Information Processing-Perspective: Cognitive Development In Children

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Cognitive development in middle childhood revolves around children just becoming of school age, that is children who are around ages six to eleven. These are eager learners building upon previous knowledge. Berger's (Berger (2015)) research shows that according to Piaget, these children are of concrete operational thought and have developed logic. The Information Processing-Perspective compares people to computers and brings up a different approach as to how children develop and learn. This approach is also largely used in memory, which affects how language is learned. This is the time where education is critical. Many nations differ in what is taught and how, but almost all nations send their children to school around the age of five. …show more content…
A child in preoperational thought may think the long piece of clay contains more clay than the balled-up clay, whereas a child in concrete operational thought knows the two pieces of clay are of the same amount. Berger has also described Piaget's research into reversibility. In preoperational thought children experience irreversibility. For example, once pickles on their sandwich have been placed, even if you remove the pickles, the sandwich is ruined. Concrete operational children understand reversibility. Once the pickles have been removed from the sandwich, it is restored. Reversibility is useful in arithmetic as well. A logical operation to come with concrete operational thought is seriation, the concept that things can be arranged in a series logically. An example of this is the alphabet and numbers. Children in preoperational thought may be able to say their ABCs or count to one hundred, but they are memorizing these things and are not able to apply what they know. School-aged children understand why things are arranged the way they are. Seriation, conservation, and reversibility are crucial for basic arithmetic. Logic …show more content…
Many have mastered a second language as well if they grew up bilingual. Bilingual children who don't know or forget the word in the language they are speaking will insert a word from their second language, which shows the child's drive to communicate. This is called code-switching. School-aged children can learn as many as twenty new words a day, and by age six, name thousands of objects, as well as use many parts of speech. They now understand their verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs as well as prefixes, suffixes, compound words, phrases, and even metaphors. School-aged children finally start to comprehend metaphors as well as jokes and puns. The new cognitive flexibility of age six to eleven years allows for them to enjoy jokes with unexpected answers and puns whereas younger children may not understand why it's so funny and someone too old may have just heard the joke or pun too many times it's no longer funny. A lack of metaphorical understanding can be a sign of cognitive deficiency, even when the person's vocabulary is large as metaphors are context-specific and build upon knowledge bases. Asking a school-aged child to create a metaphor or simile may reveal emotions not shown in other ways. Pragmatics also advances during this period. Pragmatics allows children to change the way they