An appreciation of temporal and logical relationships is one of the essential and defining features of human cognition. A central question in developmental psy chology, and in the philosophical speculations out of which psychology evolved, has been how children come to understand temporal and logical relationships. For many recent investigators, this question has been translated into empiri cal studies of children's acquisition of relational terms-words such as before, after, because, so, if, but, and or that permit the linguistic expression of logi cal relationships. In the mid 1970s, Katherine Nelson began to study young children's knowledge about routine activities in which they participated. The goal of this research was to understand how children represented their personal experiences and how these representations contributed to further cognitive development. A primary method used in the early phases of this research involved simply asking children to describe familiar events. They were asked, for example, "What happens when you have lunch at school?" or "What happens at a birthday party?" Hundreds of transcripts of children's responses to such questions were available when Lucia French became an NICHD Postdoctoral Fellow in Developmental Psychology at City University of New York in 1979.

The progression from newborn to sophisticated language user in just a few short years is often described as wonderful and miraculous. What are the biological, cognitive, and social underpinnings of this miracle? What major language development milestones occur in infancy? What methodologies do researchers employ in studying this progression? Why do some become adept at multiple languages while others face a lifelong struggle with just one? What accounts for declines in language proficiency, and how might such declines be moderated? Despite an abundance of textbooks, specialized monographs, and a couple of academic handbooks, there has been no encyclopedic reference work in this area--until now. The Encyclopedia of Language Development covers the breadth of theory and research on language development from birth through adulthood, as well as their practical application. Features: This affordable A-to-Z reference includes 200 articles that address such topic areas as theories and research tradition; biological perspectives; cognitive perspectives; family, peer, and social influences; bilingualism; special populations and disorders; and more. All articles (signed and authored by key figures in the field) conclude with cross reference links and suggestions for further reading. Appendices include a Resource Guide with annotated lists of classic books and articles, journals, associations, and web sites; a Glossary of specialized terms; and a Chronology offering an overview and history of the field. A thematic Reader’s Guide groups related articles by broad topic areas as one handy search feature on the e-Reference platform, which includes a comprehensive index of search terms. Available in both print and electronic formats, Encyclopedia of Language Development is a must-have reference for researchers and is ideal for library reference or circulating collections.

This book is about building metaphorical bridges--all sorts of bridges. At the most basic level, it concerns the bridges that individuals build to understand the events that they experience--the bridges that connect the events in the mind's eye. At another level, it is about bridges that interconnect findings and theoretical frameworks concerning event comprehension and representation in different age groups, ranging from infancy to adulthood. Finally, it is about building bridges between researchers who share interests, yet may not ordinarily even be aware of each other's work. The success of the book will be measured in terms of the extent to which the contributors have been able to create a picture of the course of development across a wide span in chronological age, and across different types of events, from the fictional to the actual. The individuals whose work is represented in this book conduct their work in a shared environment--they all have an intellectual and scholarly interest in event comprehension and representation. These interests are manifest in the overlapping themes of their work. These include a focus on how people come to temporally integrate individual "snapshots" to form a coherent event that unfolds over time, to understand cause and effect, and to appreciate the role of the goal of events. Another overlapping theme involves the possibility of individual differences. These themes are apparent in work on the early development of representations of specific episodes and autobiographical memories, and comprehension of complex events such as stories involving multiple characters and emotions. The editors of this volume had two missions: * to create a development span by bringing together researchers working from infancy to adulthood, and * to create a bridge between individuals working from within the text comprehension perspective, within the naturalistic perspective, and with laboratory analogues to the naturalistic perspective. Their measure of success will be the extent to which they have been able to create a picture of the course of development across a wide span in chronological age, and across different types of events--from fictional to actual.

Picturebooks, understood as a series of meaningful text-picture relations, are increasingly acknowledged as an autonomous sub-genre of children’s literature. Being highly complex aesthetic products, their use is deeply embedded in specific situations of joint attention between a caregiver and a child. This volume focuses on the question of what children may learn from looking at picturebooks, whether printed in a book format, created in a digital format, or self-produced by educationalists and researchers. Interest in the relationship between cognitive processes and children’s literature is growing rapidly, and in this book, theoretical frameworks such as cognitive linguistics, cognitive narratology, cognitive poetics, and cognitive psychology, have been applied to the analysis of children’s literature. Chapters gather empirical research from the fields of literary studies, linguistics and cognitive psychology together for the first time to build a cohesive understanding of how picturebooks assist learning and development. International contributions explore: language acquisition the child’s cognitive development emotional development literary acquisition ("literary literacy") visual literacy. Divided into three parts considering symbol-based learning, co-constructed learning, and learning language skills, this cross-disciplinary volume will appeal to researchers, students and professionals engaged in children’s literature and literacy studies, as well as those from the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology, linguistics, and education.

Katherine Nelson re-centers developmental psychology with a revived emphasis on development and change, rather than foundations and continuity. She argues that children be seen not as scientists but as members of a community of minds, striving not only to make sense, but also to share meanings with others. A child is always part of a social world, yet the child's experience is private. So, Nelson argues, we must study children in the context of the relationships, interactive language, and culture of their everyday lives. Nelson draws philosophically from pragmatism and phenomenology, and empirically from a range of developmental research. Skeptical of work that focuses on presumed innate abilities and the close fit of child and adult forms of cognition, her dynamic framework takes into account whole systems developing over time, presenting a coherent account of social, cognitive, and linguistic development in the first five years of life. Nelson argues that a child's entrance into the community of minds is a slow, gradual process with enormous consequences for child development, and the adults that they become. Original, deeply scholarly, and trenchant, Young Minds in Social Worlds will inspire a new generation of developmental psychologists.

discussion on assessment of preschool children with the McCarthy scales of children's abilities, Weschler preschool and primary scale of intelligence revised, the fourth edition of the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale, Differential ability scales, and the Kaufman assessment battery for children. It also includes sections on assessing the multicultural child, the severely handicapped child, and the gifted child.