Table of Contents

Taking development seriously; the child as a linguist; the child as a physicist; the child as a mathematician; the child as a psychologist; the child as a notator; nativism, domain specificity, and Piaget's constructivism; modelling development - representational redescription and connectionism; concluding speculations.

Promotional Information

This book has an important central thesis and Karmiloff-Smith argues impressively well in support of it. She focuses on one of the truly distinctive features of human cognitive development and makes a powerful case for her claim that cognitive science needs a developmental dimension. -- Margaret Donaldson, Emeritus Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Edinburgh In this engagingly synoptic volume, the author calls on a long and distinguished career to model the development of the child's representational system, and to show that the changes it undergoes are not triggered by failure but by endogenous factors. A coherent picture of the development of the human representational system emerges from an insightful set of experiments. -- David Premack, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania

Reviews

...deserves wide readership by both developmentalists and nondevelopmentalists who need an overview of the state of the art. Clearly and comprehensively, Karmiloff-Smith shows the highly structured ways in which different representational processes emerge from infancy onwards. -- Andrew Whiten Nature