This book's goal is to go beyond traditional accounts of human symbol skills to examine the development and consequences of symbolic communication. The editors explore the significance of communicating symbolically as a means for understanding human symbol skills. Symbolic communication may play a central role in the representation and manipulation of symbols, processes which seem to have gotten more attention than communication has. The process of communicating with symbols, perhaps to oneself, or to a real or hypothetical other, may be a central element in explanations of what information...