In this article, I briefly review theories about the development of theory of mind, and then examine evidence for minimalism, the idea that infants initially understand only behaviors. To this end, I consider the need for a wide variety of species to predict the behaviors of other animals and that human infants are not unique in this regard. I…

The past 20 years have seen research on language acquisition in the cognitive sciences grow immensely. The current paper offers a fairly extensive review of this literature, arguing that new cognitive theories and empirical data are perfectly consistent with core predictions a behavior analytic approach makes about language development. The review…