Wiktionary
a. 1 Prior to a surgical operation. 2 In or relating to a Piagetian phase of child development characterized by sparse and logically inadequate mental operations and inability to reason or work with symbols.
Usage examples of "preoperational".
Even in late preoperational thinking, the child firmly believes that names are a part of, or actually exist in, the objects that are named.
As magic gives way to mythic, the preoperational structures themselves are preserved.
He went on to admit that his greatest disappointments were his children: his thirty-year-old son, now a preoperational transsexual, and his daughter, who had recently married into an Afro-American Urban Heritage Commune and had become the seventh wife of Chief Amumba-9.
For what we find as we carefully study Piaget is that the productions of, say, the preoperational mind initially look very holistic, very interconnected, very "religious" in a sense, until we even barely scratch the surface and find the whole production supported by egocentrism, artificialism, finalism, anthropocentrism, and indissociation.
Habermas strongly believes, for example, that even in preoperational magical times, some individuals clearly developed cognitive capacities all the way up to formal operational cognition, not as fully formed structures but as potentials for understanding.
Whether some individuals did (or did not) reach formal operational in those societies is beside the central point, which is that the basic organizing principles of the primal societies themselves did not evidence formal operational, but rather followed the primary structures of preoperational cognition (and preconventional dispute arbitration, etc.