Child development is a process every child goes through. This process involves learning and mastering skills like sitting, walking, talking, skipping, and tying shoes. Children learn these skills called developmental milestones, during predictable time periods. There are five main areas of development: Cognitive, Socio-emotional, Language, Fine motor skill, and Gross motor skill development. All of these areas correlates to each other. However, the differences of cognitive and language development on a child’s growth is the main focus of this paper.
What is Cognitive Development? “Cognitive development is the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to
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Among the two, which one is better? Cognitive and language development both contribute to a child’s development specifically on thinking and speaking. However, if I were to choose among the two developments, for me it would be the cognitive. Why? Even if language focuses on a child’s ability be able to understand and speak a language, it is better if the child knows how to think, learn, and solve problems as they grow in order for them to figure out how things work in their surrounding and how they will be able to stand on their own once they encounter a problem. Even at their young age, a child does experience minor problems such as how to get up after they fall from standing, walking, talking, etc. As I have said earlier, cognitive development correlates with language development. Through the process of learning how to talk, at the same time, the child starts think, learn, understand, and solve his or her problem. It may be as simple as trying to talk clearly by mimicking. So even if I chose cognitive development, it doesn’t mean that language development is not as important as the other developmental area. It just means that with cognitive development, a child will learn to become much more independent on himself or herself. Then, he or she would be able to figure out how to learn the language that the people around him or her is …show more content…
As Master Social Worker (MSW) Angela Aswalt explained regarding Piaget’s theory, infants initially learn through instinctive and reflexive behavior (. Their earliest cognitive development consists of two major milestones: discovery that they can acquire attention to their needs, typically through crying; and understanding of the “object permanence” concept--even if caregivers “disappear” from view, they re-appear to tend to infants’ needs. In contrast to cognitive development, language development is part of later brain development and builds upon existing cognition. In other words, babies begin to understand concepts and make distinctions between objects and events, prior to acquiring the ability to define them with relevant words. Whereas cognitive is initially instinctive, language learning occurs as an acquired skill when babies process what they see and hear around them. Babies begin acquiring language by mimicking words spoken by other people and understanding the connection between the words and the objects or events