Book section · August 8, 2025
From an evolutionary point of view, the most basic normative ideals are goals: potential states of affairs that the organism imagines and values over others and so acts to realize (with the possibility of both success and failure). Beyond such instrumental ...
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Book section · January 1, 2023
This chapter looks at a major cause and a major consequence of the 9-month social-cognitive revolution; and both of these also concern infant intentionality. It argues that young children’s understanding of other persons as intentional agents results in la ...
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Book section · January 1, 2022
In this chapter, we consider children’s moral development from an evolutionary perspective. We propose that human morality arose evolutionarily as a set of skills and motives for cooperating with others. Following recent accounts by Tomasello and colleague ...
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Book section · January 1, 2021
The underlying assumption of the Bridge Hypothesis-which is not shared by all developmental psycholinguists-is that communication pressure is beneficial to the child’s development of communicative competence, including the acquisition of linguistic skills. ...
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Book section · January 1, 2019
Animals can use punishment as a means to change the behavior of others. Punishment can be done for selfish ends with no regard for how the target of the act is affected. On the other extreme, it can benefit others in a society and be motivated by its effec ...
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Book section · January 1, 2019
Animals can use punishment as a means to change the behavior of others. Punishment can be done for selfish ends with no regard for how the target of the act is affected. On the other extreme, it can benefit others in a society and be motivated by its effec ...
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Book section · January 1, 2018
The ‘ape language’ studies have come and gone, with wildly divergent claims about what they have shown. Without question, the most sophisticated skills have been displayed by Kanzi, a male bonobo exposed from youth to a human-like communicative system. Thi ...
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Book section · January 1, 2017
The modern study of moral development began with Piaget’s (1932) The Moral Judgment of the Child, which although originally published in the 1930s only became internationally known in the 1960s through its influence on Kohlberg’s theory (e.g. Kohlberg, 198 ...
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Book section · January 1, 2017
The crucial middle step consists in second-personal engagement with engagement others. In this chapter, the authors present face-to-face interactions joint intentionality. On the other hand there are capacities for acting collectively within a social group ...
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Book section · April 25, 2016
Both cross-linguistic priming methodologies and research on codemixed utterances have been concerned with the nature of the underlying syntactic representations of bilinguals. The present paper investigated code-mixing at the morphosyntactic level (NP) by ...
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Book section · January 1, 2016
To acquire competence with a natural language, young children must master the grammatical constructions of their language(s). In this article we outline the main theoretical issues in the field and trace the developmental path children follow from talking ...
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Book section · January 1, 2016
Both cross-linguistic priming methodologies and research on codemixed utterances have been concerned with the nature of the underlying syntactic representations of bilinguals. The present paper investigated code-mixing at the morphosyntactic level (NP) by ...
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Book section · July 31, 2013
In this study, we test a number of predictions concerning children's knowledge of the transitive Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) construction between two and three years on one child (Thomas) for whom we have densely collected data. The data show that the earlie ...
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Book section · January 1, 2013
The seminal work in the modern study of children’s moral development is Piaget’s (1932/1997) The Moral Judgment of the Child. As is well known, Piaget claimed that before the age of 8 or 9 years children make moral judgments based only on a respect for aut ...
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Book section · September 18, 2012
This article reviews some of the best-known and most interesting work on language acquisition from within the framework of functional-cognitive linguistics, particularly those on meaning and conceptualization as well as usage and grammar (grammatical const ...
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Book section · September 18, 2012
This article suggests that the ontogenesis of shared intentionality depends on the developmentally primitive phenomenon of 'joint attention'. This is the ability of the infant to understand that they and other individuals can attend to the same object and ...
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Book section · March 22, 2012
This chapter examines the distinction between two approaches in interpreting the behaviour in non-human animals. It explains the 'boosters' interpret behaviour in psychologically rich ways while 'scoffers' prefer psychologically lean interpretations. It co ...
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Book section · March 22, 2012
This chapter explores the early stages of pragmatic language acquisition before taking up the issue of syntax and semantics. It suggests that the relation between language and theory of mind is different depending on which aspect of social understanding is ...
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Book section · December 24, 2010
Many animal species live in complex social groups, some of whom transmit information across generations "culturally". Humans' uniquely cultural way of life began with this kind of social organization but then acquired novel characteristics as a result of b ...
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Book section · September 1, 2010
Chimpanzees follow the gaze of conspecifics and humans -follow it past distractors and behind barriers, 'check back' with humans when gaze following does not yield interesting sights, use gestures appropriately depending on the visual access of their recip ...
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Book section · April 1, 2010
This chapter contains the authors' reactions to the previous chapters and stresses the similarities and differences between these theoretical views. It discusses that part of the debate concerns whether the first words are more like the indexical signs of ...
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Book section · April 1, 2010
This chapter describes research findings from the social-pragmatic approach. It discusses that Nameera Akhtar and Michael Tomasello's dramatic findings demonstrate how word learning occurs in some fairly complex, nonostensive situations amid the flow of so ...
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Book section · April 1, 2010
A current controversy in the study of word learning is whether it is conceptually easier to learn nouns as compared to verbs early in development. This chapter describes three experiments which address the noun-verb question in different ways. In the first ...
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Book section · January 1, 2010
This chapter emphasises the role of psychology in language evolution, but claims that it was the separate evolution of capacities for using symbols and grammar (that is, syntactic structure) that distinguishes human communication from the communication of ...
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Book section · January 1, 2010
Human beings share many cognitive skills with their nearest primate relatives, especially those for dealing with the physical world of objects (and categories and quantities of objects) in space and their causal interrelations. But humans are, in addition, ...
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Book section · January 1, 2010
Animals can use punishment as a means to change the behavior of others. Punishment can be done for selfish ends with no regard for how the target of the act is affected. On the other extreme, it can benefit others in a society and be motivated by its effec ...
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Book section · January 1, 2009
Animals can use punishment as a means to change the behavior of others. Punishment can be done for selfish ends with no regard for how the target of the act is affected. On the other extreme, it can benefit others in a society and be motivated by its effec ...
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Book section · February 27, 2008
The universals and cultural variations of human development have been the focus of fruitful study by anthropologists for decades. In recent years psychologists also have directed their attention, long overdue, to understanding development in cultural conte ...
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Book section · February 26, 2008
A central goal of cognitive science is to understand how human beings comprehend, produce, and acquire natural languages. Throughout the brief history of modern cognitive science, the linguistic theory that has been most prominent in this endeavor is gener ...
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Book section · January 1, 2008
Introduction Primates are highly social beings. They begin their lives clinging to their mother and nursing, and they spend their next few months, or even years, still in proximity to her. Adult primates live in close-knit social groups, for the most part, ...
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Book section · January 1, 2008
There are, however, major debates as to what they bring to this language learning: do they come with innate, specifically syntactic skills or, rather, with more general cognitive and interactive skills? In this chapter, we will argue for the latter and sug ...
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Book section · January 1, 2008
To acquire competence with a natural language, young children must master the grammatical constructions of their language(s). In this article we outline the main theoretical issues in the field and trace the developmental path children follow from talking ...
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Book section · January 1, 2008
Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the ratchet effect). The key adaptation is one t ...
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Book section · January 1, 1995
This chapter discusses the early development of the understanding of self as social agent in the human species, and briefly discusses its ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins. The chapter outlines the canonical developmental sequence, focusing especially o ...
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