Both drawing and language are fundamental and unique to humans as a species. Just as language is a representational system that uses systematic sounds (or manual/bodily signs) to express concepts, drawing is a means of "graphically" expressing concepts. Yet, unlike language, we consider it normal for people not to learn to draw, and consider those…

Discusses Gopnik and Meltzoff's ascription of theories behind children's cognitive processes, consideration of phenomena that must be explained by a cognitive development theory, and belief that cognitive advances are tied to advances in language learning. In contrast to Gopnik and Meltzoff, concludes that the basis for understanding how humans…

Reed believes the proper study of psychology is not mind or stimulus-response phenomena but ways animals (including humans) encounter the world. In this view, animals are seen in environmental and evolutionary contexts; a fundamental concept is not mind or behavior but affordance or what environments offer animals; and new topics, such as…

Moral competence is more difficult to attain than scientific competence. Since language comprehension plays a central role in conceptual development, and moral language is difficult to learn, there is a common deficiency in moral conceptual development. This suggests a theory of non-spontaneous solutions to moral problems. (Author/MS)

Recent research has established closer links between language, cognition, and social life than Piaget or Vygotsky imagined. Connections have been established between object permanence development and acquisition of disappearance words and the quantity and quality of child-adult joint attentional social interactions and children's early word…