J.Piaget's concept of "parallelism" concerning the development of affectivity and intelligence is very important for the evaluation of his psychology as theory of human development. This concept, however, is difficult to understand for many psychologists. The purpose of this article is to contribute to understanding it from the point of view of Piget's developmental psychology. We have three points for understanding of the parallelism. First of all, Piaget's parallelism is based upon the idea of affectivity and intelligence as two aspects of actions ; affectivity is the energetic aspect and intelligence (cognition) is the structural aspect of actions. They are inseparable and complementary, but are of different nature and irreduciable to each other. Secondly, one of the most important concepts in this theory is that of cognitive "structure, " and cognitive development implies the transformation or change of this structure. He insists that affectivity explains the acceleration or retardation, but is not the cause, of structural transformation i.e. intellectual development, nor is intelligence the cause of development of affectivity. According to Piaget's analysis, there is a relation of correspondence, not of causality, between affective and intellectual developments. The developments of affectivity and intelligence, therefore, must be parallel (see Piaget's parallel table of stages of intellectural and affective development). In a sense, it is natural that he should think of this parallelism, because he thinks that actions must always contain both affective and intellectual elements which correspond to each other. Thirdly, another problem, however, remains unsolved ; what is the cause of developments of affectivity and intelligence? The developmental factors for intelligence in Piaget's theory is, as everybody knows, hereditary maturation, experience, social transmission and equilibration. In regard to affectivity, he says that affectivity and intelligence have common factors for their developments ; above-mentioned four factors give rise to the development of affectivity. Consequently affectivity doesn't have to be the cause of cognitive or intellectual development, and vice versa.

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The purpose of the present study is to inquire into the relationship between the levels of language acquisition and the development of verbal regulatory function in moderately mentally retarded (MR) children with Down's syndrome and to build up the hypothesis about the factors influencing the development of verbal regulation in MR children. The subjects are 9 moderately mentally retarded children with Down's syndrome, who have been participating in our language training experiment and whose language acquisition levels have been confirmed through the several diagnostic tests. In this study we gave them two series of tasks of elaboration of differential motor reactions to two conditioned optical stimuli by preliminary verbal instruction. In the first series of tasks the child, at first, had to press a rubber balloon by one hand at the appearance of a conditioned red star-shaped light and at the appearance of a green star-shaped light he had to abstain from movement. And then, after elaboration of this differential motor reactions, he was instructed to respond to the stimuli in reversal way respectively. In the second series he had to press a red marked rubber balloon by the right hand at the stimulus of red star-shaped light and to do a green rubber balloon by the left hand at the stimulus green. And after elaboration of this differentiation, he was instructed to do in reversal conditions. As result of comparison of their performance with their language acquisition levels, it was found that performance of verbal regulation tasks was strongly connected with language acquisition level of each child and out of 9 MR children, only 5, who could comprehend the sentences with Agent-Object-Action construction could perform well the first series of tasks and two out of 5 also the second. And it was confirmed that verbal regulation in MR children began to develop, although their language abilities had still remained at lower stages than that of normal children of 3-4 years of age. These findings brought us the hypothesis that some nonlinguistic factor, such as a cognitive factor, as well as comprehension of Agent-Object-Action constructed sentences influenced the development of verbal regulation in MR children.

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