In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children’s awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet performed the exact same action as in the experimental conditions, but the context was different such that this act did not constitute a mistake. Children’s normative responses to the puppet’s acts (e.g., protest, critique, or teaching) were scored. Both age groups performed more normative responses in the target than in the control conditions, but the 3-year-olds did so on a more explicit level. These studies demonstrate in a particularly strong way that even very young children have some grasp of the normative structure of conventional activities.

When Tom Givón asked me a while ago what my chapter would be about, I said, “Roughly, about the relation between language and theory of mind. ” His laconic response was, “Well, they are inseparable. ” So, I thought, there goes my chapter. But not really. There is reason to believe that language and theory of mind have coevolved, given their close relation in development and their tight connection in social behavior. However, they are clearly not inseparable—physiologically, cognitively, or functionally. So the question becomes, “What is the exact relation between language and theory of mind, in evolution, development, and social behavior? ” To answer this question is a daunting task; I will try merely to clear a path toward an answer. I will consider several possible relations between the two faculties, bring conceptual arguments and empirical evidence to bear on them, and end up arguing for an escalation process in which language and theory of mind have fueled each other’s evolution. Language Some Stipulations About Language and Theory of Mind What constitutes genuine language? Modern language is typically described on several

Computers may be "smart" in terms of brute processing power, but their abilities to learn are limited to what can easily be programmed. A computer can indeed learn to solve new problems, but only ones that are quite similar to those it has already been programmed to solve. Computers cannot yet form new abstract representations, manipulate these representations, and integrate disparate knowledge (e.g., linguistic, contextual, emotional) to solve novel problems in ways managed by every normal young child. Even the Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) I study, with their evolutionary distance from humans, succeed on such tasks. How can parrots, with walnut-sized brains, succeed where a computer cannot? The birds' success likely arises for two reasons. First, a parrot, like a young child, does not rely exclusively on conditioned responses or simple associative learning, but has a repertoire of desires and purposes that cause it to form and test ideas about the world and how it can deal with and function in the world; these ideas, unlike simple associations or conditioned responses, can amount to representations of cognitive processing. Second, I hypothesize that their learning processes resemble those of young children because I have found that a social interaction paradigm is necessary to train the birds to communicate with us using the sounds of English speech. Because learning occurs more slowly in birds than humans, and is thus easier to study, I suggest that by deepening our understanding of the social processes whereby nonhumans advance from conditioned responses to representation-based learning we will uncover rules that can be adapted improve the ability of nonliving computational systems to perform advanced learning.