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This chapter argues that it is ‘too simplistic’ to view language as primarily a symbolic system used for communication. This view leads to an interpretation of the archeological record that is ‘too naïve’. Central to this argument is the assumption that natural language is a computational system by which linguistic form and semantic interpretation are mapped systematically onto each other. The mapping is based on an inventory of lexical items and a combinatory system that includes the process known as ‘recursion’ which, roughly, has the capacity to form infinitely long sentences by embedding phrases within phrases. The introduction of this process altered the nature of linguistic signs, severing the direct connection between form and interpretation. This gave rise to desymbolization, which is the ‘most characteristic’ property of language. If this view is correct, evidence of symbolic activity by itself would not be a proper diagnostic of the presence of language.

From early on in development, children assume that certain pieces of information to which they are exposed, are shared by members of their cultural community. This is indeed a crucial developmental achievement because much of what children need to know to function adaptively in the world is knowledge that is socially constructed and bound. In many ways, defining what is conventional is akin to defining what is cultural. This chapter reviews evidence regarding both, what and who children treat as conventional, and shows that indeed from a young age, children are neither completely generalists nor universalists. While this conclusion does not deny the possibility that children start off with a promiscuous conventionality, eventually learning how to filter out certain types of knowledge or people, the evidence reviewed here highlights the need for a developmentally sensitive account of the process by which children make these distinctions. A number of mechanisms known to be available to children at the relevant ages are proposed, which can help children figure out the domain of conventions.

This chapter discusses how certain aspects of linguistic form specific to a language belonging to an understudied type of languages (ergative languages) yield processing results and acquisition patterns that have hitherto rarely been reported from studies of a well-studied type of languages (nominative languages). Specifically, it discusses recent results from studies on relative-clause processing in Basque that are incompatible with the widely held assumption that subject-object language processing asymmetries are universal, and that they tap into deep aspects of linguistic structure involving the core grammatical functions ‘subject-of’ and ‘object-of’. It is argued that the processing results obtained in Basque do not entail that the structural location of subjects and objects in ergative and nominative languages is different; rather they entail that morphological differences and input-initial choices have nontrivial consequences for processing.

This chapter explores one strand of popular and political discourse about the past in the recent United States. It notes that for an emergent Christian conservative movement, memory and related linguistic forms aided in opening nominally secular public spaces to Judeo-Christian constructions of the past. It demonstrates that memory talk helped a newly muscular Christianity reduce history to eschatology.

This chapter discusses a unique perspective on the processes of explanation and prediction. The major features of the folk-conceptual theory of explanation are explained in order to develop new ideas about the temporal dimension of explanation. Then, the three layers of the theory are introduced and applied to an analysis of temporal aspects of explanation. The theory's first and fundamental layer describes the conceptual framework that underlies behavior explanations. The second layer of the folk-conceptual theory concerns the psychological processes that govern the actual construction of explanations. The third layer of the theory identifies the specific linguistic forms speakers have available in their language to express behavior explanations. It is claimed that explanations and predictions overlap to a considerable extent because they share a number of cognitive processes — processes that support the agent's attempt to construct the judgment at issue, whether it be an explanation or a prediction.

Drawing upon the work of Carol Chomsky, this chapter focuses on two specific issues. The first concerns the robustness of language acquisition to variability in learners' access to input that appear crucial to the function being acquired, as seen from language studies in people who became both deaf and blind during infancy. The second concerns the abilities of children to reconstruct the meanings of sentences with covert structure, as in Carol Chomsky's landmark studies of whether blindfolded dolls might be hard to see. These two themes exemplify the general problem known as ‘the poverty of the stimulus’; in the present case, how humans reconstruct linguistic form and meaning from the blatantly inadequate information offered in their usable environment.