Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and
listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret …

Verbal reference is the ability to use language to communicate about objects, events, or
ideas, even if they are not witnessed directly, such as past events or faraway places. It rests …

Representing objects in terms of their kinds enables inferences based on the long-term
knowledge made available through kind concepts. For example, children readily use lexical …

This study examined the early pragmatic language skills in typically developing (TD)
preschool-age children, children with language impairment (LI) and children with autism …

Joint engagement—the sharing of events during social interactions—is an important context
for early learning. To date, sharing topics that are only heard has not been systematically …

Abstract Language is learned in complex social settings where listeners must reconstruct
speakers' intended meanings from context. To navigate this challenge, children can use …

In the first year of life, infants' word learning is slow, laborious, and requires repeated
exposure to word-referent co-occurrences. In contrast, by 14–18 months, infants learn words …

Four experiments show that 4‐and 5‐year‐olds (total N= 112) can identify the referent of
underdetermined utterances through their Naïve Utility Calculus—an intuitive theory of …

This chapter focuses on the learning of language and addresses the question of how
children can communicate via gestures from an early age and how gestures, being a part of …

The ability to understand the mental states of other individuals is central to human social
behavior, yet some theory of mind capacities are shared with other species. Comparisons of …