Introduction

Each of the contributions to this volume began from a simple insight: If we are to understand fully either language or thought, we must understand how they develop and interact in children's minds. Philosophers have long speculated about the origins of our distinctly human abilities to speak and reason complexly. Only relatively recently, however, has the issue been the subject of serious scientific study. We are now in the midst of an explosion of such research. In the past twenty years we have witnessed many exciting advances in the study of language and cognitive development. Now more than ever before, the utterances of small children are being gathered, scrutinized, and incorporated into broader theories of human cognition. The purpose of the present volume is to report and reflect on these advances. The product is a set of detailed and compelling models of language–thought relations (specifically, meaning– concept relations) as reflected in the developing mind of the child.

There are two quite different motivations for focusing on development as a window onto language–thought relations. One motivation is that children's behaviors provide clues to constraints on language and on thought. We can determine how languages and conceptual systems are constrained by examining the forms and meanings that children construct, and which errors they fail to make. All natural languages must be learnable by children; thus, children provide clues to what is universal, not only in syntax but in semantics as well.

A very different motivation for taking a developmental approach is that it can provide valuable clues to the complexities of the system eventually acquired.