A clash of conversational worlds: Interpreting cognitive development through communication

According to Piaget (1970), young children are often unable to detect the invariant or concealed realities that underlie perceptual appearances. My aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that children may actually know a good deal about how these realities do not correspond to appearances, and that their lack of success with the many tasks that Piaget and others have used to support the existence of conceptual limitations during an early preoperational stage of cognitive development can be reinterpreted through an explanation that focuses on language. My proposal is that children are both sophisticated and limited users of rules of conversation that promote effective communication: sophisticated when it comes to the use of conversational rules in everyday, natural talk, but limited in specialized settings that require knowledge of the purpose intended by speakers who have put aside rules in the conventional use of language.