Does the child's emerging understanding of other minds interact with his/her growing understanding of language? If so, in what ways? This paper focuses on the recent proposals of Daniel Hutto and colleagues regarding the role played by the child's developing skills in narrative discourse in his/her acquisition of folk-psychological understanding.…

As thinking adults depend upon years of practical experience, reasoning about facts and causes, and language to sustain their knowledge, beliefs and memories, and to understand one another, it seems quite absurd to suggest that a newborn infant has intersubjective mental capacities. But detailed research on how neonatal selves coordinate the…

In this paper, I review some recent submissions to "Developmental Science" that advance our understanding of psychological development. More and more submissions to the journal explore the origins of knowledge and, for psychological knowledge, such origins are multiple. Here I consider the contribution of mechanisms such as contingency detection,…

Describes the richness of Hollich et al.'s model of language acquisition. Presents concerns about focus on object words in word learning research, the phantom child in the model, and the missing affect in theories and research on word learning. Suggests that experimental work inspired by principles and constraints theory and observational work…

The experiment reported here investigated infants' concept of intention, as well as the relation among intention understanding, general productive vocabulary, and internal state language production during the 2nd year. Results from an imitation task indicated that 18-month-olds are better able to differentiate between intentional and accidental…

Four studies examined whether 16-month-olds' responses to true/false utterances interacted with their knowledge of human agents. Findings suggested that infants are developing a critical conception of human speakers as truthful communicators and that infants understand that human speakers may provide uniquely useful information when a word fails…

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…

For infants and toddlers, education and care are "two sides of the same coin." The author briefly reviews current research on the importance of relationships to cognitive development and early language and literacy. Instructional strategies that are most appropriate to the early years include "intentionality" and "scaffolding." Intentionality…

Explored the relation between types of peer behavior in young children to children's level of intention understanding. Found level of intention understanding predicted types of overtures made, types of objects offered, monitoring of partner responses, partner compliance, and types of speech acts addressed to partners. (Author/DLH)

Examined 2-year-olds' language acquisition with an emphasis on the agency and intentionality of the child. Concluded that development depends on the child's expression of intentionality by actions (performance), the essential tension between the child's engagement and effort, and the integration of linguistic, cognitive, and social aspects of the…