The Language And Thought Of The Child

When first published in 1923, this classic work took the psychological world by storm. Piaget's views expressed in this book, have continued to influence the world of developmental psychology to this day.

The importance of this remarkable work deserves to be doubly emphasized, for its novelty consists both in the results obtained and in the method by which they have been reached. How does the child think. How does he speak. What are the characteristics of his judgment and of his reasoning. For half a century the answer has been sought to these questions which are those which we meet with at the very threshold of child psychology. If philosophers and biologists have bent their interest upon the soul of the child, it is because of the initial surprise they experienced at his logic and speech. In proof of this, we need only recall the words of Taine, of Darwin and of Egger, which are among the first recorded in the science of child logic.

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.

A critical exposition of Piaget's views on child language and thought.

Since it was introduced to the English-speaking world in 1962, Lev Vygotsky's highly original exploration of human mental development has become recognized as a classic foundational work of cognitive science. Vygotsky analyzes the relationship between words and consciousness, arguing that speech is social in its origins and that only as children develop does it become internalized verbal thought. Now Alex Kozulin has created a new edition of the original MIT Press translation by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar that restores the work's complete text and adds materials that will help readers better understand Vygotsky's meaning and intentions. Kozulin has also contributed an introductory essay that offers new insight into the author's life, intellectual milieu, and research methods. Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) studied at Moscow University and acquired in his brief lifespan a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, literature, and the arts. He began his systematic work in psychology at the age of 28, and within a few years formulated his theory of the development of specifically human higher mental functions. He died of tuberculosis ten years later, and Thought and Languagewas published posthumously in 1934. Alex Kozulin studied at the Moscow Institute of Medicine and the Moscow Institute of Psychology, where he began his investigation of Vygotsky and the history of Soviet psychology. He emigrated in 1979 and is now Associate Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology) at Boston University. He is the author of Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology(MIT Press 1984).

Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.