This paper presents a selective review of the literature addressing the influence of young children's conversational environments and interactions on their psychological understanding of persons. Our dual purposes are to reveal some consensus on the current state of knowledge and to foster a programmatic approach to future research. The initial…

Researchers from several disciplines have contributed to the realization that context or social situation varies in regard to a child's language acquisition. Children acquire both linguistic competence, the unconscious understanding of grammatical rules, and communicative competence, the understanding that language is used differently in different…