This book provides a description of pre-literate children's developing ideas about writing and numerals, and it illustrates the many ways in which cultural artifacts influence the mind and vice versa. Remarkably, children treat writing and numerals as distinct even before they have received any formal training on the topic, and well before they learn how to use writing to represent messages and numerals to represent quantities. Liliana Tolchinsky argues that pre-literate children's experiences with writing and numerals play an essential and previously unsuspected role in children's subsequent...