Compare Piaget and Vygotsky

PIAGET vs. VYGOTSKY

Compared: Piaget and Vygotsky

Piaget vs. Vygotsky: The role of language in cognitive development

Jean Piaget's theory of human development is fundamentally a biological one: Piaget believed that all human beings go through a series of developmental stages, and the ability to understand certain concepts such as volume and mass is determined by the biological and developmental stage of the brain, more so than culture. If the child is not yet ready to learn certain spatial principles, he cannot do so, even with the best of teachers. The child interacts with the environment and is shaped by its contents to some extent, but there are natural constraints based upon the child's mentality.

In contrast, "unlike Piaget's notion that children's development must necessarily precede their learning," Lev Vygotsky argued, "learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological functions" (McLeod 2007). Piaget viewed learning, including the learning of language as a kind of 'seed' that was innately planted in a child's brain. Granted, the 'seed' needed to be supported by a positive learning environment, and certain environments were more salutary for learning than others. But Vygotsky viewed language acquisition instead as a fundamentally socially-constructed process. "According to Vygotsky, all fundamental cognitive activities take shape in a matrix of social history…cognitive skills and patterns of thinking are not primarily determined by innate factors, but are the products of the activities practiced in the social institutions of the culture in which the individual grows up" (Schutz 2004). This also meant that the trajectory of language development could vary a great deal between cultures, and was not a universal construct. "Whereas Piaget believed that all children's cognitive process follows a very similar pattern of stages, Vygotsky saw intellectual abilities as being much more specific to the culture in which the child was reared" (Kristinsdotti 2001). For Piaget, language was a physical process in which the child interacted with the physical world as his or her brain physiology changed; for Vygotsky, the process was a social one.

Language itself is a process of acculturation in Vygotsky's eyes, not mere natural 'development' like growing taller. Moreover, the language one acquires determines the speaker's ability to articulate specific concepts within his or her social context. Vygotsky stated that: "language is not merely an expression of the knowledge the child has acquired. There is a fundamental correspondence between thought and speech in terms of one providing resource to the other; language becoming essential in forming thought and determining personality features" (Schutz 2004). For Vygotsky, the thought cannot come before the words to articulate the concept. Piaget believed the exact opposite: the child understands the concept of 'more than' and then uses the words to articulate this concept (Narra n.d.: 29).

Piaget believed that well before language, infants showed evidence of thinking, which proved that thought existed before language. Early childhood speech is relatively primitive and concrete. As the child grows, he or she is able to use and articulate more complex ideas (such as abstractions) and use more complex verbal imagery (like similes and metaphors) (Narra n.d.: 29). At first, the child's language is egocentric and takes the form of a monologue, like his thoughts, but gradually expands to a more social discourse.

However, Vygotsky noted the presence of thought even in non-human species. Language was a powerful shaping tool of thoughts, but was not innate to the developmental trajectory of the brain; rather, it must be imposed upon children from without (Narra n.d.: 33). Language was acquired through observation, mimicry, and dialogue with others. This meant that the persons with whom the child engaged would have a critical impact upon how that dialogue evolved and teachers played a vital role in childhood development.

Reflecting the critical importance placed upon learning from others, Vygotsky advanced the concept known as "the zone of proximal development," which are "functions and activities that a child or a learner can perform only with the assistance of someone else" (Schutz 2004). The objective of education is for the child's teacher to build upon what the child learns to breach this zone. This is an active process for both teacher and learner, in contrast with Piaget's vision of language development, in which the child's learning trajectory is internally-driven. Piaget believed that it was essential that the child become a social being and his or her language would reflect that, but the socialization would come naturally, evolving from the inevitable egocentrism of the infant to a fully-formed human adult who was capable of engaging in social dialogue with others using abstractions and higher-level linguistic devices.