Week 5:
Egocentric speech
and learning by self-regulation
Piaget and Vygotsky
“I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I
cannot say to myself. ”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850)
“The very essence of cultural development is in the collision of mature
cultural forms of behavior with the primitive forms that characterize the
child's behavior. ”
L. S. Vygotsky, “The genesis of higher mental functions” (1981, p. 151)
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
•
Swiss psychologist pioneering systematic study of child knowledge and
later, genetic epistemology: which "proposes discovering the roots of
the different varieties of knowledge"
•
At 10(!) published on observations of albino sparrow, at 15 his
publications on mollusks were well known by European zoologists
•
Studied under Carl Jung & Eugen Bleuler (Zurich); in Paris devised &
administered reading tests to schoolchildren and became interested in
the types of errors they made, then exploring children's reasoning
processes. 1921: Dir. Institut J.J. Rousseau (Geneva).
•
1929-1980: U. Geneva: Prof child psychology - Ingenious questioner &
observer of children – “the first to take children’s thinking seriously”
•
50 books - how child's mind evolves through ordered developmental
stages for conceptualizing/acting on models of the world
•
Piaget's concept of developmental stages influenced education: if stages
determine thinking that is possible, simple reinforcement insufficient to
teach concepts until child's mental development at the proper stage to
assimilate those concepts. Teacher's role = guide child's own discovery
of the world – not to transmit knowledge
Language and Thought of the Child
(1926/1951)
• Investigation of functions of children’s language in a nursery in
Geneva.
• Followed two children, 6 years old, for a month in a nursery,
writing down all their talk.
• Distinguishes egocentric and socialized talk; by creating an
inventory of children’s spontaneous speech, and
distinguishing different types of egocentric and socialized
speech, he sought to establish a measure of verbal
egocentrism
• He then finds egocentric speech fading out with age and
socially adaptive speech increasing in its frequency
Vygotsky’s Roots
(from Pea, 1985)
Giambattista Vico
(1668–1744)
Baruch Spinoza
(1632–1677)
Georg Hegel
(1770-1831)
Karl Marx
(1818–1883)
Friedrich Engels
(1820–1895)
•
Influenced by Vico, Spinoza, and Hegel, Marx and Engels developed a theory of society now
described as historical or dialectical materialism.
•
On this theory human nature - rather than being a product of environmental forces - is of our
own making and continually "becoming."
•
Humankind is reshaped through a dialectic of reciprocal influences: Our productive activities
change the world, thus changing the ways that the world can change us. By shaping nature and
how our interactions with it are mediated, we change ourselves.
•
A change in the instruments of work changes the functional system of humans' relation to work:
What humans do as their tasks differs, not only do they accomplish the work faster.
•
On this cultural-historical perspective, labor is seen as the factor mediating humans and nature.
By creating and using physical instruments (e. g., machinery) that mediate in less & less direct
ways our interactions with nature, we reshape human nature.
•
To integrate accounts of individual and cultural changes, Vygotsky and Luria generalized Marx
and Engels' historical materialism developed for physical instruments to an historical analysis of
symbolic tools like written language that shape culture and human nature. Vygotsky (1978)
recognized that "the sign acts as an instrument of psychological activity in a manner analogous to
the role of a tool in labor" (p. 52).
Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934)
•
Studied@U. Moscow to become a literature teacher. First
studied art creation.
•
1924-> Launched work in developmental psychology,
education, psychopathology; contributions in philosophy,
linguistics & literature; Died of tuberculosis in 1934
•
Pioneer of cultural-historical theory of learning processes:
cognitive activities shaped in a matrix of social history and
form the products of sociohistorical development that then
shape learning for others
•
One's cognitive skills and thinking patterns emerge via
activities practiced in the social institutions of local culture
- history of the society where child reared and child's
personal history shape how that individual will think.
•
Thinking and speaking criss-cross in their developments;
providing resources to one another - Language not merely
an expression of knowledge child has acquired.
•
Famed for "zone of proximal development": difference
between the child's capacity to solve problems on his own,
and his capacity to solve them with assistance.
Piaget and Vygotsky on Egocentric Speech (ES)
Dimension of
comparison
Piaget
Vygotsky
What egocentric speech
represents
Symptom of immaturity;
by-product of activity
Instrument of thought;
mediator of activity
Function of egocentric
speech
Useless
Self-regulation, planning
Developmental fate
Dies off
Goes ‘underground’;
facilitates intermediate
stage from vocal to inner
speech; surfaces in face
of difficulties in activity
Developmental
sequence
Individual autistic ->
egocentric -> social
speech
Social before individual:
egocentric -> inner
speech
Piaget and Vygotsky on Egocentric Speech (ES)
Dimension of
comparison
Piaget
Vygotsky
Role of things/activity for Don’t shape a mind
reality
Shape a mind – since
egocentric speech is
connected with practical
activities
Relation of child to social Outside, then ‘coerced’
order
Relations experienced
outside brought inside
Nature of scientific
claims
Milieu-specific;
historically-socially
determined
Universal across
situations; law of nature
Piaget’s 1962 response to Vygotsky’s critique
•
Concurs with Vygotsky's "new hypothesis" - that egocentric speech is the point of
departure for the development of inner speech, which is found at a later stage of
development, and that this interiorized language can serve both autistic ends and
logical thinking
•
Piaget argues that Vygotsky failed to appreciate egocentrism as the main obstacle
to the co-ordination of viewpoints/co-operation. Says while Vygotsky reproaches
him rightly for not emphasizing the functional aspect of egocentric speech, he did
so later, in The Moral Judgment of the Child, where he studied children’s group
games (marbles, etc.) and noted that before the age of seven they do not know
how to co-ordinate the rules during a game, so that each one plays for himself, and
all win, without understanding that the point is competition.
•
Agreed: Vygotsky's conclusion that early function of language is global
communication and that speech is later differentiated into egocentric and
communicative.
•
Disagreed: when Vygotsky maintains that these two linguistic forms are equally
socialized and differ only in function, since egocentric speech is only "socialized" in
the sense that there is contact between speaker and listener, but that speech is
unadapted to the listener from the point of view of intellectual co-operation.