Concerned with conversation and cognition in young children, this text assesses their profound conceptual limitations, that is, that they have little understanding of numerical and causal relations and are incapable of insight into the minds of others. The text considers how this inability has led researchers to accept a model of the young child as plagued by conceptual deficits. With this in mind, the text assesses how a greater degree of competence should be attributed to children to reflect the position that development in evolutionary important domains is guided by implicit constraints on...

One of the most important questions about children's development involves how knowledge acquisition depends on the effect of language experience. To what extent, and in what ways, is a child's cognitive development influenced by their early experience of, and access to, language? Likewise, what are the effects on development of impaired access to language? This book is the first to confront directly the issue of how possessing an enhanced or impaired access to language influences children's development. Its focus is on learning environments, theory of mind understanding and the process of...