Questioning others is one of the most powerful methods that children use to learn about the world. How does questioning develop? How is it socialized? And how can questioning be leveraged to support learning and education? In this volume, some of the world's leading experts are brought together to explore critical issues in the development of…

Lev Vygotsky is no doubt one of the leading educational theorists in history. His theories have been used to guide teaching and learning in public school classrooms for over a century. Vygotsky was considered to be one of the most creative psychologists of the twentieth century. This article covers a brief accounting of his birth, life…

Proper Names appear at the heart of several debates in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. These include "reference", "intentionality", and the nature of "belief" as well as "language acquisition", "cognitive development", and "memory". This dissertation follows a cognitive approach to the philosophical problems posed by proper names. It puts…

Literacy should not be limited to decoding written text. More broadly construed, education should address the many ways in which experience is represented, the development of cognitive potential, and differences in intellectual proclivities. The object should be cultivation of a broad capacity to construct meaning. (SK)

This paper discusses four kinds of reasons for studying child language. The first of the four, biological reasons, includes the desire to understand our own species and its place among other living things in the universe. The common human faculty for communication, the variability in language building, and the similarity of human communication to…

An overview of current theories of reading and the acquisition of literacy skills by children is presented. A research framework in which reading can be described in terms of the processes employed in other language uses is introduced and used to explain the failure of some children to learn to read. An ongoing research program is described that…

Intended for elementary school language arts teachers, this paper outlines some recent work in the area of cognitive functioning and shows how this highlights the necessity for great care in fostering a child's language competence at two different stages: very early childhood and early to middle primary school. Following an introduction, the paper…

To discover the relationship between cognitive development and writing, a means of assessing writing is needed that reflects accurately changes in the way children write as they grow older. This may be accomplished by using Piaget's characteristics of concrete and formal operations. His framework permits general descriptions of thinking, organized…

This book articulates and defends the "theory theory" of cognitive and semantic development: the idea that very young children just beginning to talk are engaged in profound restructurings of several domains of their knowledge. These restructurings are analogous to theory changes. The children's early semantic development is closely tied…

Exploring many possible relationships among language, thought processes, and education, this book is designed to synthesize modern views of language and linguistics, literature and semiotics, and thinking and knowing that are pertinent to education. It develops theoretical positions about language and thinking in school, proposes practical…

Noting that beyond the individual variations among humans, there is a body of mental abilities common to every human being, this book examines the debate among researchers about the extent to which humans are "preprogrammed," and suggests a new scientific psychology of human development. By examining experimental data obtained from…