One of the ultimate mysteries for anyone who wants to understand the remarkable human capacity for language is to discover how language is acquired by children and how it is integrated with other areas of cognition. This is certainly the central issue in child language research where there are two views that, in their strongest forms, appear irreconcilable. There are those who believe language is a special capacity, separate from other areas of cognition and learning, and there are those who believe language is one part of a larger, more general cognitive system. This study does not unravel the mystery, but in a very important way it is this central question that motivated the study in the first place.

Language is probably related in some interesting ways to conceptual development. It is not a trivial matter that language and other areas of cognition are mutually informative and that discoveries in one domain can lead the child to related discoveries in another domain of intellectual development. This relationship is not unidirectional, but rather it is symbiotic. Very simply, learning terms for, say, time may lead the child to grasp abstract concepts of temporality. Discovering that small items can be contained in larger ones may lead the child to discover words, such as in, that encode this idea.

With congenital blindness nature has created children whose representations of the world and paths to understanding the world are necessarily a little different from those of seeing children.