Early childhood, from 2 to 6 years, is the phase when the child progresses through the Preoperational stage. 

There are two sub-stages of the Preoperational Stage:

(a) Symbolic Function (2 to 4 years).

(b) Intuitive Thought (4 to 7 years).

During the Symbolic Function substage, children can create mental images of objects and store them in their minds for later use. For example, such a child can draw a picture of or pretend to play with a puppy that is no longer present there. Children can talk about people who are travelling, or who live somewhere else. They can also talk about or draw places they visited, as well as create new scenes and creatures from their imagination. Children can also use their mental images of things to role-play in games. Piaget also believed that pre operational children have a style of thinking characterised by Egocentrism, or the inability to see the world from someone else’s point of view. According to Piaget, children with egocentrism explain situations from their own perspective and understanding. 

The next substage in Piaget’s Preoperational cognitive development stage is the Intuitive Thought substage, which spans ages 4-7 years. Children in this substage of development learn by asking questions such Piaget labelled this “intuitive thought” because he believed that children at this stage tend to be so certain of their knowledge and understanding that they are unaware of how they gained this knowledge in the first place. These children show “Centration”. They focus on one characteristic of object and base their decisions or judgement on that only. During early childhood, children’s ability to understand, process, and to produce language also improves rapidly. There is a ‘language explosion’ between 3 and 6 years. At age 3, their spoken vocabularies consist of roughly 900 words. By age 6, spoken vocabularies expand dramatically to anywhere between 8,000 and 14,000 words.