This monograph summarizes current research with an eye to several audiences (researchers, clinicians, educators).

The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how the phenomenon of early childhood autism may cast light on issues that are central to our Understanding Of Normal Child Development - Issues Such As The Emotional origins of social experience and social understanding, the contribution of interpersonal relations to the genesis of symbolism and creative thought, and the role of intersubjectivity in the development of self. Drawing upon philosophical writings as well as empirical research on autism, the author challenges the individualistic and cognitive bias of much developmental psychology, and...

Analogical reasoning is a fundamental cognitive skill, involved in classification, learning, problem-solving and creative thinking, and should be a basic building block of cognitive development. However, for a long time researchers have believed that children are incapable of reasoning by analogy. This book argues that this is far from the case, and that analogical reasoning may be available very early in development. Recent research has shown that even 3-year-olds can solve analogies, and that infants can reason about relational similarity, which is the hallmark of analogy.
The book...

This book is an attempt to trace out a line of development in the understanding of how things happen from origins in infancy to mature forms of adulthood. There are two distinct but related ways in which people understand things as happening, denoted by the terms "causation" and "action". The book is concerned with both. The central claim and organising principle of the book is that, by the end of the second year of life, children have differentiated two core theories of how things happen. These theories deal with causation and action. The two theories have a common point of origin in the...

This text offers a survey of approaches to the development of moral reasoning - those of Freud, ego psychology, Piaget and Kohlberg. The book argues that the impressive nature of Kohlberg's later evidence for his view that moral reasoning passes through a sequence of stages is in part illusory, because his theory predicts that specific types of reply will show specific developmental patterns. However, as data are always reported in terms of stages, which amalgamate very disparate types of reply, it is impossible to know whether the specific types of reply follow their predicted developmental...

The association between parents' behaviour and children's cognitive development is at the meeting-place of several prominent theories of psychological development and a range of complex methodological and conceptual issues. On the one hand there are theories which argue that the impetus of development is within the child and is largely unaffected by his or her experience of social interaction; on the other are the commonsense experience of parents and educators and the body of neo-Vygotskian theory, which would see the child's development as profoundly affected by social interaction or even...

The association between parents' behaviour and children's cognitive development is at the meeting-place of several prominent theories of psychological development and a range of complex methodological and conceptual issues. On the one hand there are theories which argue that the impetus of development is within the child and is largely unaffected by his or her experience of social interaction; on the other are the commonsense experience of parents and educators and the body of neo-Vygotskian theory, which would see the child's development as profoundly affected by social interaction or even...

The author defines the alphabetic principle before immersing the reader in the process by which a child graduates from spoken language to written script.