At the very core of language is the symbol-concept association. The symbol by itself is just a visual or auditory pattern with little significance. But when paired with a concept, the symbol becomes a powerful currency for thought and communication.
So what is the concept? Basically it is knowledge--stored information. It can be a small body of information--just enough to recognize something; to let us know that we have experienced it before.
The number of concepts humans develop and retain is astronomical (this is truely one of our stellar skills), altough some would maintain that just 10 would be sufficient.
As a child, I could look up at night and see a twinkling point of light. That's all it was to me, and I recognized it when I saw it again, and we call it a star.
Concepts, however, typically accrue information and become quite complex. Hence, the twinkling point of light I see and call a star today, I now understand to be a monstrous roiling mass of compressed gas (mostly Helium) being fused by its own weight with a tremendous release of energy.
A star may be many times larger than our sun, depending upon which point of light we are looking at, but has a life cycle that is shorter than our sun.
It will eventually self destruct spewing out atoms heavier than helium and will shrink into a dense lifeless sphere or maybe a point so dense that nothing can escape its gravity--almost.
For the child, there are more concrete concepts to deal with as they strive to become familiar with their environment.
A child, for example, handles and looks at a shoe she has come across as she crawls across the floor. Immediately, a flurry of changes take place in her brain as a consequence of the experience.
The next time the child sees the shoe, there is a match between the visual and/or haptic input and the stored data from the past experience; and there is recognition and some understanding of its shape, mass, texture and possibly its use.
There may eventually even be a name attached to it, "shoe." The name, however, may signify just that particular shoe only.
That is the child's concept of shoe and it is very concrete in that it relates to just on one object. In time, the concept and symbol will be expanded to include any shoe. What cognitive processes are active in this expansion? We shall discuss three: Abstraction, Imagery and Generalization.
Abstraction is the cognitive process of drawing away mentally, the semantic features (I am calling them "bonds") of an object such as a shoe). In just everyday conversation we would call them the "characteristics" of a shoe.
Eventually the child will note its shape and size, its texture, its weight and what is done with it, and perhaps how it tastes (unless you can get to him fast enough).
It is on the bases of a comparison of these bonds that the child will eventually broaden his concept of shoe to include other similar but not exactly the same objects.
When the child looks at a shoe in a concrete fashion, the process of abstraction is not happening.
Hence there is nothing to compare, and the one shoe becomes the total concept and exclusive meaning for the word "shoe."
Abstraction involves three sub processes, which we have come across before in our discussions: They are Figure-ground discrimination, Short-term Memory and Long Term Memory.
FIGURE-GROUND: In figure-ground discrimination, as we discussed earlier, part of the input becomes our focus, and the remaining is relatively ignored.
If one glances at a shoe, for example, he may note that it has a heel. In this case, the heel has become the figure, and the remaining part of the shoe is the ground.
In this figure-ground task, for the purposes of abstraction, there are three particular elements that must be considered.
1. The observer must be aware of the figure. That seems obvious enough. But in observing the shoe, if the heel doesn‰t register in my thought process, it is of no value as a characteristic (semantic feature) which could be used for comparisons.
2. The observer must retain some awareness of the ground. If I become so engrossed in the heel that I totally forget the shoe, then my focus has changed and the heel has become the sole (no pun intended) focus of my thought processes. This is of no value either in developing a useful concept of a shoe.
3. The observer must not lose sight of the relationship between the figure and the ground. It must be remembered that the heel is related to(part of) the shoe. Children (and adults) can forget this relationship.
I once was working on speech with a first grader. We had a good rapport, and he was bright enough to recognize I was bigger than he was.
On this day, however, he had become intent on drawing on the table with a marker pen. I was in the process of removing the pen, so his attention was drawn to my hand.
He was not angry at me, nor had he any notion to engage in a struggle with a "giant," but he was furious at the small hand that has thwarting his intentions.
In the excitement, he lost sight of the connection I had to the hand, and proceeded to rigorously try and spear it with a pencil.
On a happier note, it is humorous to three year olds, who understand the connection, to ignore the relationship as a joke. Hence, a hand, which is trying to snatch the child‰s toy or tickle a rib becomes an free agent to be attacked, but only in pretend.
The figure that is developed through perception becomes the semantic feature or bond that is "drawn away" in the abstraction process. There are two types of bonds: Parts and Aspects.
Parts: A part is anything that can be physically dismantled (at least in your mind). A doorknob is a part, a feather is a part, appendages are parts, etc., etc., etc. Parts are widely used to categorize objects.
I actually had a near brush with failure because of my lack of attention to parts. As a senior Agricultural major at the University of Hawaii, I had to complete an entomology course to get my degree.
If I thought I was finished with using parts to learn categories in the elementary grades, I was sadly mistaken. In lab they handed us a book the size of Webster's Dictionary. It was full of insect parts which we had to be learned.
It seems that insects are categorized by body parts--the number of wings, veins in their wings and so forth.
In the lab, of that course, we were asked to collect an insect display showing the development of a particular species from pupas to grampas.
I was more than a little embarrassed by the thought of running through the campus bushes with a big white net to catch hapless specimens for my collection.
I contemplated this prospect frequently on my surfboard off Waikiki, where there were not many bugs in sight.
It was not until the day before the assignment was due, that panic forced me to consider reality and some course of action. But what?
Fortunately, I was living in the Vet's dormitory and most happily found the solution to my problem right under my own bed.
I gathered up a whole range of specimens from eggs to the elderly, put them in bottles, and went off confidently the next day to lab, much relieved.
My relief was short lived, however, when the lab assistant became noticeably upset. She pointed out to me that the specimens in my collection had FOUR sets of legs, whereas insects had only THREE !
As such, my specimens were not insects, but arachnids, more commonly known as brown widow spiders.
The Lab assistant did give me a "D-" for not letting them go in class, and so I did pass the course, but I never forgot the importance of parts for classifying objects, even in college.
Hence, as parents and teachers, we should take the effort to frequently draw a child's attention to parts. Notice that I said "draw attention to." That is another way of saying that we are directing the child's figure-ground discrimination so that the part (the bond) becomes the figure.
There is that pitfall here, as I mentioned earlier, that the child may get so caught-up in the figure, that he forgets where it came from. This, does not help in the development of a concept.
We must provide frequent cues or reminders to insure that the figure-ground relationship is maintained in the child's awareness.
This is much of what teaching is about in the early elementary grades.
Aspects: These are the features of an object that could NOT be physically removed. Take, for example, the squareness of a table. You can't unscrew that like you can a leg.
There are three types of aspects: Qualities, Actions and Relations.
Qualities refers to the features we use to describe an object, such as color, size, texture, lenght etc. We often without even realizing it direct a child's figure-ground discrimination to these features. "Look how light this feather feels," we say to the child. Its weight (or lack of it) is the object (figure) of his attention.
Actions refers to how something performs or is used. What, for example could a horse, a car, a boat, a plane and a train have in common. There are few obvious parts or qualities that are shared by any of them. Some are alive, some are not; some are big and some are small and some have hooves and some have wings. The major bond is portage, and we will place them all in the same category and give them all the same name--transportation.
Relations refers to correspondence of one object to another. There are many types of relations: Spatial, temporal, personal (such as possession), professional, and so forth.
Spatially, instructors usually stand in front of and facing a class of individuals. You can classify them on the basis of their position relative to the students or the classroom.
Temporally, if I frequently come to the class I teach on campus past the time class begins, I am liable to be put into a category of folks called ex-employees.
Personally, there are a certain class of objects that have particular relevance to me as I, for example, pack up my desk. I call them mine.
Professionally,there are certain people whose relationship to me can be heard in the way I address them. I say "Yes Sir," to a policeman and my wife, "Alright" to a student, and "ok honey" to my young daughter.
For children, the abstraction process begins before the advent of language, but it continues on indefinitely after that. Hence, for most of our lives, language interacts with and becomes a part of the abstraction process itself. It can be both a diagnostic indicator of weak abstraction skills; and also a facilitator to strengthen those skills.
Parts, for example, are represented typically in language by uncompounded nouns. Leg, feather, leaf are simple nouns that are associated with parts.
Qualities are expressed linguistically by adjectives, and adverbs.
Relations are conveyed by prepositional phrases. Morphological endings are also used to communicate qualities and relations.
Language as a diagnostic tool: If a child's language shows a paucity of nouns, adjective, adverbs and prepositional phrases, we may consider this a red flag alerting us to the possibility that this child may not be seeing many of the semantic features that are present in his/her environment.
This child may not have at her/his disposal, then, the bonds that are necessary to develop a rich repertoire of concepts.
Of course this is only a red flag calling for attention to the possibility--not a fact.
There may be other factors at work. Einstein, for example, didn't start talking until late in life, and he saw the world in more ways than I can contemplate. But he was an exceptional person.
On the other side of the ledger, show me a parent who has a child with a good vocabulary and I will show you parent who express wonder at the keenness of their child's awareness of his surroundings!
In instances where a dearth of language does relate to a general lack of environmental awareness, this red flag gives us an opportunity to recognize this state early and take steps to ameliorate the problem.
Here is where language again plays a role.
Language as a facilitator: There was a concept of language called the Whorfian Theory which suggested that a person could not see an object unless he had a word for it.
It suggested, for example, that Eskimos had many words for snow and could see many different kinds of snow, where as you and I only saw snow.
We on the other hand can see many different kinds of cars whereas the Eskimos probably would just sees a vehicle.
No one would suggest that you can't see something without a name for it, but Vygotsky demonstrated that symbols do make things more recognizable and more resistant to figure-ground disturbances.
Hence, there is value in providing young children with many experiences which develop language and the parts of speech.
This is the value of a three hour, twice a week, pre-school program for the three and four-year old children. (Not to be confused, necessarily with day care centers whose job it is to provide a home away from home- a sad contradiction of terms).
The most powerful language learning experiences, however, are those which involve one-on-one interactions with an adult (mom and/or dad). The more interactions we have, the better the skills of language and abstraction will develop.
Figure-ground is not the only contributor to the abstraction process. Important roles are also played by Short-term and Long-term memory.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY: It is possible to have adequate figure-ground discrimination and still fail in the abstraction process because of a particularly restricted short-term memory.
I may notice, for example, that a chicken has feathers. Then I may notice that a duck has feathers, but by this time I have forgotten my experience with the chicken.
Hence my concept is concrete and only relates to the animal I am presently looking at.
With young children, our goal is to strengthen the neuralgic infra-structure of their short-term memory.
This is done as we mentioned through many means, including teaching them to play games; taking them on many excursions and talking about them; and just plane reading to them a lot, to mention a few.
LONG-TERM MEMORY: I may have adequate figure-ground discrimination and short-term memory and still have problems due to problems in Long-term memory. It may be either an inability to convert to long-term memory, to retain it or to retrieve it. We will have more to say about this when we discuss memory later on.
