Language in Cognitive Development

Contemporary study of language and cognition in infancy and early childhood has received considerable, well deserved attention. However, little effort has been directed to the means by which language becomes a cognitive and communicative tool, as well as what the full implications of this development may be. This book highlights a transition from the study of language and cognition to that of language in cognition. It presents an integrative theory of cognitive development, emphasizing the important role that language plays in taking the two to five year old child to new levels of cognitive operations in memory, forming concepts, categories, processing narratives, and understanding other people's intentions. Biological evolution is considered the source of both language and culture but it is argued that qualitatively different modes of thinking and knowing emerge therefrom.

"What Nelson has done, though, in a readable, accessible, but very thorough way, is put children's communicative development into relation with their prior understanding and memory for events and with their later emerging capacity to produce autonomous discourse and to enter into the worlds of knowledge that it makes possible...This book by Nelson brings together the fields of linguistic and cognitive development by describing how acquiring language makes possible massive changes in the scope of cognition." Catherine Snow, Science, "Language is the channel through which culture is recreated for every generation, through which knowledge is transmitted, and through which the autobiographical self is established....This book by Nelson brings together the fields of linguistic and cognitive development by describing how acquiring language makes possible massive changes in the scope of cognition." Catherine Snow, Science, "Language is the channel through which culture is recreated for every generation, through which knowledge is transmitted, and through which the autobiographical self is established....This book by Nelson brings together the fields of linguistic and cognitive development by describing how acquiring language makes possible massive changes in the scope of cognition." Catherine Snow, Sicence, "Nelson's ambitious, timely, and far reaching theory should stimulate readers to rethink how cognitive development takes place." James N. Forbes, Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography, "...a truly significant contribution to the study of cognitive development." Michael Tomasello, Contemporary Psychology