Product Description: The field of cognitive development is an exciting one that has undergone a revolution in the past generation, with a wealth of new findings, methods and theoretical ideas that transform our understanding of children’s thinking.  This new SAGE Major Work presents a collection of important papers - both classic and contemporary - that cover key contributions in the area of cognitive development in children, designed to be a touchstone text for scholars, practitioners and educators with an interest in children’s thinking...read more

Product Description: Navigating the social world requires sophisticated cognitive machinery that, although present quite early in crude forms, undergoes significant change across the lifespan. This book will be the first to report on evidence that has accumulated on an unprecedented scale, showing us what capacities for social cognition are present at birth and early in life, and how these capacities develop through learning in the first years of life...read more

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.

Product Description: Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as "dog," "man," or "intelligence," have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. Where does this idea come from? In this book, Susan Gelman argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias...read more

Product Description: Recent research shows that pre-school children are skilled classifiers, using categories to organize information and extend knowledge. Focusing on the role of maternal input, this monograph provides one of the first detailed examinations of how mothers convey information about category structure to their children...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: What is the nature of human thought? A long dominant view holds that the mind is a general problem-solving device that approaches all questions in much the same way. Chomsky's theory of language, which revolutionized linguistics, challenged this claim, contending that children are primed to acquire some skills, such as language, in a manner largely independent of their ability to solve other sorts of apparently similar mental problems...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)