🍁 Socialization, Language and Cognitive Competence✍🏻 DeLamater et al:
Children must develop the ability to represent in their own minds the features of the world around them. This capacity to represent reality mentally is closely related to the development of language.
The child’s basic tasks are to learn the regularities of the physical and social environment and to store past experience in a form that can be used in current situations. In a complex society, there are so many physical objects, animals, and people that it is not possible for a child (or an adult) to remember each as a distinct entity. Things must be categorized into inclusive groupings, such as dogs, houses, or girls. A category of objects and the cognitions that the individual has about members of that category (for example, “dog”) makes up a schema. Collectively, our schemas allow us to make sense of the world around us.
Young children must learn schemas. Learning language is an essential part of the process, because language provides the names around which schemas can develop. It is noteworthy that the first words that children produce are usually nouns that name objects in the child’s environment. At first, the child uses a few very general schemas. Some children learn the word dog at 12 to 14 months and then apply it to all animals – to dogs, cats, birds, and cows. Only with maturation and experience does the child develop the abstract schema “animals” and learn to discriminate between dogs and cats.
Researchers can study the ability to use schemas by asking children to sort objects, pictures, or words into groups. Young children (aged 6 to 8) rely on visual features, such as color or word length, and sort objects into numerous categories. Older children (aged 10 to 12) increasingly use functional or superordinate categories, such as foods, and sort objects into fewer groups (Olver, 1961; Rigney, 1962). With age, children become increasingly adept at classifying diverse objects and treating them as equivalent.
These skills are vital for social interaction. Only by having the ability to group objects, persons, and situations can one determine how to behave toward them. Person schemas and their associated meanings are especially important to smooth interaction. Even very young children differentiate people by age (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979). By about 2 years of age, children correctly differentiate babies and adults when shown photographs. By about 5, children employ four categories: little children, big children, parents (aged 13 to 40), and grandparents (aged 40 plus).
As children learn to group objects into meaningful schemas, they learn not only the categories but also how others feel about such categories. Children learn not only that Catholics are people who believe in the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit but also whether their parents like or dislike Catholics. Thus, children acquire positive and negative attitudes toward the wide range of social objects they come to recognize. The schemas and evaluations that children learn are influenced by the social class, religious ethnoracial, regional, and other groups to which those who socialize them belong. (DeLamater et al, 2024: 85)
📚 DeLamater, John D. & Collett, R Jessica L. & Hitlin, Steven. (2024).
Social Psychology. 10th edition. UK:
Routledge.
