Piaget's Four Stages Of Cognitive Development

From the first days of life, babies attend to words and expressions, responding as well as their limited abilities allow—crying, cooing, and soon babbling. Before age 1, they understand simple words and communicate with gestures. At 1 year, most infants speak. Vocabulary accumulates slowly at first, but then more rapidly with the naming explosion and with the emergence of the holophrase and the two-word sentence.
The impressive language learning of the first two years can be explained in many ways. One theory contends that caregivers must teach language, reinforcing the infant’s vocal expressions. Another theory relies on the idea of an inborn language acquisition device, a mental structure that facilitates the acquisition of language as soon
Piaget realized that very young infants are active learners, seeking to understand their complex observations and experiences. Adaptation in infancy is characterized by sensorimotor intelligence, the first of Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development. At every time of their lives, people adapt their thoughts to the experiences they have.
2. Sensorimotor intelligence develops in six stages—three pairs of two stages each—beginning with reflexes and ending with the toddler’s active exploration and use of mental combinations. In each pair of stages, development occurs in one of three types of circular reactions, or feedback loops, in which the infant takes in experiences and tries to make sense of them.
3. Reflexes provide the foundation for intelligence. The continual process of assimilation and accommodation is evident in the first acquired adaptations, from 1 to 4 months. The sucking reflex accommodates the particular nipples and other objects that the baby learns to suck. Over the next year, infants become more goal-oriented, creative, and experimental as “little
Objects that move are particularly interesting to infants, as are other humans. Objects as well as people afford many possibilities for interaction and perception, and therefore these affordances enhance early cognition.
7. Infant memory is fragile but not completely absent. Reminder sessions help trigger memories, and young brains learn motor sequences long before they can remember with words. Memory is multifaceted; explicit memories are rare in infancy.
Language: What Develops in the First Two Years?
8. Eager attempts to communicate are apparent in the first year. Infants babble at about 6 to 9 months, understand words and gestures by 10 months, and speak their first words at about 1 year.
9. Vocabulary begins to build very slowly until the infant knows approximately 50 words. Then a naming explosion begins. Toward the end of the second year, toddlers begin putting two words together, showing by their word order that they understand the rudiments of grammar.
10. Various theories attempt to explain how infants learn language as quickly as they do. The three main theories emphasize different aspects of early language learning: that infants must be taught, that their brains are genetically attuned to language, and that their social impulses foster language