Piaget’s pre-operational stage in children : a comparative study

Abstract

Each stage of Piaget’s Cognitive development process has its own distinctive origin and its own form of final resolution. All the stages are thus related to one another, the structure of each being a more complex version of the structure developed in a prior stage. Since cognition is an evolutionary, dialectical process, the final form of the first stage is the source for the origin and the initial form of the second stage. The second stage of Piaget’s cognitive development process is named as the pre-operational stage. In this stage, the children of 2-7 years old goes through significant cognitive development process such as imaginative thinking, make-believe play, egocentrism, logical thought, memory, spatial reasoning, conservation and so on. Though Piaget’s theory asserts that, every children goes through each of the stages according to their age but in reality a normal growing children and an autistic children have several differences in case of their cognitive development. The aim of the paper is to explore in what extent normal children’s cognitive development differs from autistics children’s cognitive development during Piaget’s pre-operational stage.