Perspectives on Language and Thought: Interrelations in Development

From the time of birth through the early school years, young children rapidly acquire two complex cognitive systems: They organize their experiences into concepts and categories, and they acquire their first language. How do children accomplish these critical tasks? How do conceptual systems influence the structure of the language we speak? How do linguistic patterns influence how we view reality? These questions have captured the interest of such theorists as Piaget, Vygotsky, Chomsky and Whorf but until recently very little has been known about the relation between language and thought during development. Perspectives on Language and Thought presents current observational and experimental research on the links between thought and language in young children. Chapters from leading figures in the field focus on the acquisition of hierarchical category systems, concepts of time, causality, and logic and the nature of language learning in both peer and adult-child social interactions.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Perspectives on thought and language: traditional and contemporary views James P. Byrnes and Susan A. Gelman; Part II. Relations Between Word Learning and Categorization: 2. Acquisitional principles in lexical development Eve V. Clark; 3. The whole-object, taxonomic, and mutual exclusivity assumptions as initial constraints on word meanings Ellen M. Markman; 4. Convergences between semantic and conceptual organization in the preschool years Sandra R. Waxman; 5. Language and categorization: the acquisition of natural kind terms Susan A. Gelman and John D. Coley; 6. Theories, concepts, and the acquisition of word meaning Frank C. Keil; Part III. Logical, Causal, and Temporal Expressions: 7. Language and the career of similarity Dedre Gentner and Mary Jo Rattermann; 8. The matter of time: interdependencies between language and thought in development Katherine Nelson; 9. Constraints on the acquisition of English modals Marilyn Shatz and Sharon A. Wilcox; 10. Acquisition and development of if and because: conceptual and linguistic aspects James P. Byrnes; Part IV. The Role of Social Interaction: 11. The language of thinking: metacognitive and conditional words Ellin Kofsky Scholnick and William S. Hall; 12. Parent-child collaboration in young children’s understanding of category hierarchies Maureen A. Callanan; 13. Beginning to talk with peers: the roles of setting and knowledge Lucia French, Marylou Boynton and Rosemary Hodges.