Is development continuous or discontinuous?
Some psychologists believed that human functioning does not undergo fundamental changes but instead changes gradually in its efficiency and working capacity; initially a child spoke a few words but gradually these words become longer and more complicated, increasing the child’s ability to remember and use them in sentences. Other psychologists maintain that changes in development reflect psychological processes that mediate human functioning. These are qualitatively unique stages, in which the evolution of one stage may depend on the traits of the preceding stages. e.g. Roger Brown, psychologist, maintains that in the process of language acquisition, a child progresses systematically in five steps or stages. Each stage has its own set of rules and skills from which a higher level of language acquisition takes place. Jean Piaget maintained that cognitive development occurs in a series of steps in which the child acquires and uses unique sets of cognitive processes that allow the child t
