Recent research has established closer links between language, cognition, and social life than Piaget or Vygotsky imagined. Connections have been established between object permanence development and acquisition of disappearance words and the quantity and quality of child-adult joint attentional social interactions and children's early word…

Comments on Gauvain's discussion, in this issue, of the development of thinking from a sociocultural perspective, expanding her analysis by comparing research on apes who have developed in natural habitats with apes raised by humans in something resembling a human culture. Argues that the study of nonhuman primates can contribute to the emerging…