Developmental Psycholinguistics

Abstract

One of the questions a Genevan psycholinguist who works with Jean Piaget hears often is: how does language figure in Piaget’s theory? Does his theory of cognitive development provide a framework for the acquisition of language? Does he have an epistemology of language? It is difficult to answer these questions in a straightforward manner; the more so, since the few articles Piaget himself has written on language are almost uniquely concerned with the problem of language as a factor in development, and may seem to be written almost reluctantly (one of them starts off “... il aurait fallu me poser cette question à une epoque ou....” 1963); his very early work, Le Langage et la pensée chez l’enfant (1923) concerns far more “la pensée” than “le langage.” On the other hand, it is quite wrong to assert, as many authors do, that Piaget leaves language completely outside his considerations, and that, in fact, his experiments may lose some of their meaning because of this refusal to consider language as a separate, important variable.