CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,479Child and Animal Learning DevelopmentCategorization, perception, and languageLanguage Development and Disorders

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Words, Thoughts, and Theories

Gopnik, Alison, Meltzoff, Andrew N.·1997·The MIT Press eBooks
DOI 10.7551/mitpress/7289.001.0001
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Words, Thoughts, and Theories articulates and defends the "theory theory" of cognitive and semantic development, the idea that infants and young children, like scientists, learn about the world by forming and revising theories, a view of the origins of knowledge and meaning that has broad implications for cognitive science. Gopnik and Meltzoff interweave philosophical arguments and empirical data from their own and other's research. Both the philosophy and the psychology, the arguments and the data, address the same fundamental epistemological question: How do we come to understand the world around us? Recently, the theory theory has led to much interesting research. However, this is the first book to look at the theory in extensive detail and to systematically contrast it with other theories. It is also the first to apply the theory to infancy and early childhood, to use the theory to provide a framework for understanding semantic development, and to demonstrate that language acquisition influences theory change in children.The authors show that children just beginning to talk are engaged in profound restructurings of several domains of knowledge. These restructurings are similar to theory changes in science, and they influence children's early semantic development, since children's cognitive concerns shape and motivate their use of very early words. But, in addition, children pay attention to the language they hear around them and this too reshapes their cognition, and causes them to reorganize their theories. Bradford Books imprint

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.7551/mitpress/7289.001.0001

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 701–800 of 1,000

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. N.
ORCID
Meltzoff, Andrew N.
Venue
The MIT Press eBooks
Publisher
The MIT Press
Published
1997-01-07
DOI
10.7551/mitpress/7289.001.0001
OpenAlex
W4302454383
Cited by
1,479
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 55 · 2025: 37 · 2024: 66 · 2023: 76 · 2022: 51 · 2021: 59 · 2020: 51 · 2019: 109 · 2018: 50 · 2017: 28 · 2016: 49 · 2015: 37 · 2014: 48 · 2013: 40 · 2012: 55
FWCI
38.50
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
The MIT Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
Keywords
theory theory, cognitive development, semantic development, language acquisition, theory change, infant cognition, early childhood, epistemology, origin of knowledge, language and cognition

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review