Influence of Verbal Subjoined Information on Cognitive Development

The aim of this study is to examine and discuss conceivable relationship between cognitive development and thinking. Thinking ability of learners has been a controversial point among educators in Japan. Facing against the criticism that education have not worked successfully to improve thinking of children, the ministry has made enormous effort to strongly invite teachers to devise teaching in class at school. However, we have to understand that thinking is not severed from cognitive development, or is not fostered only in class at school, or is not taught only by teachers. Thinking development must be affected in daily life, wherever or whenever people are. What is noticed conspicuously in Japan is the overuse of visual pictorial information, especially on TV programs. Nobody can help but surprise to find how often subtitles are used while watching TV in Japan. You can read what people are talking on the screen and even recognize how they are feeling, because the font styles or drawings express their emotional states, for example, anger, joy, sadness, happiness and so on. This phenomenon emerged more than a decade ago. Getting used to such information processing, children growing up in this decade might not have enough opportunities to train their skill of decoding complicated information, for burdens on thinking are abated a lot. The hypothesis is that learners who have tendency to rely on pictorial information may have troubles in processing aural information or may have unskilled thinking.