictures of women with varying waist-to-hip ratios and ask their preferences. The result: Men find women with a low waist-to-hip ratio—a known fertility correlate— attractive, apparently a preference built in by evolution.48
