Knowing Children: Experiments in Conversation and Cognition

Concerned with conversation and cognition in young children, this text assesses their profound conceptual limitations, that is, that they have little understanding of numerical and causal relations and are incapable of insight into the minds of others. The text considers how this inability has led researchers to accept a model of the young child as plagued by conceptual deficits. With this in mind, the text assesses how a greater degree of competence should be attributed to children to reflect the position that development in evolutionary important domains is guided by implicit constraints on learning.