This is one of a series of four books that forms part of the Open University course on child development. The series provides a detailed and thorough introduction to the central concepts, theories, issues and research evidence in developmental psychology. Cognitive and Language Development in Children gives an up-to-date and accessible account of how thinking and language develop during childhood. The book is innovative in its approach: it starts by considering cognition and language in infants and continues to weave together these two areas in subsequent chapters that cover aspects of their development through childhood. The chapters have been prepared by leading researchers and theorists in collaboration with members of the Open University course team. Building on the themes in The Foundations of Child Development, a previous book within the series, the editors provide a fully up-to-date, broad and engaging overview of the field, ranging from modern understandings of brain architecture and function to the social and cultural contexts of learning. The chapters have many features to assist and facilitate understanding, including defined learning outcomes, research summaries, activities, readings, definitions of key terms and section summaries.

This book discusses the role of language as a cognitive and communicative tool in a child's early development.

Language development is driven by multiple factors involving both the individual child and the environments that surround the child. The chapters in this volume highlight several such factors as potential contributors to developmental change, including factors that examine the role of immediate social environment (i.e., parent SES, parent and sibling input, peer interaction) and factors that focus on the child’s own cognitive and social development, such as the acquisition of theory of mind, event knowledge, and memory. The discussion of the different factors is presented largely from a crosslinguistic framework, using a multimodal perspective (speech, gesture, sign). The book celebrates the scholarly contributions of Prof. Ayhan Aksu-Koç – a pioneer in the study of crosslinguistic variation in language acquisition, particularly in the domain of evidentiality and theory of mind. This book will serve as an important resource for researchers in the field of developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics across the globe.

Children are already learning at birth, and they develop and learn at a rapid pace in their early years. This provides a critical foundation for lifelong progress, and the adults who provide for the care and the education of young children bear a great responsibility for their health, development, and learning. Despite the fact that they share the same objective - to nurture young children and secure their future success - the various practitioners who contribute to the care and the education of children from birth through age 8 are not acknowledged as a workforce unified by the common knowledge and competencies needed to do their jobs well. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 explores the science of child development, particularly looking at implications for the professionals who work with children. This report examines the current capacities and practices of the workforce, the settings in which they work, the policies and infrastructure that set qualifications and provide professional learning, and the government agencies and other funders who support and oversee these systems. This book then makes recommendations to improve the quality of professional practice and the practice environment for care and education professionals. These detailed recommendations create a blueprint for action that builds on a unifying foundation of child development and early learning, shared knowledge and competencies for care and education professionals, and principles for effective professional learning. Young children thrive and learn best when they have secure, positive relationships with adults who are knowledgeable about how to support their development and learning and are responsive to their individual progress. Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8 offers guidance on system changes to improve the quality of professional practice, specific actions to improve professional learning systems and workforce development, and research to continue to build the knowledge base in ways that will directly advance and inform future actions. The recommendations of this book provide an opportunity to improve the quality of the care and the education that children receive, and ultimately improve outcomes for children.

This volume includes the papers presented at the fourth symposium on topics in the general area of cognition sponsored by Carnegie-Mellon University, and held there on April 11-12, 1968. The specific topic was developmental linguistics, or those processes by which children acquire language. Some of these papers are the texts presented at the symposium, while others reflect considerable development since that time. Some papers report post-symposium reflections, or respond to issues the symposium raised, reflecting the lively, collegial discussions that characterized the symposium.

In recent years the field has seen an increasing realisation that the full complexity of language acquisition demands theories that (a) explain how children integrate information from multiple sources in the environment, (b) build linguistic representations at a number of different levels, and (c) learn how to combine these representations in order to communicate effectively. These new findings have stimulated new theoretical perspectives that are more centered on explaining learning as a complex dynamic interaction between the child and her environment. This book is the first attempt to bring some of these new perspectives together in one place. It is a collection of essays written by a group of researchers who all take an approach centered on child-environment interaction, and all of whom have been influenced by the work of Elena Lieven, to whom this collection is dedicated.

This text's goal is to go beyond traditional accounts of human symbol skills to examine the development and consequences of symbolic communication. The editors explore the significance of communicationg symbolically as a means for understanding human symbol skills.