These essays by leading theorists and researchers in sociocultural, cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology honor the memory of Sylvia Scribner, who believed that science holds a responsibility to human welfare and understanding and whose work is recognized by the authors as seminal to their own thinking. The themes include the relationship between history and culture, the importance of context to thinking, the place of literacy in human activity and thought, and cognition in school and in the workplace. The volume presents applications of activity theory to fundamental issues in...

This book highlights a transition from the study of language and cognition to that of language in cognition. It presents an integrative theory of cognitive development, emphasizing the important role that language plays in taking the two to five year old child to new levels of cognitive operations in memory, forming concepts, categories, processing narratives, and understanding other people's intentions. The author considers biological evolution the source of both language and culture, but she argues that qualitatively different modes of thinking and knowing emerge therefrom.

This book highlights a transition from the study of language and cognition to that of language in cognition. It presents an integrative theory of cognitive development, emphasizing the important role that language plays in taking the two to five year old child to new levels of cognitive operations in memory, forming concepts, categories, processing narratives, and understanding other people's intentions. The author considers biological evolution the source of both language and culture, but she argues that qualitatively different modes of thinking and knowing emerge therefrom.

A psychological case study, which focuses on one talkative child's emerging ability to use language, her capacity for understanding, for imagining, and for making inferences and solving problems. It also includes essays in which scholars offer linguistic and psychological analyses of her conversations with her parents and pre-sleep monologues.

This work examines a key issue in current cognitive theories - the nature of representation. Each chapter is characterized by attempts to frame topics in cognitive development within the landscape of current developmental theorizing and the past legacy of genetic epistemology. The chapters address four questions that are fundamental to any developmental line of inquiry: how should we represent the workings and contents of the mind? How does the child construct mental models during the course of development? What are the origins of these models? And what accounts for the novelties that are the...

These essays by leading theorists and researchers in sociocultural, cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology honor the memory of Sylvia Scribner, who believed that science holds a responsibility to human welfare and understanding and whose work is recognized by the authors as seminal to their own thinking. The themes include the relationship between history and culture, the importance of context to thinking, the place of literacy in human activity and thought, and cognition in school and in the workplace. The volume presents applications of activity theory to fundamental issues in...

An appreciation of temporal and logical relationships is one of the essential and defining features of human cognition. A central question in developmental psy chology, and in the philosophical speculations out of which psychology evolved, has been how children come to understand temporal and logical relationships. For many recent investigators, this question has been translated into empiri cal studies of children's acquisition of relational terms-words such as before, after, because, so, if, but, and or that permit the linguistic expression of logi cal relationships. In the mid 1970s,...