In this article, I briefly review theories about the development of theory of mind, and then examine evidence for minimalism, the idea that infants initially understand only behaviors. To this end, I consider the need for a wide variety of species to predict the behaviors of other animals and that human infants are not unique in this regard. I…

This paper, conceptual but with empirical support, fills in some blanks in Vygotsky's reworking of Spinoza's "Ethics." Here Vygotsky sought to develop a developmental theory of emotions that would fit his developmental theory of higher psychological functions; that is, one which used function to explain how structure changes (much as…

This Special Issue on linguistic and cognitive development in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) arose from the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) (2017), when Jeannette Schaeffer, Stephanie Durrleman, and Inge-Marie Eigsti organized a symposium on this topic. It shows that the study of language development…

Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

Various arguments are reviewed about the claim that language development is critically connected to the development of theory of mind. The different theories of how language could help in this process of development are explored. A brief account is provided of the controversy over the capacities of infants to read others' false beliefs. Then the…

How do responsive adult-child interactions influence early language development? How do a child's language skills develop in tandem with social-emotional development, executive function, and literacy? What are effective ways to help parents support their child's development? Uncover the answers to these questions in this fascinating book, which…

Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and…

Medical contexts provide a rich opportunity to study important theoretical questions in cognitive development and to investigate the influence of a range of interacting factors relating to the child, the experience, and the broader social context on children's cognition. In the context of examples of research investigating these issues, we…

Theory of Mind (ToM) is a foundational skill related to understanding the thoughts, beliefs, and desires of oneself and others. There are child factors that play an important role in the development of ToM (e.g., language and vocabulary) as well as environmental factors (e.g., conversations among family members and socioeconomic status). In this…

In recent years, the intersection of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and neuroscience with regard to deaf individuals has received increasing attention from a variety of academic and educational audiences. Both research and pedagogy have addressed questions about whether deaf children learn in the same ways that hearing children…

The hypothesis that language plays a role in theory-of-mind (ToM) development is supported by a number of lines of evidence (e.g., H. Lohmann & M. Tomasello, 2003). The current study sought to further investigate the relations between maternal language input, memory for false sentential complements, cognitive flexibility, and the development of…

This volume presents the latest research from internationally recognized researchers and practitioners on language, literacy and numeracy, cognition, and social and emotional development of deaf learners. In their contributions, authors sketch the backgrounds and contexts of their research, take interdisciplinary perspectives in merging their own…

Typically language development in children closely coincides with development in many other areas. This makes it difficult to determine whether observed correlations are coincidental or causal in nature. The three studies presented here explore these relationships by looking at two populations of learners who are delayed in exposure to English,…