ental tasks of the preoperational period is the transition from egocentric to socialized speech.
However, Piaget (1968) does not believe that language is a prerequisite for all thought, as symbolic interactionists and social psychologists argue. Rather, he maintains that the development of language depends on the prior development of sensorimotor operations (in which movement is the modality of thought) and not vice versa. Thus, children must think in order to acquire language, although language is crucial to more sophisticated cognitive and social development.
Lee (1976) points out that semiotic function is acquired through the process of accommodation, which is defined as the act of modifying a current mode or structure of thought to deal with new features of the environment. Accommodation is the converse of assimilation, or the process of incorporating an environmental feature into an exis
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